A customer has disputed an invoice, sent an email and now calls your team. Can the person answering pick up where the email exchange left off? Or does the customer have to start again?
Phone support can be especially helpful when you need to ask several follow-up questions, clear up a misunderstanding or work through a difficult situation together. Give your team the right information and make sure they know which decisions they can make and who will take care of anything left to do after the call.
When planning your channels, start with the questions customers ask:
- What can they do themselves?
- What can you sort out by email or with a few messages in live chat?
- And when would it be more helpful to talk directly?
Depending on the task, a person or a voice agent may be able to help.
Phone, live chat or self-service?
If you're deciding when to offer phone support, live chat or self-service, concrete examples help. These situations suggest a few options. The best choice depends on how your team works and what the customer needs at that moment.
| Request | Possible route | What it needs |
|---|---|---|
| A customer asks about the status of an order. | Self-service, chat or a voice agent | Order details are up to date, and the request can be matched to the right order. |
| An invoice is still unclear after several messages. | A conversation or agreed callback | The team can see the previous messages and answer the remaining questions. |
| A complaint escalates. | Help from a person, by phone or message depending on the customer's preference | The person handling it can make a decision or bring in someone who can help. |
| The team needs photos or documents to handle a request. | Email or chat, with a call if useful | The team can find the documents and call notes in the same case. |
| A customer gets stuck in self-service. | Help from a person, such as live chat or a callback | Where possible, the team can see the details already provided and find out what's gone wrong. |
A call can help shorten a long exchange: you can ask questions and clear things up together, without waiting for the next message.
If documents, detailed instructions or confirmations are involved, it often makes sense to send an email or message as well. Plan what your team should send after the conversation.
Does the phone work for this customer?
Think about possible barriers too: Do both people speak the same language? Can the customer hear and speak comfortably? And do they want to use the phone?
The timing needs to work as well. Offering a callback helps only if your team can call at the agreed time. If someone prefers to write or cannot use the phone, your team should be able to help them by email or chat.
What your team needs to help customers on the phone
When planning your phone support, look at how your team handles a question from the first contact through to the solution. These four questions help you check what they need:
What information does the team need?
The customer may have sent a message already, be waiting for an order or have a question about a contract. Work out which messages, tickets and customer details your team needs to see during the call to help straight away.
Who can help?
The call should reach someone who can answer the question and speaks the right language. Decide what happens when everyone is on a call, a customer asks for a callback or someone calls outside your service hours.
What do you record after the call?
Add a note to the right ticket explaining what the customer asked, what you decided and what you promised. Colleagues can then pick up the case without listening to the whole recording first.
Who makes sure things move forward?
Someone may need to arrange a refund, investigate a problem or get an answer from another team. Record who's taking care of it and when the customer can expect to hear from you again.
At Leafworks, we work through these questions with you as part of our customer service consulting. We establish what information your team needs and how your systems can provide it.
That helps us choose the right telephony integration, whether you keep your existing phone system, use telephony within Zendesk or choose a separate cloud phone platform.
How AI helps on the phone—and when a person takes over
Support for your team or a conversation with AI
AI can support your team on the phone in different ways. It can help summarise and document a call, for example.
An AI voicebot or voice agent speaks to customers itself and can handle certain questions or tasks. To do that, it needs access to the right information and clear limits on what it can do.
When a person takes over
Start with one clearly defined task and decide when a person should take over. The voice agent may be missing information, unable to answer a question or not allowed to make a particular decision.
Customers should know how to reach someone on your team in those situations. Make it clear when they're speaking to AI as well.
What your team needs to know at handover
When a person takes over, they need enough information to help:
- What's the question?
- What has the customer already told the AI?
- What has it tried?
- And why is it handing over the call?
Test the handover with your own systems
Try the handover with your own systems. Even if a ticket is created automatically, check what your team can actually see.
- Is there a summary?
- Is there a transcript to read?
- Are the customer details they need available?
That depends on the products you use, how they're connected and how they're set up. Test what happens on a callback or when the customer gets in touch again later too.
An example from Aircall
Aircall is a good example of why it's worth looking closely at handovers.
- If one voice agent passes the call to another, the second gets a summary of what's been said.
- But if the customer calls again tomorrow, this feature won't remember the earlier conversation.
- When a person takes over, they get basic details such as the reason for the transfer, rather than the whole conversation.
Aircall explains these differences in its guide. Check what your Zendesk integration adds to the ticket as well, and whether your team has what they need to help straight away.
Our Aircall page explains how we set it up and connect it to your systems. You'll also find a short voice agent demo there.
From our work at Leafworks
How we connected telephony and Zendesk at JobCloud
At JobCloud, we set up Zendesk for four brands, eight teams and three languages. This included connecting Aircall and Salesforce to Zendesk. Teams could then keep track of customer requests in one place while using processes suited to their work.
There's a useful lesson here for planning your phone support: look at what information your team needs from other systems and how colleagues will continue working on a case. Include those questions when setting up the service.
How to tell whether your phone support helps
Look at whether the customer's question is answered after the call:
- Do they get in touch again about the same problem, perhaps by email or chat?
- How long did they wait?
- And how happy are they with the help they received?
What happens after the call
Think about the work for your team too. Alongside the call, there are notes to write, tasks to finish and perhaps more calls or messages to handle.
A short call can leave plenty still to do. A longer conversation may help avoid several follow-up questions. Look at what happens after the customer hangs up as well.
Compare similar customer questions
When comparing costs and results, look at similar questions over comparable periods. A complicated complaint on the phone may take more time than checking an order's status in self-service. For planning, look at the total cost of sorting out each type of question and whether the customer is happy with the result.
Ask the same questions about AI: Which requests can it resolve itself? When does handing over to a person help? And how much work is left for your team afterwards?
