When your company decides to roll out a new product, extra customer support can help maintain customer satisfaction and provide a smooth transition for your clients. This short-term process, often used for software and other types of technical support, is referred to as hypercare.
Help your company minimize disruptions that naturally occur when your clients navigate change. Learn more about what hypercare is, who uses it, and when and why you should roll it out.
What is hypercare?
Hypercare is a period of amplified customer support that takes place immediately following a product launch or other major change in operations. It’s a type of planned, proactive communication designed to provide a seamless transition and help both your company and clients avoid potential disruptions. Customers should feel prepared and valued throughout the transition process, whether they’re getting comfortable with a feature change in your software or navigating a website redesign.
Done well, hypercare has multiple benefits:
-
Increases adoption. The easier it is to learn the new features, the more likely your clients will be to use them following the hypercare period.
-
Reduces churn. Minimizing customer dissatisfaction can reduce the rate at which they lose interest in your brand and turn to a competitor instead.
-
Builds loyalty. Taking care of your customers during critical phases of your company’s growth can shape and strengthen your company’s reputation.
Hypercare differs from typical customer service, which is primarily reactive to customer questions and concerns. Traditional customer service helps address critical issues if a customer comes to you with questions or for help. Hypercare is proactive, so it anticipates the need to address the concerns about the upcoming changes before customers get confused or frustrated, or their productivity is disrupted.
Who uses hypercare?
Businesses launching new products, software updates, or major system changes typically implement hypercare. This type of change management is an important strategy for rapid issue resolution, which can be critical to the success of your company’s services and products.
For instance, consider an ecommerce shop that decides to change its online payment system. Multiple teams may need to help with the transition, including web development, sales, and customer care teams. These employees will all need to get comfortable with the new software features before any update can go live.
Real-world example of hypercare
Gyve Safavi and Mark Rushmore took a big swing when they created SURI, an electric toothbrush company focused on plant-based, recyclable brush heads. It was a new product that was bound to invite questions and experience some hiccups along the way to building a customer base.
Using the extensive market research and survey data they collected prior to launch, they set up messaging automations in the Gorgias customer service system before they started taking preorders. This step proved crucial. SURI had 5,000 preorders coming in on Shopify and had to tell thousands of customers they were going to get their orders weeks later than anticipated.
Thankfully, SURI had systems and messaging in place. The brand was able to proactively communicate with affected customers and maintain goodwill, despite the setback.
“We didn’t have a single refund as a result of that,” Mark says on an episode of Shopify Masters. “I think a combination of thinking about your infrastructure to help you address customers [and] being proactive in your communication [was key].”
How to deliver high-quality hypercare
- Make a customer success plan
- Train your customer care team
- Update your tools and resources
- Increase the number of help channels available to your customers
- Seek customer input
- Monitor your hypercare outcomes
Adapting to new technologies can be hard—even ones designed to make your products and services more effective. A successful hypercare strategy starts well ahead of any finalized product change. By laying the groundwork before your rollout, you can make sure your team has the resources they need to maintain customer satisfaction. Here’s how to do it:
1. Make a customer success plan
A great framework for mapping out a hypercare plan is a customer success plan. It should outline your goals and any touchpoints along the customer journey that will require extra support. By considering the new changes from your customers’ point of view, your team can anticipate what resources customers will need. You can also prepare for any potential concerns they might have during a critical transition for your company.
2. Train your customer care team
These employees will be bearing the brunt of the transition, which is inherently stressful. However, you can support team members by making sure they’re well-trained to handle the extra level of customer support that hypercare demands. That could involve drafting scripts, practicing with customer role play, and taking detailed walk-throughs of the new products or services you plan to roll out.
As part of your hypercare planning, make sure that roles and goals are clearly defined and communicated within your team. Give team members, such as a hypercare manager overseeing project management and communications specialists, a chance to weigh in on the hypercare plan before it’s implemented.
3. Update your tools and resources
Self-service resources like FAQ pages, webinars, chatbots, and how-to blogs or videos are crucial tools during hypercare. Review and update them before a hypercare phase begins to reflect any changes a customer might encounter. Make sure this knowledge base is comprehensive, so your customers receive accurate and helpful information.
Plan to reserve dedicated time for team check-ins and feedback, so you can tweak the plan if something isn’t working. A help desk tool like Zendesk or Gorgias centralizes customer interactions, routes support queries to the right place, and automates initial responses to help ease the burden on your support team.
4. Increase the number of help channels available to your customers
Customers can interact with your business in many different ways. Depending on your available resources, this might mean offering hypercare customer support across more channels than you typically do.
Additional channels could include a 24/7 virtual chat agent on your website, text messages, and email. You might also offer dedicated social media support or add extended hours and extra communications specialists to your phone lines.
5. Seek customer input
You’ve anticipated your customers’ needs and potential pain points during a critical transition to plan your hypercare phases. Seeking their input and feedback during and after the hypercare period directly helps you understand customer challenges and expectations. Customer satisfaction surveys, feedback forms, and direct outreach gives the information needed to focus your hypercare on real-world needs. These efforts also help customers feel like valued participants in the process.
6. Monitor your hypercare outcomes
To learn how effectively you helped your customers during your hypercare period, consider tracking customer service metrics. This includes analyzing data such as response times, ticket volume, resolution rates, and user engagement rates to make sure your team addressed the right challenges and helped your customers adapt.
Monitoring customer service metrics also helps you spot unforeseen patterns in what’s working and what’s not. For example, you received a few reported issues on a software feature that you expected would be problematic but lower engagement with a new FAQ webpage than you’d hoped for. You can re-allocate hypercare resources to the places where they’re most needed.
Hypercare FAQ
What does hypercare support mean?
Hypercare support is a period of intensive customer service designed to help customers navigate a product launch, software update, or other major technical changes to a company’s operations. It’s focused on resolving problems before customers become frustrated, with the goal being to increase user satisfaction.
What is the hypercare process?
Each company will approach hypercare differently based on its products and customer needs. Implementing hypercare will likely include setting goals for positive outcomes, adequately training your customer support team, and communicating proactively to gather feedback. Consider tracking customer service metrics to determine whether you are on track to meet your goals.
What are common hypercare challenges?
People are reluctant to change, which can sometimes make helping them adapt to new technologies tricky. And because of hypercare’s intensive nature, it can take a toll on even well-trained teams, leading to job dissatisfaction and burnout. Those feelings can also arise when there’s poor planning for the rollout, miscommunication between teams, and knowledge gaps in the training materials.
