Enhancing your customer support with UX
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” — Bill Gates
In these turbulent times, people’s values are changing. Companies are facing shock to loyalty. Empathetic and strong customer support is needed now more than ever. PWC report says 65% of U.S. customers find a positive experience with a brand to be more influential than great advertising.
Nearly 80% of American consumers say that speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service are the most important elements of a positive customer experience.When it comes to customer support, companies use a variety of channels to help their users.
A recent Forrester report says that modern customers prefer self-service knowledge bases and live chats over other types of support. So in this article I’m going to focus on those and analyze the best practices from a UX perspective.
Knowledge base case study
According to the Harvard Business Review, 81% of all customers attempt to troubleshoot themselves before reaching out to a live representative.
A Knowledge base is a catalog with large amounts of data about the company and its products. Leveraging Information Architecture helps make browsing of data intuitive. For example, Figma support center uses clear labeling, both for top navigation, and on the page, helping the user to easily navigate between the categories:
Research indicates that 71% of consumers are frustrated by impersonal experiences. Therefore it’s important to use back end analytics to track bounce rates and other metrics to identify challenging workflows, so that we can experiment with solutions that personalize the experience for these users. Card sorting sessions will help to categorize most popular and common requests and to label them so the user feels understood. Those sessions can be done remotely using software like OpenSort.
For example, Figma support center includes not so common for a regular knowledge base questions, but obviously the ones that are important to their users:
If a user is looking for help while shopping on the website or the app it’s important to simplify the flow of going back and forth between the shopping cart, checkout and help section.
Anthropologie website uses sticky primary navigation. So when the user goes to the support section, they can easily go back to browsing and their shopping cart.
Live chat case study
Nowadays it is crucial to provide customer support at every channel of user interaction with the brand. To ensure seamless transitions and experiences across channels, design and engineering teams can incorporate ticketing systems. They allow to keep track of all communication with the user no matter what channel they choose. They also make the user feel heard and cared about.
Athleta live customer service asks the user for some basic information to nominate the ticket. It can be later used if the issue resolution takes longer than planned and the user has to talk to another customer representative:
They also do a great job setting the user expectations to minimize disappointment. They highlight the topics that will be easier to solve through other channels rather than the live chat.
Users appreciate consistency when it comes to customer experience. Anthropologie website has a prompt on their customer support page that says their customer representatives are online and available to chat:
But when you click on CTA “Start chat” it says that no one is available:
In this situation it’s important to stand by your promises, especially if the action was prompted by the company. Also if the representatives are not available, there should be a CTA with an alternative option to connect with the support team (via email or Contact us form).
And last but not least users really appreciate the human touch in their interactions with the brand.
Webflow support center homepage has pictures of all the support representatives:
To sum up it’s important to keep technology and your platform human. If your support team doesn’t work on weekends or holidays and you will explain it to your users, most of them will understand. If you are experiencing supply disruption during these turbulent times, people will understand.
It’s extremely important to share reassuring messages with your users and communicate openly about your issues and how you’re dealing with them in order to continue to help your users solve their problems.
