In the internet era, customer service has transformed. 83% of Gen Z and millennial customers say that they’re likely to give up on an issue if they can’t resolve it in self-service. Most users search for solutions on Google before attempting to speak to anyone.
In a world where customers expect products to work out of the box and issues to be resolved without personal interaction, what is ‘hypercare’? When do customers want extra attention? How can organizations provide hypercare while keeping customers happy?
Read on to find out.
How to Implement Hypercare in Customer Service
Summarize this article for me pleaseWhat is Hypercare?
Hypercare is a period of additional attention paid to customer relationships, typically after a major change. The fundamental way in which hypercare differs from regular customer care activities is as follows.
Change-driven: Businesses offer hypercare after any significant change or disruption in the business. This might be a change in business ownership, rebranding, product UX change, etc. Hypercare is often meant to cater to customers who are at a higher churn risk
Strategic: Leaders plan a comprehensive set of actions—that constitute hypercare—to enable a successful transition after disruptive change.
Proactive: Unlike traditional customer care, which is reactive in that it is in response to incoming requests/complaints, hypercare is proactive. During the hypercare period, support teams reach out to customers, preempt problems, offer solutions, address concerns, and gather feedback.
Summarize this article for me pleaseBenefits of Hypercare Support
Are you wondering why we need yet another customer service practice when we already have comprehensive systems in place? Here’s why.
Customer retention
Change is hard, and when it comes to software, customers find it especially inconvenient (unless you’re fixing something in response to a common complaint). For example, a small UX change can be disruptive when customers rely on muscle memory to navigate the app.
Now, imagine an enterprise that has thousands of users whose workflow is disrupted one morning. Given the scale of change, they’d not be wrong to want to take their business elsewhere.
Hypercare avoids this by helping users navigate change. It gives customer service teams the opportunity to show users that the change is for the better. A good customer retention software will enable hypercare strategies out of the box.
Product adoption
A major influencing factor of product adoption is onboarding. Whether you’re acquiring new customers or launching new features/modules, strategic onboarding shapes adoption.
Eliminating onboarding friction irons out the customer journey and accelerates their product-related goal achievement. Hypercare enables exactly that. With hypercare, you can show the user how to make the most of the product, leading to higher customer stickiness and adoption.
Trust and loyalty
A key benefit of hypercare is receiving and working on customer feedback. Being open to receiving criticism and acting on it enthusiastically builds trust among customers. They feel heard. They understand that their voices matter.
This builds loyalty and customer advocacy. Beyond just the next renewal and retention, hypercare builds a meaningful relationship with the customer, dramatically improving their lifetime value.
Insights
Hypercare offers a front-row seat to customer experience. It gives you deep insights into how customers feel, react, and reconcile with change that would be near impossible from the distance of traditional customer service.
For any business exploring how to improve customer centricity, insights from hypercare initiatives can be highly valuable.
So, how do you reap all these benefits in your business? Well, let’s see!
Summarize this article for me pleaseHow to Implement Hypercare Support for Your Customers
Good hypercare support needs a strategic plan, customer understanding, thoughtful communication, and a robust CRM like ClickUp. With that, here are the steps to implement your own hypercare strategy effectively.
1. Create your hypercare strategy
Before you set out to do anything, create a comprehensive strategy based on your customer service goals. Outline the change, its impact, and your responses. Make sure you include the following:
- What is the change/event? (E.g., Increase in pricing)
- How big is the impact? (E.g., It will impact all customers in the premium category and above)
- What are potential concerns? (E.g., Customer dissatisfaction, not seeing value for the price increase, cancellation of subscriptions)
- What are the possible remedial measures? (E.g., Offering a grace period to try upgraded features, re-onboarding to demonstrate value, email campaigns indicating ROI)
- What should the client retention strategies be? (E.g., Rolling back, giving more grace time, etc.)
Think of all possible scenarios and document ways in which you’ll approach them. ClickUp Docs is a great way to do this collaboratively. Bring together product, software development, marketing, sales, and customer success teams to collaboratively build your hypercare strategy and execute it effectively.
If you don’t yet have a collaborative CRM, set one up quickly and easily with ClickUp. Use ClickUp’s CRM template to track your leads, add relevant data, monitor touchpoints, and engage them all in one place.
2. Prep your customers
The only thing worse than change is unexpected change. Even if you’re giving your customer what you believe is the best possible solution to all their problems, if it is different from what they’re used to, they are probably going to be resistant to it at first.
Understand this and plan for managing client expectations. Before you make a public announcement, inform your existing customers. Explain to them why you made the change and how it is beneficial to them.
Ask them what they might need to make a smoother transition. Use your customer success software to identify especially vulnerable customers and prep them better.
3. Create supporting material
While you might want to talk to your customers over the phone or set up a video call, not all of them want to spend that time and be walked through the change. They are busy and want to navigate it themselves, at their own pace and time. Enable smooth transition for these customers with easy-to-use training content.
Ensure that your content is:
Digestible: No one wants to spend hours learning to navigate through a change they had no say in. So, keep the content short, digestible, and easy to act on.
Accessible: Try videos or audio material that is more engaging than blobs of text. If you’re introducing a new system or changing the UX, screengrab videos will make great training material.
Findable: Don’t hide your resources behind dozens of clicks. Put them upfront on your website, app, email communication etc.
Interactive: If possible, leverage AI tools for customer service. Set up chatbots to help users find answers without having to watch pre-designed videos. With ClickUp Brain, for instance, users can ask about anything that you have documented on ClickUp Docs.
4. Execute your communications strategy
Hypercare is not a one-and-done activity. It involves prolonged engagement with the customer until they feel comfortable with the change. During the hypercare phase, you need robust customer communication management.
- Send regular emails, app notifications, or text messages based on customer preference to get them accustomed to the change
- Personalize communication for each user
- If you’re receiving repeated complaints about a specific problem, create training material focusing on that and distribute it widely
When you use ClickUp for customer service, you can manage all this and more in one place. Receive, track, and resolve customer support tickets effortlessly with ClickUp’s Customer Service Management Template. Track top issues, monitor changes in CSAT/NPS scores, collaborate with cross-functional teams on key tickets and more.
Bonus: Try out more customer service templates for everyday needs
5. Collect feedback
Throughout the process, collect customer feedback. Conduct regular surveys to understand user sentiment. ClickUp Forms allows you to launch surveys within minutes, send them to large audiences, and integrate the responses directly into your ClickUp CRM for a unified view.
What’s more? You don’t need to do any of this from scratch. ClickUp’s Feedback Form Template gives you a predesigned framework for designing and launching surveys. Download, customize, and launch surveys instantly with ClickUp.
Once the hypercare phase is over, don’t forget to hand off these inputs to the customer service team for seamless long-term support.
6. Foresee challenges and plan for them
If you’re in the kind of situation that demands hypercare, it’s likely a big event for your customer service teams as well. So, it’s important to foresee challenges and have a plan to overcome them should they occur. Let’s see how.
Summarize this article for me pleaseChallenges in Providing Hypercare
Hypercare, by its very nature, is somewhat of a crisis prevention/management strategy. You’re likely to encounter a number of challenges along the way. Here are some common challenges and what you can do to overcome them.
Customer frustration
Customers are bound to be frustrated by the change they’re experiencing. However, they shouldn’t be frustrated by how you’re handling it.Â
To ensure this, undertake:
- Comprehensive preparation and answers to all potential questions
- Proactive communication
- Detailed training materials for users to help themselves
- High emotional intelligence and empathy
Lack of prioritization
During times of change, the loudest customer often gets the most attention. So, you might be paying attention to the tickets of customers who call multiple times and tag all their tickets as critical issues, irrespective of their account size. On the other hand, your biggest customer might be silently suffering through a real P1 issue while also looking for alternatives to your product.
Avoid this by implementing a clear prioritization strategy. Triage effectively and be strategic in resolving customer complaints.
Inward focus
Often, businesses involve technologists or engineers to write training materials for new products/upgrades/changes. Naturally, they approach it from their own point of view, creating content that speaks to them in their language, with an inward focus
Now, when customers read it, they are confused and call customer service or raise tickets for help. This creates an unnecessary additional burden on customer support teams.
While creating training content, focus on the customer. Go through their journey, identify problems they might face, and address them in the simplest way possible.
Burnout
Hypercare demands extra from customer service teams. It involves not only offering additional support but also having higher emotional bandwidth to solve problems and collect negative feedback. This can burn out already overworked teams.
Automate what you can. Instead of relying on customer success teams to manually inform their accounts, set up automated email workflows.
Your first port of call can be a conversational AI chatbot that provides answers from your knowledge base, reducing the burden on your support team members. You can also create comprehensive FAQs that support self-service.
The world is changing rapidly, whether we like it or not. Hypercare is a thoughtful, empathetic, and strategic way to help customers navigate the change that you’ve created in their lives. It is as much a tool as a responsibility.
Summarize this article for me pleaseProvide Effective Hypercare With ClickUp
Customers today have myriad choices for every product—from a can of soda to time management software. In this environment, acquiring, delighting, and retaining a customer is hard enough. But customer service challenges like these can become monstrous hurdles during periods of change.
For instance, a change like the location of your servers might not have any operational impact but can be a compliance nightmare for several accounts. Or, if you’re rebranding your mobile app from a team color palette to a red one, you might find customers clicking on the wrong buttons out of habit.
Every change needs you to handhold customers to new shores. With the right tools, you can achieve that without customer churn, loss of revenue, or reputation.
ClickUp’s virtual workspace is designed to give you everything your hypercare team needs. Whether it’s a CRM to manage relationships, forms to conduct surveys, documentation, or automation, ClickUp has all that and more.
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