Reducing Customer Support Costs

WhatsApp can be a powerful channel for customer support, but managing a high volume of conversations can be costly. By leveraging LeadClose's automation and efficiency tools, you can significantly reduce your support costs while improving response times and customer satisfaction.

1. Deflect Common Questions with Keyword Automations

A large percentage of support queries are often repetitive. Identify your top 5-10 most frequently asked questions and create automations for them.

1. Identify FAQs: Look through your chat history. What do customers ask about most? (e.g., "What are your hours?", "Where is my order?", "What's your return policy?")
2. Create Keyword Rules: Go to Automations > Keyword Rules. Create a rule for each FAQ.
   • Trigger Keywords: Use words and phrases your customers use (e.g., for hours: hours, open, when do you close).
   • Action (Reply): Create a clear, concise answer. You can even link to a more detailed page on your website.

Impact: Every time this automation runs, it's one less ticket your human agents have to handle, allowing them to focus on more complex issues.

[SCREENSHOT: The Keyword Rules list showing several common rules for FAQs like "Hours," "Shipping," and "Returns".]

2. Use Canned Responses for Speed and Consistency

For questions that require a human touch but still have a standard answer, Canned Responses are essential.

• Create Responses: Go to Chats > Canned Responses and create replies for common scenarios like greetings, follow-up questions, or closing a conversation.
• Use Shortcuts: Train your agents to use shortcuts (e.g., typing /welcome) to insert these responses instantly.

Impact: Canned responses dramatically reduce the time it takes for an agent to handle a single conversation, increasing their overall capacity.

3. Set Expectations with Welcome and Away Messages

Properly configured auto-replies manage customer expectations and can prevent frustrated follow-up messages.

• Welcome Message: Let new contacts know you've received their query and provide an estimated response time.
• Away Message: Inform customers that you're currently unavailable and when you'll be back online. This prevents them from thinking they are being ignored.

Go to Automations > Auto Replies to configure these.

4. Route Conversations to the Right Agent

• Assign Chats: Ensure conversations are assigned to a specific agent. This creates accountability and prevents multiple agents from accidentally replying to the same customer.
• Use Internal Notes: If an agent needs help from another team member (e.g., the billing department), they can use an internal note to provide context before re-assigning the chat. This avoids forcing the customer to repeat themselves.

FAQs

Q: Will too much automation feel robotic to customers? A: It's all about balance. Automations are best for simple, factual questions. For more complex or emotional issues, a human agent should always take over. The goal of automation is to handle the repetitive tasks, freeing up your team to provide better, more personalized human support where it counts.

Q: How do I measure the impact of these changes? A: Keep an eye on your Dashboard. Look for metrics like:

• Average time to resolution: This should decrease as agents use tools like canned responses more effectively.
• Number of conversations per agent: This should increase as automations handle more of the initial queries.