5 Freshworks features to improve your customer support team’s productivity

Lendsqr recently partnered with Freshworks to give every lender on our platform $10k credit to use on their robust customer support channels, Freshdesk and Freshchat. The Lendsqr team also makes use of these channels to support lenders and we are absolutely stoked about how awesome this platform is.

We are super curious over here (our own cat has more than nine lives), and trust us to constantly keep looking around to find the best ways to maximize our experience with our Freshworks package. In our exploration, we’ve discovered and played around with 5 features which we found to improve our customer support team’s productivity by a mile! We’re also super generous and would love to share them with you so you can transform your team even better than we have.

Featured read: What is Lendsqr, and how does it work?

Service Level Agreement (SLA) reminder and escalation

Photo: Freshworks – SLA

An SLA specifies the performance metrics/expectations for your customer support agents to work with in resolving customers’ issues. They are usually targets/deadlines set for resolution of each issue reported. A reminder is sent to the assigned agent when the deadline is approaching if the issue has not been responded to or resolved.

This feature also takes it up a notch and allows you to set up escalation rules where you can choose to notify an agent’s supervisor when an SLA is violated. For instance, an escalation email or notification will be sent to you if you set a target of 5 minutes for agents to resolve an issue and the issue is not resolved in this time.

This is a great tool to ensure you never keep a customer waiting and your agents are not “dropping packets” all over the place.

Setting up SLA reminders and escalations is pretty quick and easy.

Bots for chats and process automation

“Run for cover! The robots are taking over!” 

Umm .. not quite (not yet anyway) but they sure are welcome right now. You can save your customer support team from mundane repetitive tasks or responding to the same issues a gazillion times a day by creating a bot on Freshdesk.

Support is way more exciting when you automate the mundane and focus on creative problem-solving. As a lender, your support channels are probably flooded with an unlimited amount of “I want a loan”, “how do I get a loan?”, and “why didn’t I get a loan?” every day. Your support team can most likely answer these questions in their sleep and are resolving these issues with so little effort. It’s almost like being in autopilot mode.

You can streamline these low-effort chats and repetitive manual processes (e.g., manually transferring certain chats to a specific agent based on skill or shift schedule) using bots. You can program your most commonly asked questions into the platform with answers and have the bot automatically respond to customers with these issues. You can also give your customers a human feel by naming the bot. Not to worry, you can always review the bot’s performance and improve it. You can set up a review at the end of the bot’s conversation to ask if the customer is satisfied with the response. If they are not, the customer will automatically be transferred to a human agent.

Featured read: How manual underwriting still fits into an automated loan process

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey and reports

You talk about your customers having a great experience with you, but have you’ve never even asked them (so whose experience is it exactly?) 👀

Photo: Freshworks – CSAT

We can’t possibly expect supervisors/agents  to go through every single chat and email to check for a competent resolution or infer the customer’s satisfaction from issues marked as ‘resolved’. Instead, you can set up CSAT surveys and reports which allow customers to rate each interaction with a support agent to convey their satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Customers also have the chance to leave comments and these can serve as great pointers to improve your customer support.

Reports from these ratings are automatically collated and they give you a comprehensive picture of your team’s performance over time. These reports are able to show you how competent your business is at solving customers’ problems and provide insight into what you could be doing to better serve your customers.

Agent performance reports and dashboards

Remember, we spoke about setting targets for agents above (SLA)? You can look at these targets as the key performance indicators (KPIs) for your support team. Agent performance reports are available to you where you can monitor agents’ availability and track overall performance. This way, you get to understand the strength of your team and make adjustments where necessary.

Setting targets is a great way to motivate your team, and having the reports automatically collated for you just makes performance evaluation so seamless.

Featured read: We’re giving our lending tech away for free to non-profit and DFIs

WhatsApp integration into Freshchat

Freshworks loves you so much that they don’t ever want you to leave the platform to attend to your customers. Will some of your customers rather chat with you on WhatsApp? But you worry about your agents’ efficiency with having to hop from one channel to another?

The great news is you can get WhatsApp to work with Freshchat and allow your customers to continue speaking with you in the most engaging way possible (it just keeps getting better, doesn’t it?).

You can also deploy bots on WhatsApp (this is just an overload of awesomeness at this point).

It doesn’t stop here. You can even embed Freshchat in your website or with a link so that with one click, your customers can start chatting with you right away.

There’s so much more that you can do with Freshworks for customer support, and there’s a new discovery every day (we’re not even sure we’ve seen it all yet). Start lending for free with Lendsqr and instantly start exploring the wonders of Freshdesk and Freshchat. Your customers will definitely feel the difference, and so will you. It’ll be a lot like having the “SEAL team” of customer support.