Great companies are worth to be mentioned.
And today, I will mention those whose customer support efforts I’ve personally experienced at first hand—and what you can learn about them.
Desky – simplified customer support and ticket management
Desky is one of our latest lifetime deals—and it’s great. Take a look at a homepage:
On Desky you will have all the customer features in one place:
Web chat widget to let website visitors interact with you directly
- Public tickets to let users publicly posit their questions that other users can eventually use and follow
- Articles to store all your documentation
- FAQs to gather the most common questions users and customers have
We made a 3 minutes-long video to walk you through Desky so you can see the learning curve take a few minutes, but yet it has everything a small business needs.
Manychat takes a few minutes to respond on their chat
If you think all companies respond quickly to their chats, try to reach out Hubspot or Intercom.
Manychat is the leading Messenger chatbot builder. I have mentioned them already in some of our blog posts, but they never stop surprising me.
Not long ago, they started offering customer support via a chat widget, which is the fastest way for people to reach out to support.
Those companies that only use email as a support channel are basically discouraging people from requesting it.
I can show you that they take literally minutes to respond:
You can see that such a detailed answer is not generated automatically—it’s an actual person responding to your answers.
How Manychat is able to offer such support if they have thousands of active users each day?
One of the reasons is that this chat widget doesn’t show up to all users. In fact, I’ve seen it doesn’t show up to paid users.
I guess that they show such channels just to customers with “high” tickets and most active users. Or maybe those that have spent the longest time with the platform.
Whatever is their segmentation criteria to choose to whom they offer chat support, that’s a smart way to balance availability and fast support.
Believe it or not, Manychat co-founder mentioned that they acknowledged that the company was recognized as slow with poor customer support, leading to churn.
They took their customer support seriously and promised a maximum of 24 hours response time and now chat widget.
Ubidots – everyone is part of the support team
One of my first jobs was at a startup called Ubidots, an IoT platform. I was the only marketer within a team of developers.
One good practice they followed is that the whole team—including the leading developers—would dedicate some time to respond to customer queries. This way, they could offer the most accurate reasons why something wasn’t working; after all, they the features in the matter.
It is also a great exercise to get direct feedback from users so they could improve such features UX.
Such a good practice requires your company uses a ticket management system, which lets users posit questions that your team can assign to someone to respond.
Elementor – Community-led support
If you’re a WordPress user, chances are you know Elementor.
Elementor is a great website builder with more than 4 million users.
As you may guess, possibilities and use cases are endless.
It also represents millions of chances of bugs or problems.
How do people get support when these errors happen?
- Youtube tutorials
- Elementor documentation
- Online forums
- Blog posts
- Facebook groups
- And on-demand support if you’re a paid user
And Elementor makes a presence in all of them.
Many people make Elementor tutorials not just because it’s a great product but because that way they can promote affiliate links; every time someone clicks on those links and end up buying, these YouTubers make a commission.
Everyone wins; Elementor gets more customers and helps their current ones, they have a community of people making great tutorials, and YouTubers make a profit.
This is an example:
Wave video – let your customers be your customer support reps
Wave Video is an app that lets anyone create social media videos in a matter of minutes.
I have seen them at all the events I have attended.
What but impressed me was their Facebook group.
Their users help others with common questions and showcase their work.
MyZone – actual successful implementation of smart chatbots
MyZone is a Canadian event agency I worked with before.
We managed to automate a large percentage of customer support requests.
And they were many. We ran the marketing for one of the largest indoor festivals in the US and Canada, with about 10 locations and nearly 1 million tickets sold.
You may guess dozens or thousands of people made questions the whole day.
The good news is that these questions were consistent and repetitive, which is perfect for training an algorithm that could understand and answer back.
And that’s how smart chatbots work.
We used Google’s DialogFlow, a free Natural Processing language solution that lets you train an algorithm with questions that share similar intents.
The fun fact is that two people with no coding skills ran the Messenger program.
While we never aimed for a 100% accuracy—it’s not practical or feasible— we would do our best to train the algorithm to reply to most common questions about pricing, contests, location, kids’ policies, and so on.
Many times users didn’t know they were talking with a chatbot. Some may think that’s good, but it’s not.
It would help if you made sure people know they’re talking to a robot so they can ask questions properly.
A chatbot can understand, “how much are your tickets?” and not questions like “We want t come with family but don’t want to bring my wife – too expensive.” (Someone actually said so, I won’t forget it).
We managed to automate about 80% of customer support requests and about 60% satisfaction.
Wow, 60% is not low?
It was a consistent response. Consider that when people contact support, they are not in their best mood, and they’re not comfortable always with the answers; they get angry if you don’t give a discount or don’t reward them, so their feedback will tend to provide lower feedback.
If you want to implement yours, I recommend you this DialogFlow setup guide by Janis.
Loom – record videos to avoid email back-and-forth
Tools like Drift, Loom, and Bonjoro have been my latest favorites recently.
We have an article with 7 examples of how SaaS businesses can leverage personal videos.
One of them is personalized customer support.
Here’s how it works and the problem it solves.
I’m a Hubspot user. While I’m a happy user, I have questioned many times and send requests to their customer support team frequently.
What I don’t like is that each reply takes 24 hours. I understand that they have thousands of users, and their support operations should be involved.
Yet, some of their replies are vague or unclear. So I need to re-write the question to wait once again.
If their reps used tools like Loom, they could provide more helpful answers, just like the following examples:
It would be awesome that, as companies, we encouraged customers to do the same so we can understand their questions or requests better, just as shown below:
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