6 Customer Service Content Benefits That Empower Your Teams

? TL;DR: This article explores 6 specific customer service content benefits for service teams to deliver more efficient customer care.
Content helps your teams in the following ways:

• reduces direct support requests for repetitive issues
• shortens resolution times
• increases customer satisfaction
• facilitates up- and cross-selling opportunities
• and lowers the need for constantly expanding service headcount.

Well-placed and designed content enables self-service for customers and eases the pressure on support teams. Educational and instructional content helps customers adopt the product faster and reduces the volume of inquiries or complaints.

All this allows teams to focus on more complex or value-driving matters.

Did you know that 80% of customers would switch vendors after just one negative experience?

That puts your service and support teams on the spot. Excellent customer service is a competitive advantage, but even with a substantial team, a good service level is hard to maintain.

Luckily, you can use content to back up your service and support efforts.

Today we’ll show you six specific ways content can aid your support teams, your customers, and your business overall.

First and most obvious: content lets customers explore the product or service.

Guiding the Customer Through Your Product

Imagine if all your prospects and customers had to pick up the phone or fill out a contact form like this each time they had a question.

Not only is this completely unmanageable for your company. It’s annoying to customers as well.

A survey found that 81% of customers across all industries would prefer not to have to contact you. Instead, they would first try to find an answer on their own and only reach out to a representative as a last resort.

But with sufficient content, customers can explore your product at their own pace and convenience without overwhelming your service team.

Different types of customer service content, like FAQs, knowledge bases, or blog posts, can provide helpful information and answers just as your representatives would.

Slack, for instance, is well aware of the customers’ tendency to find answers on their own. This is why they have extremely detailed self-service pages and a help center.

These pages guide potential customers through the platform so they can decide whether installing the app is worth it. The help center is also full of useful content that helps users navigate the platform and troubleshoot issues.

Slack uses customer support and service content proactively and anticipates the users’ questions. And based on this g2 review, it’s a successful approach. This satisfied customer claims they never had to contact the support team thanks to helpful online resources.

Therefore, think about the journey people typically go through with your product. Invest in creating quality content that answers different questions at different stages.

You’ll save both your customers and your service team a lot of hassle.

Improving Relationships With Customers

We’ve already established that customers prefer minimal contact with support teams. That’s because they’re conditioned to expect long wait times, poor communication, and pushy upsell attempts.

Moreover, it sometimes takes several contacts before reps resolve some customer issues. This is a practice that customers will complain about, either directly to you or publicly.

Sadly, no matter how well you train your service reps, something can always go sour in customer communication. In such cases, customer satisfaction and experience take a serious blow.

Even reputable companies like Nokia have lost customers due to lacking support. You can see an infamous example of one such instance below.

So, instead of relying on only one point of contact (your representatives) and risking a poor experience, prepare content as a fall-back option.

This is especially important for SaaS businesses.

Why?

Because you’re likely offering services to people around the world. Language barriers and availability times come to mind as possible hiccups in customer contact.

Additionally, knowledge curse is a real pitfall.

An average user may have a hard time following technical instructions on a call or chat, no matter how simple they sound to you. But with a well-designed knowledge base or a video tutorial, they can troubleshoot issues more confidently.

That’s precisely how you can improve customer relationships with content. It’s all about solving a problem in a way that’s most convenient for the customer.

And for 91% of users, the most convenient and preferred method to get help is self-service content. Don’t take it personally, but your customers will actually love you more the less they need to contact you directly.

To sum up, we’re not suggesting that you abandon your customers when they turn to you for help. Nor are we implying you should just replace your whole support staff with knowledge bases and FAQs.

On the contrary.

Creating helpful content means you’re providing service in a way the majority of customers prefer.

You can improve customer relationships through readily available content that engages customers and helps them competently navigate your product.

At the same time, you’re freeing up your agents so they can dedicate all their energy to more complex issues.

Facilitating Social Media Support

Customer service has taken a turn in recent years. What used to be resolved in private via call centers can now be found out in the open on social media.

Customers in any industry now directly reach out to businesses on Facebook or Twitter, like here:

So, since customer support now happens publicly, you must always put your best foot forward. This is another area where content can assist your customer service team.

We’re not only talking about support articles that you can send as a link to an inquiring customer.

Depending on the social media platforms you use, you have many more options. Different platforms support more types of content than what you would typically include on your website.

Take Instagram, for example.

Whether you’re selling products, software, or services, you could leverage Instagram as a support and service channel.

For instance, PayPal has created a highlights folder where the social media team addresses frequently asked questions from users.

When it comes to Instagram specifically, here are some more ideas:

• use stories for announcements, special offers, and an occasional peek behind the scenes.
• advertise your company through posts with attractive images and captions.
• create highlights to categorize stories into groups so customers can browse products, pricing, useful tricks, and more.

Remember that good customer service is a joint effort between multiple teams.

Your social media team is a great source to find out what your users need help with. Use their inputs to craft content they can use for more efficient and helpful interactions.

That way, you create even more sources of information for your customers, while simultaneously unburdening your support team.

Maybe short-form content is not the first thing that comes to mind for customer service or support purposes, especially in B2B SaaS.

But social media is where customer interactions happen nowadays.

So don’t leave your social media teams scrambling when they receive a support or service inquiry. It will reflect poorly on your brand.

Delivering Additional Value

Traditional customer support methods, like calls or emails, give you limited time and space to relay information—let alone go the extra mile.

Say a customer calls asking about your pricing and subscription plans. Your service rep only has so much time to present different options. Worse, the customer probably won’t even remember all of it after the call. And you don’t even have a pricing page on your website.

Your representative could probably help the customer make the best decision. But alas, their allotted average handling time is running out, and there’s a queue as long as the Wall of China.

That’s why successful companies, like Notion, have plentiful support content. Blog posts, guides, tutorials, and help center posts are just some of the resources where customers can find the information they need.

As an example, the company organizes weekly webinars to teach customers about the product and has active community forums.

Such resources help customers solve issues, empower them with extra knowledge, and make them confidently use your products.

Those are all ways to provide extra value that’s hard to deliver in simple calls or emails.

In summary, supplementary content can mean the difference between good and great customer service.

So prepare helpful additional resources your reps can share with customers when appropriate. Also, make sure the customer can easily find and access additional content when they need it.

Such positive customer experiences drive customer loyalty because they show you prioritize your customers’ success.

Creating Upselling Opportunities

Customer service content can be a powerful cross and upsell driver although it’s not its main purpose.

Instead of your reps, your content can do the talking and naturally lead the customer to consider additional offerings.

For instance, different “tips and tricks” content pieces help existing users do more with your product or service. But at the same time, such content can make additional features more appealing to customers who don’t use them yet.

To illustrate what we mean, let’s get back to Notion for another example.

Say you’re already using the free functionalities Notion offers. So one day, your company needs a knowledge management system (or KMS for short). You start your research and run into Notion’s post on building a KMS.

While reading, you realize it’ll take a lot of time to build a KMS from scratch. Luckily, the post points you toward a few templates you can purchase to slash the time it takes to build your KMS.

You already use Notion and you trust it, so you have no qualms about the extra purchase.

If you think this sounds unrealistic, consider this.

One marketing company has found that consumers are 131% more likely to buy from a brand immediately after they consume early-stage, educational content.

Content that educates customers about the full range of benefits of a product or service can naturally warm up the customer to consider additional offerings.

Selling to new and retaining more existing customers is probably high on your business priority list. After all, a good customer retention rate is vital for subscription-based businesses, like SaaS.

Scaling Customer Support

Once your customer base starts to grow, you’ll eventually have to deal with scaling customer support too.

Now, before you hire an additional fifty support representatives or pay for a costly chatbot, you’ll be glad to learn that scaling customer support is one of the greatest customer service content benefits on this list.

Think about it this way. If your reps answer the same set of questions daily, it makes sense to develop an FAQ section or even a self-service portal.

This way, you can keep the same volume of customer support with fewer representatives and less hands-on time. Whether it’s fifteen customers or 1500, they can all get the same information at the same time from a single source.

You can find a good example in Spotify’s FAQ section. It contains the five most frequently asked questions with links to the articles that help customers solve the issues.

Bear in mind that Spotify didn’t randomly select the featured FAQs—these are the questions that customers look up the most.

You can emulate this approach and analyze your data to see the most frequent contact reasons in your business.

As your self-service base grows, you could even categorize the content to help customers find answers even faster.

Again, here’s Spotify’s article organization:

Scaling customer support with content doesn’t mean that you’ll never have to expand your support staff.

According to Mike Lemire, the VP of Customer Success at Toast, there’s still room for human contact. The role of content is just to help you distribute your representatives’ time better.

Here’s how Lemire sees the situation.

“I think so often when we hear customer success at scale, it’s almost assumed the customers are no longer engaging on a regular basis with humans on your team, which shouldn’t be the case. I think there’s an opportunity for human touch, it’s just prioritizing the type of human touch that has the most impact for the customers that need that.”

All in all, expanding your support operation doesn’t equate to a loss of quality.

Instead, content shortens the time a customer needs to get the answers. This frees up your representatives to assist the customers with advanced requirements.

Customer Service Content Benefits Users and Teams Alike

Yes, customer service content serves your users. But as you just saw, the content you create makes your reps’ lives easier too. And in the bottom line, happy service reps create happy and loyal customers.

If done correctly, content can reduce support costs. That’s not to say you shouldn’t invest in building up your service and support teams.

One benefit of customer service content we didn’t even mention is that they learn from that content too.

So imagine all the uses for your content next time you’re onboarding or upskilling your team members!

Did we mention that Acomplix team members have several years of experience in various tech service and support roles? Coupled with our expertise and experience in content marketing, we can help you uncover content opportunities to boost your service efforts.

Sounds good? The let’s talk ?