To win their way to a customer’s heart companies must offer customer support. But what does customer support mean these days? Generally, the approach involves responding to users’ problems when they arise. However, this can prove challenging to meet customer expectations, especially when dealing with a high volume of customers to support. Our solution? Product Flows.

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We are long past the days of customers just reaching out via email or to a call center. Customers have choices and want support based on their terms. By using innovative solutions and workflows to anticipate the needs of your customer before the problem arises, you can exceed customer expectations, improve customer relations and build brand loyalty.

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Contents

  • Challenges in offering proactive customer support
  • How can product flows solve customer support issues
  • Benefits of product flow in customer support
  • How to prepare for product flows

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Challenges in offering proactive customer support

Proactive customer support is a strategy adapted to address customer challenges before they occur. It improves retention rates, boosts brand reputation, and takes the pressure off your team. Implementing this process is a combined effort that can sometimes feel like an enormous challenge. Here are some tips to help you transition from reactive to proactive support:

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Offering a personalized, human touch can be difficult, especially when dealing with a high volume of customers. Before you start anticipating your customers’ needs you need to understand their needs,  who they are, and what issues they experience.

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If your support tickets are out of control, meaning you need more staff to manage them, first look at your internal communications. Is your support team talking to your product team. If not, break down that silo. Together you can develop insights, set benchmarks, and more importantly, gain experience from all sectors of your company, thus improving your customer support as well as your product.

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Creating content that will educate your customers. Self-help portals, forums, and FAQs are very beneficial to support tools, but you need to make sure this information is accessible and can be found and shared easily. Increasing engagement with helpful, easy to follow content, such as how-to-videos, help center articles, chat scripts and emails or a knowledge base where they can easily find relevant information and answers to the most commonly asked questions can sometime be time consuming, and with a smaller team, hard to deliver at scale.

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How can flows solve customer support issues?

When you have a product launch or update, you can use product flows to not only provide support, but also onboard them to new features. The best part is all of this will be based on their interaction with your product, allowing the customers to learn and use your product based on their preferences.

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Product flows can be created for A/B testing, allowing you to assess different flows, and see which messages work best for specific user segments. From this, you can create and scale similar content.

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Get personal by combining your flows with behavioral emails to entice the user while giving them a truly unique customer experience. With user behavior triggers and events, you can create a better and more personalized customer journey. Within the flow, you can create interactive and proactive guides for your customer that will result in a reduction of support tickets and higher engagement rates.

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Retarget lagging or dormant customers with flows to showcase new features or guides that re-engage them with your product. It’s a great tactic to prevent churn with a more contextual approach.

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Benefits of product flows in customer support

Product flows give you insights into the strengths and weaknesses of your product. By grasping how and what features your customers use you can develop a truly personalized customer experience. Some of these benefits include:

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  • A quick and simple setup
  • Reduced time to value
  • Creating brand champions and power users
  • Increased NPS score
  • Allows simplified A/B testing
  • Speedier user onboarding

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How to prepare for product flows

Effective product flows can be achieved in several ways to assist in proactive customer support:

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  • Plan and organize independent flows to identify individual user sections and their specific goals
  • Create relevant content to share with each user flow based on the customers usage patterns
  • Plan the triggers and conditions users see and interact with your product flow
  • Implement and test, test, test! Analyze and improve your product flows to offer the most proactive customer support to drive customer satisfaction while simultaneously creating onboarding segments.

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Proactive customer support is a necessary approach in today’s customer success world. It has to be a vital part of your overall strategy.

Consumers today tackle platform issues in real time and in a variety of ways, so you need to be able to respond quickly and efficiently, with an omnichannel mentality.

To implement a truly proactive customer support strategy companies need to take a collaborative approach across departments to better understand user pain points and how they resolve them – whether it is self-serve live chat or knowledge base tools.

The best way to set yourself up for success and be a step ahead to adopt multiple avenues for customers to engage with your product and product flows is the most adaptable tool that can truly take customers from the brink of an awful tweet or review to brand advocates.

Want to learn more about Product Flows – read on!

Want to see a Product Flow in action? Book a meeting with one of our product experts below!

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