Todays online users expect to access information on various platforms. It’s normal to search when researching for something, it’s normal to use social networks to exchange opinions, it’s normal to use communities, support portals, blogs. Basically it’s normal that companies and customers spread their information across various platforms, good or bad. The pros for developers are higher penetration, more exposure. The cons are more complex overview, harder to keep in touch with all platforms and give good support.
The old way
The old way of doing customer support is having a mail address and/or ticket system where users strictly have to submit their request, patiently waiting for a reply. Handling the hassle of user accounts, forgotten passwords, slow response times, customers are often frustrated with those support services.
Many things have been tried on the way to greater support, for example phone support and chats, allowing customers to interact with companies in real time. Unfortunately both methods are rather resource intensive for companies, so either implementation or availability isn’t always great.
The new way
The new way of doing customer support is to accept that the old ways of controlling customers entry points is over. You don’t want customers to go through the annoyance of complying with some support software to get their problems solved. You want customers to post their issues whereever they are, and the you go there so solve it. This may sound vauge in theory, but in praxis it’s quite simple: Use the availabile integrations with blogs and social networks to answer comments by users where they post them.
The wow effect
One support panel which does this quite well is ZenDesk. They have addons for WordPress, Facebook and Twitter, allowing you to get comments from those resources (i.e. your company blog, Facebook fanpage or Twitter stream) and convert them into tickets – answering customer inquiries right where they are. This creates a wow-effect and tons of goodwill!
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