What does it take to provide the best customer service in the UK? 10 UK-based SMBs offer their thoughts.

Chat Shortcuts that are visual - because, let's be honest: everyone loves gifs

We previously gave you some live chat canned responses examples. These Shortcuts from Olark users provide a nice framework for transactional chat shortcuts. They help your live chat agents respond faster, which keeps average response time down and customer happiness up.

Starting today (Friday, August 11, 2017) the Olark Customer Support team is headed to Traverse City, MI for Olark's annual company retreat.

I'll be the first to admit that I don't know much about customer support. My background is in public relations, as I've talked about before.

Yet, as is wont to happen in any startup, my role has expanded since I joined Olark. As I've morphed from 'specialist' to 'marketing generalist,' I feel like I've read a million "how to market your startup" articles. What kind of articles you ask? Try starting with the 'Growth Marketing' section of the Appcues blog. They do a nice job capturing actionable insight.

While they often have amazing hints on growth hacking and optimizing different funnels, many articles fail to mention a strategy that may come as a surprise: customer support.

Yes, it actually involves humans, but don't be afraid: it will help you improve your product to ensure existing customers stick around longer, and maybe even buy more; and it makes it easier to attract and sell to new customers. 

How so? Let's take a look.

All Hands Support is our way of getting everyone on the team to contribute to customer support. It means that every week, every team member, even me, the PR guy, logs on for a three hour customer support shift. 

Sometimes it's easy - a few questions about pricing or automated chat rules. Sometimes it means handling customer complaints effectively - using what I know about customer relations to ensure that a frustrated customer gets the help they need. 

I realize that might seem a little crazy - for Olark and for me - to hand over the ‘keys to the car’ for three hours, but in reality it’s invaluable, for both of us.

What's a CRM? When we use the term it typically means a customer relationship management (CRM) platform - a piece of software that makes it easy to get an at-a-glance view of every interaction a customer has with your business. 

For me - ConversionXL Live is the best conference we attend all year. More intimate than Hubspot's INBOUND conference, the true power of ConversionXL Live isn't in the sessions we attend, but the connections we make over meals, coffee, cornhole, playing Super Mario Bros., gigantic Jenga, karaoke, brewery visits, or any number of other fun activities featured at the conference.

Introducing Support Driven Exposition (SDX)

We've talked before about how ongoing education is a pillar here at Olark. We've set a number of ways to enable teaching within our teams - onboarding, presentations, newsletters, retreats. We really want colleagues to share what they've learned with others.

Introducing the Olark and PeformLine integration

There are plenty of reasons why you want to review your transcripts. We've written before about how reviewing customer conversations can give you an advantage to overcoming objections in your sales funnel. It's also valuable in understanding where your chats are originating, so you can understand what pages may need optimizing.

Thank you, customers, for helping Olark win gold in the "Customer Service Department of the Year" category

If you're not familiar with The Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service, they honor customer service, contact center, business development and sales professionals. More than 2,300 organizations of all sizes and in virtually every industry were evaluated in this year’s competition. More than 75 members of several specialized judging committees determined the Gold, Silver and Bronze Stevie Award placements from among the Finalists during final judging earlier this month.