In today's episode of "Subscription Box Answers," I'm sharing some essential customer service tips and advice.
Providing world-class customer service isn't just a choice—it's crucial for running a successful subscription box business.
High retention rates are necessary for our business model to succeed. Poor customer service can drastically increase customer churn, leading to business failure.
In this episode, I'll share insights gained over the years to help you streamline your customer service operations and deliver top-notch service.
If you have a question you'd like answered on the show, visit www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post your question there.
In today's episode of "Subscription Box Answers," I'm sharing some essential customer service tips and advice.
Providing world-class customer service isn't just a choice—it's crucial for running a successful subscription box business.
High retention rates are necessary for our business model to succeed. Poor customer service can drastically increase customer churn, leading to business failure.
In this episode, I'll share insights gained over the years to help you streamline your customer service operations and deliver top-notch service.
If you have a question you'd like answered on the show, visit www.SubscriptionBoxResources.com, join the free Facebook group, and post your question there.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Subscription Box Answers with your host, liam Brennan. You're no rubbish, no crap. Straight to the point podcast with real, actionable tips, real strategies and insights from the industry which will help you start and grow your own successful subscription box business. You ask the questions, you ask the questions, you ask the questions. Liam gives the answers. It's as simple as that.
Speaker 2:
Welcome back to a brand new episode of Subscription Box Answers. I hope you're having a great day. On today's episode I'm talking about customer service. We got a question during the week and I'm going to call it out. Let me read it out here.
Speaker 2:
Hi, I see you use Senddesk for your customer service in BusterBox. What are the benefits of using Senddesk? How have you plugged it into Subli and do you have any general advice around customer service? Great question. I don't need to go into much detail about why customer service is so important. It's really important for every company. You have to give exceptional customer service and if you don't, word will get around and you won't be in business for a very long time. If you're running a subscription company, a subscription box or any form of subscription company, then customer service is even more important because for one of these companies to be successful, we have to have a high retention rate. If you're providing terrible customer service, you won't have a high retention rate because customers will be angry, you won't build any kind of customer loyalty, word will get around and people will cancel and you'll go out of business. So, yeah, I don't need to go into too much more detail about why customer service is so important. Having a successful subscription box company and providing world-class customer service go hand in hand, and we take it really seriously in BusterBox. Now to get back to your question why do we use Senddesk? I'll explain to you. We use Senddesk because it makes running our whole support system way, way easier.
Speaker 2:
Now, if you're only getting up and running in your business, it's probably okay to use email for your support. Just use your email inbox. If you have plans of scaling things up, though, and acquiring a lot of customers, email just won't work for you, and I'll explain why. The ball can easily be dropped. When you have a lot of customers, you're going to have many support tickets coming in, and some of those support tickets will require you going back and forth with your customers. Now, if you're doing this through email and you have many different support tickets coming in, think how easy it is for you or your support staff to lose track of something and the ball to be dropped. Now, this doesn't happen when you use something like Zendesk, because you're able to see all of your open tickets, your closed tickets and your tickets which are pending replies. So, yeah, really, really easy to manage that.
Speaker 2:
Now, as your company grows, you are going to have to hire more customer service staff, and Senddesk, thankfully, make this really really easy, because every single person is able to have their own unique profile. You are then able to see how many tickets your customer service staff are answering. You're able to look at other important metrics, like their average time for response, and loads of other helpful information that can be used to track how efficient your customer service team is and manage them. Pretty much, it can be used to help you manage and coach them. So, yeah, really really important. It's also really handy because it allows us to easily track different issues in our company.
Speaker 2:
I'll give you an example. Say, there is something going on in the company. Well, we could instruct our support staff to tag every single support ticket that comes in around that issue, and then we could pull all of that data and figure out what kind of impact it's had on our business. We also use it to host all of our FAQs, which is pretty handy. If you head over to the Busterbox website and go down to the bottom, you'll find our FAQ section and you'll see how we have it laid out. All of that is hosted on Zendesk. Now you don't need to use Zendesk. There's other software out there like it Freshdesk is another one off the top of my head, and there's various others, but I definitely recommend using one of them because it'll make everything so much easier for you. Now, in regards to plugging it into Subly, you don't need to plug it into Subly or any other platform for that matter. It just hooks up to your email system and that's pretty much it. It's really really easy to set up and doesn't require any tech skills, which is great. Now, as far as customer service tips go, I'm happy to share some of them here.
Speaker 2:
Number one FAQs. Go out of your way to make your faqs as easy to understand as possible and to contain all the information your customers need. If you want to cut down the amount of support tickets your company gets, make sure you have great faqs. I'll give you an example. A while back, I came across a subscription box company. I was working with them and they were getting a lot of support tickets around a particular issue. It was around tracking numbers. They just never made it clear in the FAQ when a customer showed expect to receive their tracking. They went in, they updated the tracking information FAQ and it cut down the amount of support tickets, they were getting around that particular issue pretty much overnight. So, yeah, go above and beyond when it comes to your FAQs.
Speaker 2:
Number two quick response times. Get back to people as quickly as possible. This is especially relevant when it comes to a subscription business, because if you're leaving people waiting for a very long time and they're upset about something, it's likely they're going to cancel. Now in BusterBox, we get back to people within 24 hours. During normal hours of operation, that's Monday to Friday, and a lot of the time we actually get back a lot quicker than 24 hours, but we just say that to give ourselves some buffer. I've come across some subscription companies I'm not going to name them and their response times are absolutely diabolical. They're leaving customers waiting four or five days for a response to a simple question. Don't be like these companies.
Speaker 2:
Three coach your staff. I know it can be hard to find time, especially if you're a smaller operation and you may have gone out and hired your first member of staff or your second member of staff and you feel like you've a million different things going on. But, trust me, carve out some time during the week to coach your staff. Sit down with them, pull up some of their support tickets and give them feedback about how to improve. We have a customer service manager who takes care of this, and it's really important to do it, because it helps keep, keeps staff up to speed and helps them improve in their job.
Speaker 2:
Number four should you do customer service yourself? I always get a lot of questions around this, and my opinion on it is when you're starting out, it's actually really important that you handle customer service yourself. You shouldn't do it long-term, but you should do it at the start, because this will allow you to understand your company better and it will give you the opportunity to put together processes which can be used to solve all your support tickets. You should then document all of those processes, either through a word document or a video, and upload all of that information to a google drive, and that material can then be used as training material to help you train new customer support staff. It makes sense. I definitely recommend doing that.
Speaker 2:
And finally, my last piece of advice is don't turn into robots with templates. Templates are really, really handy because they can help speed up your support response times and get you more tickets, but don't go overboard with them. You want to use your support process as an opportunity of demonstrating empathy with your customers when something goes wrong and also building rapport with them so they build a connection with your company and are likely to recommend you and stay signed up for a longer period of time. You lose this if you go overboard with your templates and you just come across as very robotic In BusterBox. Our customers love to talk about their dogs and we actually encourage our support staff to get into conversations with our customers about their dogs, what kind of products they like, share information about their own dogs and just build rapport. They do use templates to help them speed up responses for certain issues, but we don't go overboard with them.
Speaker 2:
Thanks very much for tuning in to this week's episode of Subscription Box Answers. I hope you got value from that and you can take some inspiration from some of the stuff I shared to hopefully improve your own customer support processes. We will be back next week at the exact same time. Can I ask you a big favor? If you got value from this episode or any of the previous episodes episodes, would you mind leaving me a review on apple, spotify or whatever you listen to this on? It just really helps me get the show out to more people and, as always, if you have a question you want answered on the show, head over to subscriptionboxresourcescom, join the free facebook group and post it there. Chat to you next week and have a great day. Bye.