According to a report from Microsoft, 60% of customers have stopped doing business with a brand due to a single poor customer service experience.[1]
Why? The physiology of friction, for one thing. When someone gets stuck while they are trying to complete a task—like adding a product to their cart—cortisol levels rise. It’s a natural, physical response.
In this stressed-state, emotions are amplified and experiences are more likely to make a lasting impression. This means a (positive or negative) support experience can greatly influence how a customer views your brand, ultimately impacting customer retention and loyalty.
As more and more people head online to do their shopping, companies are scrambling to adapt their shopping experiences to a digital-first, self-service reality. This scramble means many companies are delivering less-than-perfect digital experiences, which in turn means increased customer confusion and pressure on support teams.
Companies that are able to deliver both an ideal digital experience and extraordinary customer support are leveraging a best-in-class technology stack that allows them to minimize costs while addressing customer pain effectively.
“When customer service reps feel the systems or tools they use enhance their ability to handle customer issues and simplify their day-to-day work, their productivity can increase by up to 20%, customer satisfaction increases by 11% and customer effort decreases by 9%,” via Gartner.
While a great digital support experience can look different depending on context, there are three common attributes of effective customer support:
Care: Do you have empathy for your customer’s pain? Are you able to demonstrate empathy in your response? Does your customer feel heard?
Clarity: Are you able to clearly, confidently, and competently communicate to your customer that you understand their issue and have the power to fix it?
Consistency: Are you able to consistently deliver on customer expectations? Are you able to quickly acknowledge and respond to a customer’s complaint or issue? How quickly and effectively can you actually resolve the issue?
The right tech stack should facilitate each of these. Working in concert, your digital support platforms should allow your support team(s) to communicate seamlessly with customers—with care and clarity—and quickly resolve issues. The goal is to strike the perfect balance between human touch and efficient automation.
To that end, we are excited to introduce the modern customer support stack, a collaboration between best-in-class technology solutions across eight key technology categories that power digital customer support:
Customer relationship management (CRM): Generally highly customizable and extensible platforms, designed to provide shared visibility into the status of past, current, and prospective customer relationships.
Customer success platforms (live chat and customer support): Platforms that allow you to centralize all customer data into an accessible 360-degree view of the customer, and facilitate support-related communication with customers.
Customer feedback management and voice of customer solutions: These tools automate the collection and management of feedback from customers or stakeholders and help to incorporate that feedback directly into daily business operations.
Call tracking and call center solutions: With these solutions, companies can trace each incoming call back to the online source where the caller experienced an issue.
Bug tracking and application performance management: These platforms provide a repository that explains how to reproduce a bug and how widespread an issue is, and allow a company to separate, prioritize, sequence, and provide communications about different bugs across many projects or applications.
Digital adoption platforms: These platforms enable companies with complex digital products to create feature tours, embed tooltips, or inject instructions, interactive guides, and in-line documentation to guide users through their digital products.
Experience optimization platforms (experimentation and personalization): Platforms that provide companies with a suite of tools to launch and manage digital experiments and dynamic experiences.
Team collaboration solutions: These solutions provide an online or intranet-based environment for virtual teamwork, enabling your digital teams to share information easily.
In a new guide, we look at each category from a problem, solution, outcome perspective and outline how you can use FullStory—your digital experience platform–to amplify the current tools in your stack, and deliver a more perfect digital customer support experience.
The guide also includes real-world and example use cases to illustrate how companies are combining these platforms to power better customer support experiences, and how you can assemble your own modern support stack.
For example, one company shared how they use their customer feedback management solution, Qualtrics, in tandem with their digital experience analytics platform, FullStory:
What do you do when you receive vague customer feedback about a “bug” on your site or app? When your support team knows there’s an issue, but doesn’t have the tools to quickly resolve and respond? This was the situation for one company prior to using FullStory alongside Qualtrics—their customer feedback management platform.
Previously, support would receive customer feedback about a bug. Before they could pass the issue to engineering, they would have to gather several additional examples of customers experiencing that same bug, then fill out a form with a package of supporting information: description of the error, screenshots, device type, browser, play-by-play of what the customer was doing before encountering the issue, etc.
This often required extensive back-and-forth with an already-frustrated customer. The process was lengthy and costly, requiring a ton of support time and effort. And after all of that, engineering would often return with a note that they couldn’t recreate the error.
Now, with FullStory and Qualtrics, a customer’s session URL is appended to their feedback. Support can easily send that session with all the necessary metadata and console logs to engineering. Using Watched Elements, the support agent can zoom out and—in a few clicks—see all of the other customers that are being affected by this issue. With both solutions, this company has been able to increase support capacity, cutting support-related costs by 20-30%.
In case you missed it: We recently sat down with Ben Rosenberg, VP of Sender Experience from fast-growth SaaS company Sendoso, and John Cason, Client Support Manager at SalesLoft, for a discussion on the current customer support landscape, the challenges support leaders are facing, and the technologies that power modern support teams.
