Part 2: Ouch! Solve the pain caused by your current B2B customer support system.

The right B2B customer support software means never having to say goodbye.

In our first blog post in this four-part series we introduced the top pain points reported by B2B customer support professionals and how the right B2B customer support software will help you solve for all of them, starting with using a B2B help desk ticketing system instead of your inbox to resolve issues in a more timely, efficient manner.

Here in Part 2 we address reducing churn. It’s bad enough when you lose a customer. It’s worse if you didn’t see it coming. When you implement a B2B customer support software like TeamSupport, you can measure how happy or frustrated your customers might be and take proactive steps with customers who might be in danger of leaving. Here are a few tools that will help:

• Customer sentiment analysis is a commonly used tool by B2B customer support teams and refers to assigning a metric to a piece of text that details how positive or negative that text is. The simplest type of algorithm uses a dictionary to look up which words or phrases indicate which sentiment. For example, if a text says, ‘all you need is love,’ it marks it as positive. If a text says, ‘I still haven’t found what I’m looking for,’ it marks it as negative.¹ TeamSupport takes this technology one step further, offering real-time sentiment analysis within tickets so agents can instantly gauge the tone of a customer response. Our automated technology helps B2B customer support teams prioritize their ticket workflow and also creates proactive customer support opportunities. 
• While sentiment analysis uses text to indicate a positive or negative tone to the communication, TeamSupport’s proprietary Customer Distress Index™, or CDI, uses data to indicate whether a customer may be satisfied or frustrated. The CDI provides a 0-100 score indicating how happy a customer may be with your business. This score can be customized by providing weights to specific values. For example, if ticket resolution time is of high importance to your customers, you can weigh it more strongly than total number of tickets or another value. This score can be a great asset in building and maintaining positive customer relationships.

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) asks customers one simple question…On a scale of 0-10, how likely is it that you would recommend my brand/product/service to a friend or colleague?  Then a simple calculation averages Promoters (9 or 10), Passives (7 or 8), and Detractors (below 7). NPS is a direct measurement of honest customer success. One of the key selling points of the NPS score is its lack of personal influence. A respondent isn’t coaxed into answering a specific way based on how a person asks the question. Your NPS score is a great starting point to understand in a simplistic way what your customers think about your company and entire operation. 

These are a few tools and features of a B2B customer support software because it lets customer service teams monitor customer satisfaction and measure overall customer health in order to be more proactive in mitigating the risk of churn.

The next pain point we’ll put a band-aid on is eliminating silos, coming up in Part 3.

¹ Five Practical Use Cases of Customer Sentiment Analysis For NPS, Medium.com, June 6, 2017. https://towardsdatascience.com/five-practical-use-cases-of-customer-sentiment-analysis-for-nps-a3167ac2caaa (accessed June 28, 2020).