Customer Experience Management | | Published February 15, 2019

What B2B Customers Value During Customer Support Calls

When calling a business, people want their issue to be resolved quickly.  

A recent survey from Clutch found that nearly 8 of 10 people consider an “efficient resolution to their issue” to be one of the three most important traits they value when calling a business.

Despite the rise of chatbots and text support, telephone customer support is still critical. People value speed and availability, but some B2B calls still require a human touch.

To ensure customer satisfaction, B2B companies must create strategies that both reduce wait times and accelerate call resolution.

To form these strategies, there are a couple questions to ask...

How much do customers value their time and a quick solution?

When you call a business with an issue, you expect once to be enough. You also expect to not be kept waiting.

Clutch’s survey found that 57% of people consider waiting on hold to be one of the most frustrating elements of calling a business. This is a customer support deal breaker for many businesses

People want businesses to respect their time by answering and resolving their issues promptly. A survey from Arise found that customers will wait only 2 minutes or less on the phone with a business before hanging up.

To deliver “prompt support,” you must manage the expectations of your callers.

For example, if a B2B customer waits for five minutes but expects to wait for 10 minutes, they will perceive this interaction as positive. Conversely, a customer who waits longer than expected will feel slighted and sustain a negative impression of the customer support call.

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Aim to under-promise but over-deliver on support calls, as this makes your customer support seem better than anticipated. One way of doing this is by providing a “fast lane” for high-value customers, making sure their calls jump to the top of the call queue.

What resources can businesses use to improve telephone customer support?

Some businesses may want to improve the experience of customers calling their business, but realize that they can’t make significant improvements without assistance. Certain software and services may be able to help businesses looking to increase their customer call satisfaction without breaking the bank.

One of the best ways to do this is by leveraging B2B customer support software to optimize the quality of the entire phone support experience.

Software can help you answer questions like:

Are support staff providing satisfactory support to callers?

Which issues come up most frequently?

How are your other support resources failing to resolve their issues?

Customer support software lets you answer these questions by monitoring call information and tracking call metrics. You can also coordinate future conversation times that fit into the schedule of the customer.

When included in a larger customer support strategy, these features help you to minimize customer annoyances and resolve issues quickly to reinforce loyalty.

 

To summarize, B2B customers want businesses to provide quick and definitive support. Businesses must streamline their customer support calls, reduce average call time, and lessen the perceived irritation of waiting on hold. Technologies exist to further these goals and assist with collecting the data needed to optimize telephone customer support.

 

Riley Panko is a Senior Content Developer for Clutch, a B2B decision making company.