Letting customers self categorize their questions by product area, issue type, or the like gives your team great insight into where your main support issues are coming from and perhaps where the product teams should be focusing.įor some types of support, prompting customers to attach a file or a screenshot along with the question can shorten a conversation considerably. If a customer can tell you the account they log in to or their company name, you can often give your support team access to internal tools and data to help them answer much more quickly. Provide the support agent with account tools and history. As shown above, Squarespace narrows down their knowledge base results according to the options you choose to describe your question. Show appropriate FAQs and support options. For example, you can send prospects to your sales team, job applicants to your people team, and product support to your customer service team. (I would hate to know the number of support replies I have personally sent that boiled down to “Can you please tell me which account you’re talking about?”)Īdding additional fields and guidance to contact forms can help you do the following:Īutomatically direct different requests to the appropriate teams. But when the initial question from a customer isn’t clear or doesn’t contain enough information to answer the question, that average takes a hit. “Average replies before a conversation is resolved” is a valuable customer service metric for your support team. Great contact pages walk a fine line between making the customer do work up front and saving them time overall. Takeaway: The design of your contact page influences how and where people go for support - be intentional! 6. Research shows that our brains are finely tuned to recognize faces, and having other people around tends to create more cooperative behaviours (even just a poster of a face has that effect). In my career, I’ve heard versions of “I want to talk to a real person, not a robot!” from customers many times. It’s easy for them to feel unimportant or ignored.
Humanize your customer service teamĬustomers who are looking for help are often stressed and frustrated, and when they can only communicate with you through text chats or emails. Takeaway: Don't make people hunt for your contact page - stick with a standard location. For example, using both “contact” and “help” for different pages adds another decision point that can frustrate someone who needs to talk to support. It is clear they are driving phone support as the primary choice (a design decision I’ll cover later in this list).Īny of these terms will be recognizable to your customers, as long as you make them easy to locate and you pick a phrase that is not too similar to other links in your navigation. Squarespace covers all the bases, using “Contact Us” and “Help & Support.” Mixpanel directly links their support page, but they use “Documentation” as a navigation link.įreshbooks and Salesforce both show a phone number prominently in the header navigation and make it a clickable link to their contact options. Though contact page names varied between companies, these are the 3 most widely used terms: Which should you use? The header is often more visually prominent, but usability studies show that fat footer link blocks are easily found (and used) too. There is a fairly even split amongst the 13 applications, half in the header and half in the footer (with a couple opting for both locations). Most of the SaaS companies I reviewed include customer support (help & knowledge base) options on their contact page and link to the contact page in the header or footer. After reviewing 13 SaaS company websites, I identified 8 design principles that make an effective contact page. But there are best practices demontrated by successful SaaS companies that will help you improve your contact page.
#Contact white pages customer service trial
There’s a reason for that: A well designed contact page directs people to the answers they need and helps them ask their questions more effectively, significantly improving their experience on your site.īut what constitutes a “well designed” contact page, and how do you know if you’re getting it right? Some of it is just trial and error, coupled with analytics from tools like Crazy Egg that allow you to visualize user behavior on your site. Yet the “contact us” page is still an essential part of every website’s architecture. In 2016, our design is flat, we hide our visitor counters and save animation for the gifs we share in Slack chat. The recipe for a website in 1995: Take one gray page, add a visitor counter, sprinkle with rainbow horizontal lines, insert poorly animated construction worker, add a “contact us” page and link the completed page to your web ring.Ĭonfused? Imagine a digital funhouse where bright colors, flashing lights and Comic Sans all compete for your attention at once.
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