How to Choose the Right Support Channels for Your Business

Unless you're Santa Claus, you can't be everywhere at once (and even he can do it only once per year). So when you're deciding where and how to support your small business customers, you have some tough choices to make.

Which customer service channels should be your primary focus, and which can you leave as a future option? This decision, ultimately, comes down to three factors:

1. Your team (their capacity, skills, and interests).

2. Your customers (their expectations, needs, context, and abilities).

3. Your industry (trends and norms you need to be aware of).

In this article, we'll take a look at the variety of support channels available to your business before diving into each of these three factors so you can make an informed decision about where and how to spend your limited customer service resources.

Don't try to be good at every channel; be great at a few

In their book "Uncommon Service: How to Win by Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business," Frances Frei and Anne Morriss write:

Frei and Morriss make a strong case that businesses cannot possibly be exceptional in all areas and that great service requires you to make a hard choice to be mediocre in ways your customers don't care about.

Keep that in mind as a bulwark against the temptation to say, “We'll be great in every possible channel!" For most of us, the limits of time and money make that an impossible dream.

 KEY TAKEAWAY:  It's better for your customers, your team, and your business to focus on and excel in a few support channels than it is to spread yourselves thin and provide inconsistent service across all of them.

A range of channels to consider

These days, there is an ever-growing range of options to choose from when providing online customer service.

Here are seven of the most popular choices:

• Email help desks are, by far, the most widely used and well-established support channel. Email is conversational, asynchronous, and supplies an excellent record of past discussion. The downside? Email can be frustrating if a lot of back-and-forth is required to resolve an issue.

• Phone support allows for direct, personal conversation in real time and remains popular with older generations. The downside? Phone support can be time-consuming and costly, especially for smaller teams.

• Live chat provides a good balance between email and phone support. The back-and-forth is less cumbersome when support team members and customers can hash out issues in real time. The downside? Customer expectations for response time are higher than email, so it can require a larger team.

• Messaging provides the real-time benefits of live chat, with the capability to be spread out over time. The downside? It can be tricky to manage customer expectations about response times.

• Social media facilitates conversation around your product or service, functioning as both a brand platform and a support channel. The downside? It's a public space, and people typically expect an immediate response.

• Forums allow your customers to help each other, which can save you time and resources. The downside? They do require diligent monitoring to temper trolls, ensure questions are answered, and maintain up-to-date information.

• Self-service tools and knowledge bases are an excellent way to scale your customer service efficiently by enabling your customers to help themselves. The downside? They take some initial investment (but are well worth it in the long run for the time they save your support team).

3 factors to consider in your customer support channel decision

There is no "best option" here, so how can your business decide which of these to offer your customers?

The first step is to understand what you're working with.

1. Understand your team

Not every customer service agent is suited to every support channel. Some people have exceptional written communication skills but find phone calls stressful. Other team members may thrive on high volume chats but lack the patience or technical knowledge to troubleshoot complex issues.

Of course, you can train and develop your staff to adapt to different requirements (further reading: "Customer Service Agent Training: Are You Sabotaging Your Agents?”). But before you start training, you should take an audit of the skills and interests available to you right now.

Here are a few questions to help audit your agents:

• What experience do they have with different support channels?

• What interests have they expressed regarding different forms of support?

• What tools and systems do you already have that may allow easier testing of new channels? (Does your existing help desk software offer or integrate with a social media monitoring tool?)

• How busy are they right now? (If they're at capacity, adding more channels without new staff will be counterproductive.)

 KEY TAKEAWAY:  Once you've identified channels where multiple team members already have some experience, you can offer that channel to customers on a trial basis without having to extensively re-train agents or take them away from existing channels.

2. Know your customers

Where do your customers spend their time online? Which channels do they want to use to talk to you? If you use help desk software, you can probably run a report to see which channels your customers use the most.

Here are a few questions to help you shed light on which channels your customers use and prefer:

• How old is your customer base? Broadly speaking, older customers prefer phone support over live chat. Younger customers are more likely to want to use chat or social channels.

• What types of questions do they have? Complex technical queries are often easier to handle via email and are less likely to be asked or resolved satisfactorily via mobile platforms. Review your incoming support to identify where you have categories of questions best suited to particular channels.

• What preferences do your customers have? Surveying your customers can provide a lot of useful information, including how they'd prefer to contact you.

• What are your competitors offering? Your customers have other options. If your competitors can easily guide them through their preferred support channels, you may need to consider matching their offerings.

 KEY TAKEAWAY:  Knowing how your customers are contacting you, though, won't tell you how your customers want to contact you. To get a better handle on that, consider running a short survey.

3. Stay informed

In addition to your staff and your customers, your business' choice of support channels should also take into account broader business changes that can shift customer demand.

The customer service landscape is shifting, and more customers than ever are using innovative channels (such as social media, AI-assisted support, and chat and messaging).

Six out of ten U.S. consumers now say that their go-to channel for simple inquiries is a digital self-serve tool (such as a website, mobile app, voice response system, or online chat). On top of this, customers still want face-to-face interactions or phone conversations with representatives for more complex issues.

Customer service expert Shep Hyken thinks the future is not “omnichannel" but “channel-less," in which customers can continue the same conversation through various tools without having to manually switch.

 KEY TAKEAWAY:  Whichever way you go, keep an eye on your peers and the market so new trends don't catch you unaware.

Find your best mix of channels

The right choice for your team is the one that lets them consistently deliver the highest quality of customer service. Offering too many options will only dilute their ability to help.

Ultimately, your customers will tell you whether you've made the right choice by continuing to do business with you, or not.

Whatever decision you make, it should be your decision for now, not forever. Routinely review your incoming support metrics. As your business grows, your team's skills will expand as your customer base changes. Consistently review your support channel mix, and add or remove based on your metrics.