Ever feel like you’re not being listened to when you need help most?
We know how it goes. You’ve got a pressing question or a problem with your WordPress website, but when you reach out to customer support, you’re met with a chatbot or a form that assigns you a ticket number and promises to get back to you ASAP. (Read: Take a number and wait in line.) And when you do reach a real person, you’re sometimes passed around from person to person, and you have to repeat your story several times.
It’s frankly exhausting. To use a phrase often found in cheesy infomercials, “there’s got to be a better way.”
How ‘All-Hands’ Customer Support Works
The most significant component of our customer support strategy is our “all-hands” support inbox, which we believe provides a superior, seamless support experience for our clients. In this article, I’ll explain how this “all-hands” model works and why it works so well for our team and our clients.
A general definition we’ve seen floating around about “all hands” customer support is that everyone in the company “works a shift” in manning the support inbox.
At WP Site Care (and our parent company Southern Web), we use a collaborative customer support help desk via HelpScout. Through this platform, our customers are typically interfacing with just one team member at a time (and, yes, a real human), but if needed, everyone on our team is able to be looped into conversations if we need to work together to solve the problem. Even if someone isn’t on “support duty,” so to speak, they can be pulled in to provide a quick answer right within the HelpScout platform.
Benefits of the ‘All-Hands’ Customer Support Model
We find that the ‘All-Hands’ model offers several great advantages for our WordPress support clients:
- It allows our team to collaborate without stepping on each other’s toes. The great thing about our help desk software is that everyone on our team can see who is working with which client. This prevents our team from crafting duplicate (or worse, conflicting!) responses or asking customers to repeat their story multiple times to multiple people.
- Every client benefits from the experience of the entire team. When a customer reaches out to us with a question or ticket, a member of our technical support team usually “assigns” the ticket to themselves to resolve. If they don’t know the answer to a question offhand or if it’s a question that should be answered by a specific person on our team, the ticket can be reassigned to that particular team member seamlessly without bogging down a customer’s support experience.
- It provides a “safety net” for all support issues. With the ability to loop any of our team members into helping with a ticket, customers don’t have to worry about their messages falling through the cracks. It even works the other way around — if our emails fall through the cracks on a customer’s end (we get it, life can get busy!), we have automated workflows and reminders that will prompt us to follow up with you if we haven’t heard back from you. This helps us keep projects and tickets moving forward, so you receive the quickest possible resolution.
- Clients have a seamless experience. Every member of our team has instant context for future conversations thanks to our robust archive of past client communications. One of the great things about this is that if the team member with whom you work most closely is out of the office, there’s always someone available to touch base with you on a ticket or project status, so you’re not left hanging.
A+ WordPress Support Requires Building Trust
These days, when so many of our systems are automated and soulless, we believe building customer intimacy and trust is one of the most important things we can do.
When you have a WordPress issue, we believe you we owe it to you to provide a personalized experience from a compassionate expert who can help you solve your problem quickly. For us, all-hands WordPress customer support is the best way to meet that goal.
