Part 2: Increase Revenue Using Automated Customer Support Alerts

In Part 1 of this series, we introduced ways that customer support can identify sales opportunities using ticket automation triggers in your TeamSupport B2B customer support solution.

Ticket automation triggers allow you to set up multiple search parameters, identify certain keywords, and automatically take action, or multiple actions on a ticket, including sending alerts to specific team members when appropriate. In Part 1 we looked at two ways to use triggers to alert your sales team about potential revenue growth opportunities and now we’ll explore how to use triggers to be proactive with potentially angry or unsatisfied customers in order to mitigate the risk of churn.

In addition to analyzing data from your Customer Distress Index^® (CDI), NPS scores, and agent ratings to determine the overall health of your customers, set your ticket automation triggers to alert you on phrases that indicate a customer might be leaving, such as:

“How do I export data out of your software?”

“Please send me a copy of our contract for our records.”

The system will alert your customer success team or the appropriate account manager, who can dive deeper into why the customer is asking the question. This will give you an opportunity to address any concerns the customer has about which you may be unaware. The sooner you understand their concerns, the more time you have to repair the issue or address any underlying grievances before it’s too late to save them.

One of the ways that your support team can impact your business is to use reporting and analytics features in your B2B customer support software to identify trends in support issues. One of the most common data points used by B2B customer support teams is total customer requests received in the past 30 days and comparing it to a previous timeframe (previous month or same month, previous year). An analysis like this will let you see bigger trends, such as an increase in the number of requests on a particular issue or an increase in response time, that you may not identify by simply looking at daily metrics. Get ahead of the trends by setting alerts for questions like: 

            “I want to speak to a manager!”

            “This is the second (or third) time I’ve submitted a ticket for this issue.”

            “What is the status of my ticket?”

            “I’ve been waiting for three days…”

SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are a good way to for customer support teams to hold themselves accountable to a high service standard. It’s a promise to your customers in a sense, and the ticket automation trigger functionality serves as a tool to enable support agents to keep those promises as well as remain proactive in addressing potential issues that might harm the overall customer relationship.

Remember, if your account managers are using a B2B customer support software solution that features ticket automation triggers, collaboration between teams is much easier because you can automatically assign the ticket to the Account Management group, or directly to that customer’s account manager, to ensure they are aware of the signs that something might be wrong. They can then take additional steps to help the customer with their questions or problems. And they can do so as a function of the ticket the customer submitted, without a secondary chain of communication.

This creates a single, harmonious communication between your customer and all of your internal groups who play a role in their success.

About the Author: Jamey Derryberry Jamey is a high-performing sales professional at TeamSupport, and more importantly, has been a mentor and team leader for new account executives, designing lead-management processes and sales procedures to ensure their success. Outside of his contributions to TeamSupport, he loves hunting, playing golf, and traveling with his family.