Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and startups may find it challenging to have a dedicated customer service team or scale up their existing staff.
However, a customer service assistant can help you keep clients happy while avoiding the added cost and hassles of hiring full-time employees. This way, you’re also able to ramp up your business operations without losing touch with your customers.
What is a Customer Service Assistant?
A customer service assistant is the primary point of contact between a company and its customers. They provide customers with the support they need and their tasks may include email support, phone support, or live chat support.
The two main forms of customer service are voice support and non-voice support:
- Voice support — The traditional approach provides customer service on the phone via a dialer or a softphone. There are two processes under this:
- Inbound process — A support representative answers incoming calls made by customers who seek technical support, raise a complaint, or ask a query
- Outbound process — A support representative makes outgoing calls to pitch a product, resolve an issue, or upsell a product.
- Non-voice support — This approach is carried out through email, social media, or live chat support.
What Does a Customer Service Assistant Do?
A customer service assistant plays an important role in your customer service process by increasing the lifetime value of your customers. They help answer customer questions, address concerns, process orders, and help users understand your service or product. Here are some of the ways that a customer service agent can help your business:
Phone Support
Phone support is a real-time channel that brings a human factor to customer support. An assistant answers phone calls from clients and helps them however they can. They can also make calls to further promote your business.
Email Customer Support
With email support, a customer service assistant responds to queries sent by clients via email. Email is ideal for problems that may need attachments such as images, quotations, or invoices.
Chat Customer Support
Chat customer service is a type of non-voice support that allows real-time conversation. A customer service assistant answers questions and concerns in real time via a chatbot on your website or through other chat software.
Escalation Management
A customer service assistant deals with incidents by ranking concerns based on their priority and making sure that they are resolved or escalated to the proper point of contact.
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Quality Management
Adhering to the policies and procedures of your business, a customer service assistant ensures that your business delivers consistently good customer service. They may ask customers to give feedback about the service they received, which you can then use to improve your customer support channels.
Positive Scripting
A customer support assistant can draft a customer service script to guide clients toward the desired outcome without frustrating or upsetting them. This skill is invaluable for de-escalating situations and building brand advocates that appreciate your level of care.
Customer Retention Strategies
An assistant uses different strategies in customer retention for small businesses such as conducting surveys, informing customers about new developments, and delivering personalized support interactions with the help of an updated customer relationship management (CRM) database. They can also keep track of comments, suggestions, likes and dislikes, as well as testimonials from customers.
Shopping Cart Management
A virtual assistant can manage your help desk or live chat support to assist customers in purchasing your product/service, generating an invoice, and processing payments and refunds.
Read More On This Topic: 4 Reasons Why You Need an eCommerce Customer Support Team
To effectively perform their tasks, a customer service assistant should have excellent communication, problem-solving, and active listening skills, computer literacy (including being able to use dialers and CRM tools), and the ability to remain calm and patient in stressful situations.
Benefits of Hiring a Virtual Customer Service Assistant
You can rely on virtual assistants to handle the bulk of the customer support work. Here are some of the advantages of having a virtual customer support assistant:
1. Boost customer satisfaction
Providing good customer support cultivates a loyal customer base that will help your business gain new clients through positive testimonials and reviews. A virtual assistant can also extend your business hours and work in a different time zone than you, therefore providing your business with 24-hour support.
2. Build your brand image
By adding a personal touch when conducting business with clients, a customer service assistant can uphold your company brand and values beyond your social media presence, advertisements, and other external marketing efforts.
3. Reduce operational costs
Hiring a virtual assistant cuts down your expenses since they are more affordable than in-person hires. Moreover, you don’t need to spend money on office expenses and training since they are remote workers who already have a work from home setup.
4. Increase productivity
Do more in your business by delegating customer service to a virtual assistant. Delegating these tasks not only improves your customer service with quicker response times, but also frees you up to focus on more important tasks.
5. Promote scalability
When startups and small businesses experience sudden increases in demand, outsourcing virtual assistant services is an easy and cost-effective solution to scaling efficiently.
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Improve customer satisfaction without worrying about fluctuating load and staffing issues. Magic customer service outsourcing can match you with skilled assistants that you can easily integrate into your team. It’s as easy as telling us what your business needs and what your goals are. We’ll handle the hiring process, from sourcing to qualifying candidates for you. Within 72 hours, you’ll have a selection of skilled virtual assistants to review and interview to ensure that they meet your needs.
Maintaining great customer service takes time and effort and if you’re like most business owners, you’re busy growing other parts of your company and don’t have time to manage your customer service. Hiring a customer service assistant can save you time and money as you focus on your business goals.
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