How Can Pinterest Slash Your Support Cost

Pinterest has come of age. Like other social media websites, this virtual pin board can be used in a variety of ways, many of which are already being explored by businesses. Businesses now use the website for various purposes, starting from product announcement, to branding, to advertising, to creating customer engagement, etc. But did you know that you can use Pinterest for customer support as well? The platform provides you an opportunity to reduce the cost your customer support team incurs. Want to know how? Read the article to the end and you will have some ideas to work with.

Create a Colorful DIY Guide

Your customer support department is often plagued with simple problems which users can easily fix, but they don’t, because either they are completely new to it (remember the tech support story where a customer calls for replacement of her broken CD Drive (aka cup holder) because she thought the load drawer of her CD ROM drive was a cup holder), or, because calling or emailing seems more convenient to them than trying a solution they have read in a black-and-white manual, which they have dumped.

To help this bunch of customers, you need to create a visual DIY (Do It Yourself) guide carefully detailing every single step a customer needs to take to make the product work. Make sure the guide is colorful, and you have highlighted the important section with bright colors to save your users trouble of finding them. If you deal with more than one product, you should consider creating separate boards for the different categories of your colorful DIY guides.

Polaroid camera has used their Pinterest page to share a similar update, a user manual of Polaroid 600 (see the image below), but the brand should have made it a little colorful, if adding some text was not part of the plan.

Create a Visual FAQ Series

There are some questions that a business faces on quite a regular basis, which is why they are called FAQs (Frequently Asked Question), and often a business will have them listed along with the answers to each one of them on their website under FAQ. Instead of going through the list and looking up their query, or using search command to find what he or she is searching for, people call support for the answer. This eats up a good many organizational hours.

You can reduce, if not save, the cost incurred on handling such queries by creating visual pins using FAQs and their answers. Do not make a long list of it, and address one FAQ in one pin. You should make a series of such pins until all the questions are answered. Make a separate board for FAQs and share each pin on that.

Dell has created something of this sort on its Pinterest page, but for an outsider, it is hard to know if these are the most frequent problems that the tech support team hears from its customers (see the image below).

Pins to Qualify Prospects

Many a time, your support department ends up talking to unqualified suspects who call to ask obvious things. It may not happen often, but people might go to your social media profiles to know what you offer before calling your support department. You can save your support cost by creating pins with exact details of the products pinned on separate boards, depending upon what you need. For example, if you are a wholesaler, you can write something in the line of “order size of less than 25 will not be entertained”. This will stop users who want to buy one piece from calling you. You can also provide contact details of your retailers to avoid calls about where the caller can buy your products.

Pins to motivate them to mail for support

Handling emails cost a business less than handling phone calls. In case your customers didn’t find the solutions to their problems, they are going to contact you and will most likely use their phones for that. You can create pins about how email support is at par with phone support, and how sending support mails will solve their problem more effectively than calling. Such pins will motivate your customers to send mails and call only when it is absolutely necessary. Through mail you can also direct your customers to pin boards where they can find further solutions in the future.

A parting advice

Just pinning the pins created to help the company is not going to do much good. You need to share the pins after every few weeks, at least once every 15 days to remind people of their existence. And as Pinterest is still in its nascent stage, not many people frequent it, but in time they will. Until they do so, you should create a Pinterest tab on your business’ Facebook page, and also share all your pins on Facebook and Twitter following all the principles you apply on these platforms. You can also include the pins on your blog. This will ensure that your effort bears fruit and more people go through the pins you have created before calling you. A drop in calls and/or email rate to ask simple questions will be the judge of your campaign success.