Kristi Ernst Thompson, a member of Assist Scout’s assist group, has a recurring sequence on our weblog that reveals precisely how our personal assist group makes use of Assist Scout. It’s nice as a result of it reveals present (and potential) clients methods to use the product in follow, which helps make the advantages extra clear.
I lately wrote a submit about the advantages of logging into your organization’s assist desk as a marketer. Subsequent, I’d wish to take a leaf from Kristi’s ebook and speak a bit of bit about how the advertising and marketing group at Assist Scout makes use of our platform to study extra about our product, higher meet the wants of our clients, and ship delight every day.
Let’s dive in!
From content material to competitor analysis
Instruments like Assist Scout include tons of details about your clients and their notion of your model. Digging into their messages and your reporting dashboards can make clear issues like buyer sentiment, ache factors, and their precise (vs. anticipated) expertise along with your product.
There’s loads you are able to do with this sort of information, however one factor we use it for helps us fill our content material calendar. Abigail Bloom, head of all issues social at Assist Scout, faucets into buyer information to jot down extra relatable copy, inform our method to humor throughout social channels, and spot objections to allow them to be preemptively addressed in her social campaigns:
Help platforms are filled with buyer and messaging gold. It is acquired all the main points and the precise phrases clients use to explain their issues, needs, and experiences.
Making an attempt to market with out assist insights is like operating a marketing campaign blindfolded.
Apart from these extra conventional glimpses into your clients, their information can include sudden gems, too, like how they really feel and speak about your rivals. Throughout my days within the queue, I’ve observed that clients regularly talk about competitor strengths and weaknesses throughout their conversations with assist.
Having that type of insider information — why your clients left these companies or why they’re contemplating switching again — might help you determine methods to place your services as a solution to the ache factors of others in your area.
Assist Scout instruments for analysis
Our favourite options for performing buyer analysis in Assist Scout:
Search — A search engine that can assist you look via conversations; search queries could be filtered by standards like assignee, buyer, tag, topic, standing, and extra.
AI Summarize — A helpful function that may sum up a protracted dialog into just a few easy-to-follow bullet factors. Summaries make it simpler to scan conversations and see in the event that they’re what you’re in search of.
Experiences — These are dashboards that can be utilized by entrepreneurs to know traits, determine ache factors, and get concepts for content material and advertising and marketing belongings.
By no means lose your needle within the haystack
When you’ve discovered what you’re in search of, realizing methods to set up and observe that info is essential. Regardless of a decade of logging into and dealing with customer support platforms, I’m nonetheless responsible of combing via tons of emails and chat transcripts to search out the proper buyer quote for my powerpoint slide or article, solely to should repeat the search a few weeks later.
I determine I’ll simply go away the tab open till I’m prepared for it.
Spoiler: I don’t, in reality, ever go away the tab open.
Whereas that alone is motive sufficient to reap the benefits of your assist platform’s organizational instruments, there’s additionally the truth that when you begin, it can make the analysis course of simpler sooner or later.
As an illustration, Andrea Kayal, chief income officer, makes use of dialog tags to keep watch over the wants of our VIPs, whereas VP of Advertising and marketing, Kristen Bryant Smith, makes use of them to assist measure marketing campaign success:
I like that we will create tags by marketing campaign in Assist Scout. That provides us a straightforward solution to monitor the suggestions coming in from the communications we’ve despatched out.
When you begin tagging messages primarily based in your chosen standards (product kind, function launch, bugs, VIP clients, campaigns, and so forth.), you should use computerized workflows to tag future conversations for you and arrange a particular view in order that the subsequent time you might want to pull up the knowledge, new, recent examples can be there ready for you.
Assist Scout instruments for group
Listed here are our favourite options for conserving conversations organized in Assist Scout:
Tags — Customizable labels that let you observe, monitor, and handle buyer conversations on the account degree.
Customized fields — Just like tags, although centered on the Inbox degree. Good for info that must be tracked on most conversations.
Workflows — Rule-based automations that may carry out useful duties like proactively tagging conversations or assigning them to the correct individual or group.
Inbox views — A simple solution to group like conversations collectively in a single place, permitting you to focus in on a particular subset of messages.
Go deeper than an elevator pitch
As entrepreneurs, you seemingly know loads about your product, and in case you’re inside a instrument like Assist Scout, studying via, sorting, and organizing buyer conversations, you seemingly have a good concept of what the shopper expertise is.
However do you want, realize it realize it?
It seems that there’s a large distinction between, say, realizing that you might want to carry out a manufacturing facility reset on the piece of tech you promote vs. with the ability to truly carry out that reset your self, which is why product proficiency is so vital. Once you learn the assist dialog, you see the ache; nonetheless, while you use the product, you really feel the ache.
(Or pleasure! Not each product expertise is painful…we hope.)
The advertising and marketing squad right here at Assist Scout is aware of that if we’re actually going to be good at convincing others that our product is the correct alternative for his or her group, we have to go deeper. This implies leveraging some platform options that may assist us up our product information and troubleshooting expertise.
As an illustration, Mat Patterson, host of The Supportive podcast, sharpens his expertise utilizing the comply with function:
The ‘comply with’ operate lets me watch different, smarter folks reply difficult or nuanced buyer queries.
When you might not be an knowledgeable at resolving tough buyer conditions, your assist group is. Once you spot a query within the queue that you simply don’t know methods to reply or simply appears attention-grabbing, smash that comply with button and have the reply land proper in your inbox.
Along with utilizing our search engine to browse conversations, artistic director Matt Performs leans into the usage of our information base and our sensible search assistant, AI Solutions.
AI Solutions + Search is a superb combo. I like to fact-check wherever potential, and crafting sturdy searches is an enormous consider serving to me do this.
Whether or not digging via the archives, following an attention-grabbing dialog, or tapping into your information base content material, Assist Scout makes it straightforward to study at your individual tempo and reality test your work when answering questions within the queue or creating advertising and marketing content material.
Assist Scout instruments for product proficiency
Listed here are our favourite options for utilizing Assist Scout to achieve product information:
Comply with — A function in Inbox that notifies you every time there’s an replace to a particular dialog.
Search — Useful for person analysis and product training!
Docs — Assist Scout’s information base instrument. Your assist group positively has a information base, and if one thing is vital to your clients to know, it’s vital so that you can know, too.
Beacon — An embeddable internet widget that offers your clients (and your group!) fast entry to information content material from inside your person expertise.
AI Solutions — A sensible search assistant that gives solutions to buyer (and marketer) questions utilizing info present in your information base and exterior sources like your organization’s web site.
Do the work and measure your success
We’ve talked loads about how the platform helps us do the “behind the scenes” advertising and marketing work like buyer and opposition analysis and boosting product proficiency amongst your group, however in some unspecified time in the future you’ll want to really put that information to work.
When you can’t do all of your advertising and marketing from inside our platform (you’re secure for now, HubSpot) you possibly can truly do fairly a bit with our proactive messaging function. Saphiya Hindeyeh, a senior lifecycle marketer right here at Assist Scout, has named Beacon — and extra particularly Messages — as her most used Assist Scout function
I take advantage of Messages to share updates, promotions, and useful sources with our website guests. What makes messages efficient is that it permits me to achieve folks proper when the message is related to what they’re doing — like displaying somebody utilizing our buyer assist hiring calculator a message about different Assist Scout instruments that may make their job a bit of simpler. When completed proper, proactive messaging can flip passive searching into significant engagement.
Along with promotional makes use of, we additionally use our Messages function to assemble buyer suggestions and measure sentiment by way of NPS and different varieties of microsurveys. All campaigns and surveys include devoted experiences to assist us measure efficiency and engagement.
Whereas this sort of function could be present in different instruments, there’s a definite benefit to having or not it’s inside your assist instrument — it’s really easy to ask a follow-up!
One other method Assist Scout might help you along with your advertising and marketing efforts is as an info repository to your group. Although most individuals use their customer support instrument’s information base function for exterior information, you possibly can retailer inner info there, too.
Inserting your group’s commonplace working procedures in a single place for fast reference could be nice for streamlining your group’s workflow and making onboarding that a lot simpler for brand new hires. For those who’re questioning what could be good to incorporate, take into consideration issues like your model pointers, methods to request paintings out of your design group, or the method of getting a vendor permitted.
Certain, a personal Docs website could not appear as attractive of a function as an NPS survey, however not having folks straight DM you each time they’ve an ask is priceless.
Assist Scout instruments for advertising and marketing and measuring
Listed here are our favourite Assist Scout options for advertising and marketing after which measuring your efforts:
Beacon — Apart from displaying assist documentation, our internet widget may also be used for proactive messaging and stay chat.
Messages and microsurveys — Show pop-ups and banner advertisements, and even conduct person analysis from any Beacon in your web site or in your app.
Experiences — Our reporting instruments might help you perceive the efficiency of your campaigns and handle buyer follow-ups.
Docs — Articles in non-public Docs collections can solely be seen when logged into Assist Scout, making it a fantastic place to retailer group information and insurance policies.
Converse and collaborate
In that current submit I discussed earlier, I talked in regards to the significance of direct communication with clients in depth, so I’m not going to get again up on my cleaning soap field right here.
I’ll, nonetheless, take a second to remind you that you simply don’t should restrict your utilization to speaking with clients. As an illustration, on the content material group, we use Assist Scout to handle reader responses to our weekly newsletters and for managing purposes to our Contributor Community.
There are lots of different use instances the place entrepreneurs would possibly profit from managing e mail inside Assist Scout vs. via commonplace e mail. Principally, any communications which are being managed by a number of events would seemingly be higher dealt with via Assist Scout than an everyday e mail consumer like Outlook or Gmail.
An instance could be managing vendor comms for an in-person occasion or discussing the main points of social campaigns with influencers. Even when just one individual is the direct contact, there’s a great likelihood that different teammates might want to weigh in on the choice — why not make that course of simpler for everybody concerned?
Assist Scout instruments for communication
Listed here are our favourite Assist Scout options for working with clients, purchasers, and one another:
Dialog assignments — Assign messages to the individual or group that’s greatest geared up to reply.
Buyer profiles — Important details about the individual you’re responding to, together with issues like identify, contact particulars, firm, and hyperlinks to earlier conversations.
Inside notes and @mentions — Don’t get caught up in forwarding emails to get a second opinion. Use inner notes and tag your teammates into the dialog.
Saved replies — Templated responses that may save time when responding to FAQs.
AI Summarize, AI Help, AI Drafts — Use AI to get caught up on conversations, enhance or translate your replies, and even draft responses primarily based on sources like earlier conversations and knowledge in your information base.
Keyboard navigation — Key combos that let you navigate your Inbox with out ever having to achieve to your mouse; Matt says they make working within the dialog editor a “complete pleasure.”
Simply get in there
I hope this peek into how our advertising and marketing group makes use of Assist Scout has given you some concepts of how your group would possibly get extra out of the platform. If in case you have any questions on methods to get began, our inbox is at all times open.
