Customer service is one of the most important parts of your business. By championing your customer service you can bolster a loyal customer base. Building trust with great service means your customers are unlikely to look elsewhere, and given that customer retention is much cheaper than customer acquisition, it’s important to keep your customers happy.
So in a world of subscription billing, how can you make sure your customers are happy?
Get on board with self-service
As a consumer, when you need support you want your question to be answered fast, no matter where you are. By giving your subscribers the ability to serve themselves you’re giving them the power to answer their questions anywhere and at any time.
Self-service support is allowing your customers to resolve their issues without the assistance of a customer service agent. According to a study on self-service support, 91% of survey respondents said they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs. So, not only are you improving your customers’ service, but you’re decreasing the customer service hours required from your agents, saving you money.
At a minimum, your subscribers should have the ability to manage and cancel their subscriptions and to view previous invoices. Giving them the power to self-serve administration on their accounts is a key baseline – and you should check your billing platform can support self-service in this way.
Great self-service tools, out of the box
Billsby includes an array of high-quality self service tools that allow your customers to manage their own account, without needing to contact your team. They just work – with no need for complex configuration.
Create an online knowledge base
Build a knowledge base brimming with handy content. You should have a library of FAQs, troubleshooting steps and general documentation. This gives your customer the resources to answer questions without you. Having this stock of information also allows your customer at the very least to narrow down their query. Making the potential contact time with a support agent much briefer.
However, building your knowledge base is only half the battle. It’s just as important to make sure customers know it exists at the right moment – like when they’re viewing an invoice, or interacting with your service.
Recommend your knowledge base when customers need it most
With Billsby, you can include links to your knowledge base and relevant FAQs in emails you send to customers and within our interactive invoices – helping you to reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction.
Get the best customer support software
While most customer queries will be filtered out by your self-service approach some of your subscription billing customers will want to interact with a real person. Customer support software enables you to manage, organize and track customer requests on a single platform.
Some big players in this industry are HelpScout, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Front.
You might also want to consider a chat-based support tool like Intercom or Drift, either as well as, or instead of a traditional ticketing program.
Be sure to shop around and see which is best for your business. Most will offer a free trial so you can explore and get to know each product and how it can work for you before you make your decision.
Integrates with your favourite service tools
Billsby is integrated with some of the most popular customer service and chat tools, saving your support agents time by ensuring that all the data you need to manage your customers accounts is a click away.
Using high-quality support software means you’ll never miss a query and therefore your subscription billing customers will never be ignored. Most support software providers also allow you to gain customer insight.
You can work out your product weaknesses based on the volume of customer complaints about certain features for example.
You can then use these insights to improve your knowledge base, by finding out what the common queries are and whether they can be solved using self-service rather than contact time with an agent.
