Are you using MS Teams to collaborate and make work happen? Wondering whether you should also start using Microsoft Teams for customer support?
Using MS Teams for customer support or as a help desk means that your employees can support and help customers without leaving the app they use all the time already. As a result, your company could help customers not only faster but also better.
In this post, I will tell you all about and more. You’ll discover why you should be using MS Teams for customer service. We’ll also discuss some practical ways to turn MS Teams into a powerful helpdesk.
So, let’s take it from the top, then.
Why Use MS Teams to Support Customers
There are three main reasons:
#1. Your team spends most of their time in MS Teams already.
That’s where your employees and colleagues collaborate, discuss projects, and even have a little banter to take their minds off projects for a while too.
It seems only logical that they should answer customer questions without leaving Teams as well, right?
In fact, many new clients who implement our live chat software confirm the need to merge the two. These companies have moved their entire back office to Microsoft Teams. Their employees focus on interactions on the platform now. As a result, they find that they are missing chats because they are not constantly monitoring the chat system.
In other words, they’re not answering customer support tickets and questions because nobody knows about them! Furthermore, these happen outside of Teams, while support agents focus on the Microsoft platform.
#2. You need zero training to implement Microsoft Teams for customer support
Let’s face it; your employees already know how to use MS Teams effectively. They know how to navigate their way through its different features and are accustomed to how the platform works.
Because of that, you won’t have to provide any additional training when implementing a helpdesk in Microsoft Teams.
Your teams can simply continue working on the platform as they were. The only different thing they’ll notice will be a new channel dedicated to customer inquiries.
#3. MS Teams makes supporting customers more conversational and human
At its core, MS Teams is a platform for collaboration. In practice, this means it enables teams to converse and work together towards a common goal.
The situation is no different when you use Microsoft Teams for customer support.
Unlike email, with live chat customer support, your agents can build rapport with customers and support them with real-time interaction.
As a result, such support feels more personal. For example, agents can ask additional questions to learn more about the customer’s problem or include screenshots for troubleshooting through a chat conversation to save time and help the person faster.
How to use MS teams for customer support
There are a few simple rules you need to remember when implementing customer support in Microsoft Teams.
#1. Connect live chat to MS Teams
Microsoft Teams doesn’t have a dedicated customer support add-on.
To set up Teams for customer support, you will need to use dedicated software that will allow you to connect live chat with Teams and display support requests in Microsoft’s platform.
This is incredibly easy to do, by the way. Social Intents allows you to connect live chat with MS Teams in a simple three-step process.
#1. Add the Live Chat for Teams app to your team.
#2. Embed our code snippet into your website. This will allow you to display the support live chat widget on your site.
#3. Start answer customer inquiries in MS Teams directly
#2. Quickly triage inquiries with pre-chat forms
Connecting website live chat with MS Teams allows you to chat with customers and support them in real-time.
The next step is to ensure that you can support and help them properly. And that often means knowing about their problem and being able to route the person to the most knowledgeable agent.
The simplest way to do it is by creating pre-chat forms that ask clients to provide initial information about their inquiry.
Such information will help you understand the nature of their problem and ensure that their chat gets picked up by the most relevant person on the team.
#3. Use canned responses to answer common questions quickly
When it comes to supporting customers over live chat, nothing matters more than speed. No customer wants to be staring at their computer screen, waiting for your agent’s reply, after all.
They expect the conversation to flow naturally, with responses appearing almost at an instant.
The problem – That’s a little bit hard to do when you have to type in all the answers by hand.
Enter canned responses.
Canned responses are predefined snippets of text that agents can import into a chat conversation with a simple keyboard shortcut or command.
In short, canned responses allow you to pre-set replies to the most common questions and practically automate the conversation with a customer.
#4. Share links to the knowledge base
Another great way to speed up an issue or ticket resolution is by sending clients links to knowledge base articles that discuss and advise on their problem.
You can do it in two ways:
- Send a link to a relevant knowledge base article when you’re explaining how to overcome a particular issue with your product or service, or
- Provide the link at the end of the support interaction as reference material to help a customer if they encounter a similar issue in the future.
#5. Use MS Teams to get the entire team to help solve customers’ problems
By its nature, Microsoft Teams is a highly collaborative platform. It boasts collaboration, conversation, and working together towards a common goal.
And that can help you improve customer service too.
Because your agents are on the same platform as the rest of the team, they can quickly connect with another expert and get their assistance with helping a client.
Naturally, the same is possible with other helpdesk solutions. But it requires agents to switch to other platforms to reach another team member.
MS Teams, on the other hand, makes the whole process seamless and quick.
#6. Integrate with other customer service tools via Zapier to create and resolve tickets
FACT: Not all customer inquiries can be resolved with a single chat conversation. Sometimes, your team needs to investigate an issue further. And for that, they will have to set up a support ticket for the customer.
Again, MS Teams does not offer such an option. But it can connect and integrate with other customer service tools through Zapier.
So, expand your support setup with such integrations, if needed, to build a robust help desk that will allow you to help customers in real-time and resolve support tickets if needs be.