Not all businesses are about the delivery of products directly to consumers. Often, companies create products and services that are used by other businesses as a means of delivering services. While you might be determined to surpass your customers’ expectations by offering a feature-rich and loaded product, it is just as imperative that you deliver exceptional customer service too. That is the real “money-maker”!

Great customer service can really put your product in an elevated position in the eyes of your client. This added benefit optimizes the performance of the business and enhances the product use. Customers will be drawn to you like a moth to the flame if you build strong relationships with them. Remember this golden rule:

Productive B2B customer support helps to create a long-term healthy relationship with your customers.

Existing Customers Matter

Research stated that a huge fraction of technology companies generate more than 70% of their total revenue from their existing customers. This more then demonstrates the value of repeat business on the bottom line.

A key point to note is that if a customer does not fully use the product, they are much less likely to consider renewal. Keeping this in mind, the sooner they use and employ your product, the faster they’ll put in an order for another one. And you can generate sales from their use or need to renew their subscription.

Understand Product Usage

Circling the above-discussed analogy, your aim after delivering a suitable and flawless product should be to encourage users to deploy your product faster so they can invest in purchasing it again. And let the cycle continue from there. This way you will establish a wide, loyal, and satisfied customer base.

But the million-dollar question arises: how do you make customers deploy the product?

If everyone knew the answer to it, there wouldn’t be just a handful of successfully run and appreciated businesses worldwide. But the companies who have figured the answer to it are in luck because it has greatly helped their businesses.

Where are your B2B Customer Support calls coming from?

You will observe that a major chunk of your B2B customer requests is related to the “how-to” questions and queries. They will usually have an ambiguity regarding operating the technology, product or will ask how to avail of the service or explore all the aspects of it.

You have to train your agents or your managers to answer this “how-to” question well. By offering the right support you’ll help customers deploy the product sooner and invest more into obtaining the product or service again.

Your post-sale customer interactions will mainly revolve around such questions. So, if you answer these questions for the customers and lend support to the operations and functionality of your tech, you’ll be making them self-sufficient and will be encouraging them to increase the use of the product.

Though you must make sure that your customer support team is aware of opportunities and advantages that could be unlocked by helping customers reach the full potential of deploying the product. While this sounds like a sales function it isn’t. By making sure that clients know how to use the product to its fullest, you’re actually helping create advocates of your technology within your client base. This helps to increase overall loyalty and if you ever create a customer community, improves the perception of all of your clients.

Improving your tools helps make you more efficient

Improving customer support tools is just as important. You must invest in opportunities for automation and self-help so that the customer service system’s working could be made optimal.

Such opportunities can be a major deciding factor that transforms one-to-one sales transactions into one-to-many sales transactions. Customers will be satisfied and satiated. They will adopt more of your product and will engage in a long-term relationship with your company.

Automated Response

Many people are using a chatbot and other software to schedule sessions with respective agents. This way precious resources are saved and customers can easily contact that concerned party that can resolve their query or processes their request.

These responses either solve the customer complaint completely or shift them to the most qualified person. This helps in expediting the case’s resolution.

Self-Help

First meticulously and thoroughly review the support requests and queries launched by the customers. Look at the problem areas and the departments where the issues are recurring. This way you can identify which problems occur more and where you need to invest.

Form this study as a basis to update your FAQs and other blogs and reviews. Shoot tutorial or document training videos and offer knowledge base tools that your clients can access themselves. This can help customers figure out a solution on their own. This way they could avoid the hassle of contacting you or dragging the resolution time.

Routing and Workflow

You must establish ground rules and concrete workflow regulations that can direct the customer issue or request to the related person or the concerned department. This will save a lot of response time. And the customer wouldn’t have to waste time and effort by engaging with unauthorized or unrelated professionals.
The most qualified agents and resources will be directed towards resolving the issue and this will accelerate the rate at which the query is resolved.

No matter how fast your initial response time is, how high your resolution rate is or how low the number of queries or requests you receive is, none of these can define success for your business if these don’t translate into an increase in your sales or customer base. All these efforts must offer some unmatched benefit to your company, otherwise, all this is vain.

No matter what triggered the support, either it is customer retention, improving operational functionality, widening customer base, delivering customer satisfaction, or just because of financial reasons, the important factor is to define your goals and achieve high business results. Your aim to offer exceptional support shall be to attain positive business results. And this will only be possible when you would align your support operation strategies to observable and calculatable customer support metrics.