5 Types Of Content That Will Make Life Easier For Your Customer Service Team
Customer service staff are a very important element of every business but, often, their time can be taken up by small queries or problems that could be addressed in a quicker (and often automated) way.
One of the ways you could help is by creating content that assists your audience in sorting out minor issues so they don’t need to contact your customer service personnel for every little thing. Providing valuable content is a great way to educate your audience and it’s also one of the customer service tips that can help to generate more sales for your business.
So, in this article, we will look at five types of content you can create to make life easier for your customer service team.
Blog posts based on FAQs
Creating valuable blog posts is one of the content marketing tips that can help you assist your customer service team. If you’re able to answer common customer queries in your website content, you can reduce the overall number of questions you get and give your customer service team a chance to point customers in the direction of these resources.
To ensure you’re genuinely helping people, you want to identify questions they actually want the answers to. And you can do this by conducting keyword research. This means using specialist tools like the ones from Moz or Ubersuggest and entering relevant words and phrases that relate to your niche. When you’ve done this, you’ll get a list of keywords or search queries that have been typed into search engines by people in your target audience.
When you have these keywords, you can then use them to craft helpful topics that will answer your audience’s questions. Also, you could decide to look through the reviews you get from customers or listen to the frequently asked questions your team currently receives if you want to get more topic ideas.
Now let’s study an example of a business that already does a great job of publishing content that answers common customer questions.
Take a look at Sleeknote, a company that focuses on improving lead generation for customers. On their blog, they have a post that provides a lot of information on the types of promotional emails that can drive more sales for businesses.
As a company that helps people get more leads, they will have some customers that might need help with selling to the prospects they have. So, Sleeknote has created this great post that includes ideas on the kinds of emails to send if you want to effectively promote products and get more sales.
They even include practical examples that can be very helpful to readers who want to get started right away. It’s exactly the type of content you want to provide to help your customers with their pain points, and you can use this as a guide when creating yours.
Case studies that show your previous work
It’s likely your customer service team will get a lot of questions about what you do and the types of results you get for clients. You can put all of this information on your website in the form of case studies — this will reduce the amount of time your customer service team spends on these kinds of queries.
Also, most consumers tend to buy from people they trust, not those they like, so publishing case studies on your website is a great way to earn the trust and confidence of your prospective clients.
On our manual local citation building service page, for example, you’ll see that we’ve included a section where we display a case study that outlines a previous client’s experiences with our company.
We’ve added this to give prospective customers an idea of the work we have done and the results gotten for past clients. This does a great job of making life easier for our customer service team because it answers a lot of the questions people might have about our service. If you also want to reduce the number of queries you get from prospects who want to see evidence of your work, consider including a detailed case study (or several) on your website.
Content that will help prospective clients make informed decisions
If your customers are informed about their purchases, they’ll make better decisions. This will lead to fewer complaints, better reviews, and more repeat purchases.
This will also leave your customer service team with more time to help new customers with their queries. To help prospects make better informed decisions, you could create in-depth guides to explain what you offer and who your products or services are for. Alternatively, you could publish blog posts that provide more information on how people can get the most out of your products or services.
Also, many customers might appreciate having user guides that show them exactly what to do with your products. To give you some inspiration, let’s take a look at some of the types of content that can help your customers make informed decisions.
Take a look at this service page from Excel Builders, a company that specializes in building custom homes and commercial buildings. Looking through the page, you’ll find it contains comprehensive information that educates prospective clients on what the company does.
It also highlights the reasons why they are so good at what they do and what clients can expect from them. This can be of great help to prospects who might want to use this company’s services because it gives them all the details they need to make an informed decision on whether or not to go ahead.
Similarly, H Clinical does a very good job of providing detailed information on the home care services they provide for different clinical trial types. By outlining the various types of clinical trials they do, they’re able to help future clients choose the right trial type for their needs, and they also show customers what they can expect while working with the company.
Any visitor going through this page will appreciate the effort H Clinical has put into explaining the services it offers because they’ve made it easier for people to make well-informed decisions. You should also take a leaf out of the books of these companies and focus on making sure you have content that helps your customers make the best buying decisions to suit their needs.
Free resources that will earn your audience’s trust
A lot of the time, prospective customers might get in touch with your customer service team as they want to be reassured that they can trust you to do a good job. One of the ways you can prove this through your website is by creating free resources your audience will use and love.
These could include how-to guides that help people perform specific tasks or ultimate guides that allow you to provide informative and valuable content for your audience. You could also make free calculators or templates that would be useful to your customers or hold webinars to educate them on various relevant topics.
If you can earn your customers’ trust through your website, it’s likely the number of people getting in touch to learn more about your expertise and qualifications will decrease. This can then free up your customer service team’s time so they can spend more time addressing important questions and complaints.
Now, let’s study an example of a business that uses this tactic well.
For example, HubSpot seems to have cracked the code to providing free resources for their audience. As a company that deals in all things marketing and sales, they’ve done an excellent job of creating a library that’s filled with free guides, templates, quizzes and other marketing resources that many people will find useful.
A lot of the free resources on their website are invaluable and have helped so many people to grow their businesses from the ground up. This amount of value makes it easier for customers to trust and believe in their products — if their free content is already doing a great job, then the paid stuff should be even better, no?
If you also want to earn the trust of prospects and customers before they start doing business with you, try to create valuable resources they’ll find useful.
Post-purchase content that shows how to use your products or services
A lot of businesses will hear from their customers post-purchase, as they might not be confident about how to use your products or services. So, publishing guides on your website that show exactly how your products or services work can provide a positive experience and save your customer service team time.
For instance, you could write a helpful how-to guide that takes your customers through a step-by-step process of using your products and services, or you could create video tutorials for more visual learners.
To give you some practical examples, let’s take a look at some businesses that use this tactic well.
Aerial Wakeboarding is a company that makes products like wakeboard towers and boat accessories for water sport enthusiasts. On their website, they’ve found a way to use content to help people with their installation process.
There are several installation guides relating to their different products like wakeboards, lightbars, or speakers. These guides are also very detailed as they use quality photos to show customers exactly how they can assemble the product(s) they’ve bought. It’s a great way to provide value after purchase and it also helps reduce the questions being sent to their customer service team.
Let’s also study FigPii, a platform that helps businesses to create the best user experience for their website visitors. On the company’s website, they have a knowledge base that has been created to support customers who use their tool. See, for example, their guide on how to install the FigPii tracking code on a website.
The guide gives step-by-step instructions on how people can perform the manual installation of the FigPii tracking code, and they use a very high-quality video to explain the entire process. They also provide a transcript with relevant screenshots from the video for people who would prefer to read the guide. Looking at these two examples, you can see how beneficial it would be to your customer service team if you’re able to create post-purchase content that shows people how to use your products or services.
Summary
Your customer service team already has a lot of work on their plate. So, it would do them a world of good if you are able to create content that reduces their workload. You can start by creating case studies to show your previous work, free resources that help you earn trust, or post-purchase content that lets people know how to use your products or services.
And, if you would like more tips, feel free to look through our customer experience archives for more useful information that can help you make life easier for your customer service team.
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Author bio & headshot:
Alex Ratynski is a Content Strategist at Loganix, an SEO fulfillment partner that works with agencies and marketers. The company focuses on helping businesses to improve their online visibility, so they can grow and reach their goals. If you enjoyed this article, visit the Loganix blog for more expert advice.