About a fortnight ago, on our poll, we asked you all a question on support channels used by your customers. Before we get to the results, let’s also see a few myths.

Myth 1: Email is so passe. It’s a thing of the 90s. Customers don’t use it much.
Reality: About 88% of respondents in our poll said that email was a channel that their customers used to reach them.

Myth 2: Social Media is the place for customer support. It has become mainstream channel.
Reality: Although social media is very very important, it’s not the mainstream channel for customer support yet.

Myth 3: The fewer channels, the more efficiently the helpdesk performance.
Reality: By automating a few tasks and setting up some notifications, you can have as many channels as you want and still operate very efficiently.

There are two key insights from the poll results.…

While talking to prospects who’re evaluating Zoho Support, I try to squeeze in a particular question during the first few minutes of the conversation. It’s a very simple question, but it defines how the company will use the software. It’s also our poll question this week!

Deciding which channels to handle, for customer support, is important, yet tricky. It’s a trade-off of trade-offs.

Conversation versus Transaction

A channel like email, or even a customer self-service portal, is essentially ‘transactional’ in nature. Customers ask for some specific help. Agents extend help. Customers can ask for help with another related aspect. Agents extend help again. This is suitable for situations where grievance redressal takes time (example: changing a part in your mobile phone).

But, in situations where customer grievances can be addressed immediately (like canceling an order in e-commerce), conversational channels like social media will create better experiences.…

Whenever I speak to customers, I realize how each of them is different from any other. Each of them has a different way of defining quality and a different philosophy that leads to quality. Their businesses are influenced to a great deal by their beliefs and philosophies.

The most fundamental aspect of a business’ customer service philosophy is how to organize its helpdesk team. It influences hiring and staffing decisions. It even influences the profit margin! And, that’s exactly why we asked this question on our poll last week.

We had chosen to ask the question to just managers and administrators. The results have come in and their opinions are very clear!

By product

About 34% of respondents said their support team was organized by product. If the support team is small enough, it’s very useful to assign a DRI within the team to each product.…

Whether customer support is a right or a privilege for your customers, it’s a tricky commitment to uphold. More often than not, running a team involves finding order within chaos. It’s all the more applicable while running a customer support team.

One of the easiest ways to seek out ‘order’ is to organise or group a bunch of your support reps using some condition.

By Channel

If you have multiple ways by which customers can reach you, a thoughtful way to organise your support team would be by channel. Each channel can have one or more support agents dedicated to it. That way, each channel gets the optimal treatment. Channels like live chat, phone and social media are far more interactive when compared to email and web forms. By staffing appropriately, you can win across all your channels.

By Time Zone

For companies that offer products or services to customers across the world, dealing with various time zones is of utmost importance.…