The popularity of social media & messaging platforms has changed drastically over time… remember Myspace? As the popularity of some platforms grow and others decline, it’s important for companies to stay engaged with their customer base wherever those users are. One platform that has gained significant traction for customer support is Discord, with over 150 million monthly active users. 

Originally known for its use in the gaming community, Discord's versatility and real-time communication features have made it an ideal platform for providing customer support. 

In this article, we will explore the various strategies and techniques to effectively provide customer support on Discord.

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Advantages of Providing Customer Support on Discord

First and foremost, Discord is a great place to engage and build communities. Assuming you already have an existing Discord community,  adding a support function to Discord allows your users to seek support where they already are (omni-channel support). This reduces the effort required for your customers to engage with your team, which has been shown to increase customer satisfaction rates.

Moreover, using Discord as a support channel means you can involve your community members in answering questions too. This allows you to save costs, free up time from your internal team members, and increase engagement. Public support works particularly well when it comes to questions where users are seeking advice, such as troubleshooting code, improving an AI prompt or improving their marketing strategy.

Community is becoming increasingly important for many companies and Discord is well placed to capitalize on this community-first trend. We believe this will make Discord an increasingly important communication channel for customer support going forward. 

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Discord also offers a number of other benefits, such as real-time communication and enabling instant responses to customer inquiries. 

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Challenges of using Discord for Customer Support

Despite its growing popularity, there are a number of challenges community and customer support leaders face when trying to provide support via Discord.

Complex to use

‍Many users complain about Discord being too difficult to understand and use. It certainly can be overwhelming for new joiners who are not familiar with the platform, but clearly laid out channels and categories can really help here, alongside Discord’s new onboarding process. For customer support it’s critical you make a dedicated area for users to reach out, more on this in the next section.

Security concerns

‍Certain Discord servers, just like many other social media platforms, have malicious actors looking to spam or scam unsuspecting community members. Without the right tools in place it can be all too easy for bad actors to trick new users by impersonating a real member of support staff. Using tools like Mava, users are actively discouraged from doing support via direct messages (DMs), and instead use  a structured and secure ticket system using private threads. 

Poor Discord search

‍For anyone familiar with Discord, it’s no secret that their search feature isn’t great. This means users often struggle to find the information they are looking for, resulting in repetitive questions and missed responses. Using AI tools in public or private tickets, such as Mava’s Discord AI bot, can help overcome these issues.  Mava learns from your team’s replies and all other existing customer support content you’ve uploaded, meaning your community and support team will never have to answer the same question twice.

Users don’t want to sign up

One of the other key issues related to Discord support,  is that not all users will want to sign up and join a Discord community. This problem isn’t unique to Discord, and is an issue for many other community platforms too. This means it’s important for teams to ensure their users can reach out via more than one channel. This is called omni-channel support, but it requires specialist customer support software. Tools such as Mava, a community-first customer support solution, has a native Discord integration allowing your team to manage omni-channel support across multiple platforms from one shared team inbox overcoming traditional issues of Discord customer support. 

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Tips for getting started with customer support on Discord

Creating a Dedicated Support Category

One of the fundamental steps in providing customer support on Discord is creating a dedicated support category within your server. This ensures that all support-related discussions are organized in one place, making it easy for users to seek support. This category can include channels for different types of support, such as ‘AI Support’ or ‘Open Support Ticket’. Make sure to use clear and concise names for these channels to avoid confusion. It can also be a good idea to add a read-only channel with links to any external support content you might have such as an FAQ document.

Add a Discord Ticket solution

Managing and organizing support requests can become overwhelming, especially if your Discord server has a large number of members. Introducing a ticket bot like Mava, can streamline this process significantly. Ticket bots allow users to create support tickets by simply clicking a button. From there users can either chat with an AI bot or a human. You can also configure tools like Mava to automatically categorize, triage and assign tickets to different members of the team. This prevents the support channels from becoming cluttered and enhances the overall user experience. Moreover, because you can add other integrations to Mava such as Telegram and Web Chat, your team will only need to monitor and respond from one shared customer support inbox. 

Dedicated AI Support Channel with AI bot

Implementing AI into your customer support strategy can provide users with instant assistance, even outside of regular business hours. Create a dedicated AI support channel where users can interact with an AI bot like Mava, designed to answer common questions and provide basic troubleshooting steps. This not only caters to users who prefer self-service but also frees up your support team to focus on more complex inquiries. However, it's essential to strike a balance between AI-driven interactions and human support and to make sure your users know they are engaging with an AI chatbot. Using AI within your server can go a significant way to help users who can’t or won’t search within Discord to find answers to previous questions.

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How to evaluate and improve your community’s support experience

Track Key Customer Support Metrics

Measuring the effectiveness of your customer support efforts is crucial for continuous improvement. Several key metrics can help you gauge the quality of your support and identify areas for enhancement:

• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Implement CSAT surveys after each support interaction to gather feedback from users. This helps you understand how satisfied customers are with the support they received and highlights areas that need improvement. Within Mava you’ll also be able to track customer satisfaction scores of your AI bot.
• Response & Resolution Times: Keep track of the time it takes for your team to respond to support requests. Fast response times contribute to a positive user experience and demonstrate your commitment to resolving issues promptly. Resolution times are also useful to track the effectiveness of your team and the complexity of issues being resolved. 
• Support Volumes: Monitor the volume of support requests over time. Identifying spikes in support volume can help you anticipate busy periods and allocate resources accordingly.
• AI Response quality: Using Mava you can track not only the number of AI responses but also the quality of those responses within the analytics panel allowing you to update and improve your knowledge base and track trends over time.

Regularly analyzing these metrics allows you to adapt your customer support strategy based on real-time feedback and data-driven insights.

Conclusion

Discord’s strong growth in popularity means it’s a channel that shouldn’t be ignored for community focused companies. The platform presents an excellent place for not only building a community but also for delivering customer support both in private tickets and in public channels.

Providing support on Discord isn’t without its challenges, but with the right server setup and using a purpose made customer support tool like Mava, it's simple to scale omni-channel support for any community.

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