What is an In-App Support?
In-App Support is a type of communication delivery service that's provided to a user within the app that they are present on, without first requiring the user to exit and use another means to contact a support agent.
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1. Why Does In-App Support concern Customer Service?
Enabling customers to contact you right within your app makes for a more robust user experience. In-app support provides a familiar interface for customers, who are already accustomed to communicating via messaging apps like SMS messaging, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger.
In-app support keeps conversations in context, saves customers from the repetition often associated with being shuffled amongst customer support agents, and provides rich context because the customer can easily send screenshots to support the conversation. For customer service organizations, in-app support promotes brand consistency, allows data as context for your agents, and will even reduce your support costs with AI-enabled bots and automation in the mix. In-app support also provides a superb opportunity for brands to ask users for customer reviews.
2. Why Is In-App Support important for a good mobile experience?
Mobile usage continues to surpass desktop usage on a daily basis, which makes apps now a standard way people do business and live their lives. Look no further than your own app usage stats to grasp why it’s important that your customers have an enriched, friction-free experience on your mobile app. This includes customer service. Asking users to leave your app in order to contact you via a mobile browser, text messaging, email, or the phone is a bad form of customer experience. In-app support can not be separated from the mobile experience.
3. How to improve in-app support?
(i). Answer first, ticket last.
Tickets are created when users must raise help, so enabling users to search out the proper answer on their own before it becomes a ticket can dramatically reduce ticket volume.
Many apps default to a page with a support number or email address, which ends up resulting in a ticket. Create a user-friendly self-service FAQ or cognitive content within your app to empower your users to find help while reducing the number of inbound tickets.
(ii). Use a shared inbox.
Traditionally, each customer service/support agent has his or her own inbox that's managed by human triage: a manager must assign issues to every agent on a case-by-case basis. This process is incredibly resource-intensive and if an agent is unavailable, users are left waiting until it’s reassigned to a brand new agent.
A shared inbox enables agents to look at all open issues and efficiently resolve them without requiring human triage.
(iii). Sort by wait time.
It seems intuitive that the customer who waits for the longest gets helped first, but that's often not the case.
Some ticket queues are sorted chronologically, such that the most recent ticket goes to the top of the queue for resolution – not the bottom.
Instead of this, we should make sure that people who are within the queue the longest get helped first.
(iv). Use bulk actions.
As an app’s user base grows, similar issues will begin to emerge within the tens, then hundreds, then thousands.
Rather than managing every one individually, use bulk actions to enable your support team to pick out all similar tickets and reply to them in the same way.
(v). Create canned responses.
Like bulk actions, canned responses allow nimble support teams to answer questions with answers from an existing knowledge domain.
Identify the foremost common issues in your ticket queue and make canned responses that apply to a suitable category of users. Remember: Canned responses for iOS users might not be applicable to Android users.
(vi). Implement an automatic follow-up system to assist you to prioritize those users who still need help with their issues.
88% of consumers don’t buy from businesses that leave complaints unresolved. The automated follow-up method is useful in identifying who to answer first. A way of implementing this is often to sort through the oldest tickets that have to be actioned; bulk apply a novel tag to all or any of these older tickets; so send a bulk message asking those users if they still need help. The unique tag will facilitate your ticket as a priority if and ever those users reply.
(vii). Don’t sound like a machine when helping users.
67% of consumers are frustrated because they could not talk to a real person. It helps to use identical words that your customers are using so as to attain mutual understanding.
(viii). Sustain with users’ expectations by innovating in handling problems or issues.
A recent study has found that an estimated 81% of businesses investing in in-app support functionalities that help in delivering excellent CX are performing much better than their competitors. For mobile app developers, 800 numbers, website forms, emails, and other desktop-based methods aren't effective enough to come close to your mobile users. To provide your mobile customers good service, you should have a dedicated mobile solution because it is not practical to create an app for the mobile platform without necessary in app support. Here's a good step-by-step guide on mobile app development.
(ix). Give your customer support team a suitable mobile help desk tools like Engati.
$289 is the average annual value that is lost by a business due to lack of maintaining a good customer relationship. Excellent customer service needs scalable and modern support software to efficiently manage incoming tickets. Even the most effective agents are often bottlenecked by using outdated help desk tools. Your app is mobile, right? Then it’s good to invest in customer support tools designed natively for mobile apps.
