Introduction

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Discord's founders simply wanted to create a way to talk to their gamer friends, but over the past few years, Discord has become a vital community platform for many web3 organizations looking to engage, reward and support their community. Discord has over 350 million registered users and over 150 million monthly active users, and a growing number are discovering Discord via crypto and web3 projects.

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The highly customizable nature of Discord has many benefits, but it often results in new users getting overwhelmed. The first time you jumped into a Discord server, did you have a great experience? 

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From a community management perspective, Discord can be a powerful tool and should be a key pillar of your strategy, but how can you provide effective customer support on Discord?

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This article will provide our top tips for delivering Discord customer support. LFG.

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Benefits of Omni-channel support

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Before we jump into Discord specifics, it's essential to understand why you should be providing Discord support. You might already have a web chat or email support and not see the need for providing support on Discord.

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Providing 'omni-channel' support is becoming increasingly commonplace and increasingly expected from users. It’s been shown that organisations retain on average 89% of their customers when using omnichannel engagement strategies vs just 33% for those with weak omnichannel strategies. It is much more convenient for users and provides a more customer-centric experience, reducing friction and improving the overall support experience for your community. It also helps improve the quality of support, as users can more easily provide context to their issues. 

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However, omni-channel support can be challenging. If you manage numerous different channels, such as web, Twitter, Telegram and Discord from within the platforms directly it’s easy to get lost and you won’t be able to see the full picture.
From an organizational perspective, using a system provides a more consistent and data-driven support experience, identifying issues and understanding how your support team performs across multiple touchpoints.

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Good support matters: research has shown that providing good quality support results in a more loyal community that is more likely to refer you to others and spend more.

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Current problems with providing Discord support

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There are a handful of options for providing Discord support, ranging from web2 companies like Zendesk or a Discord-only solution like a ticketing bot.

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Web2 support solutions are not fit for purpose and don't properly integrate with Discord or other web3 social platforms. Moreover, they are expensive. Discord-only solutions result in 'siloed' support channels meaning that community moderators and support agents need to work across multiple platforms. This siloed approach is also a nightmare for a community manager as it's impossible to gather data across all channels in one place, and you cannot provide a consistent user experience. 

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The solution? Mava. Mava is a next-generation customer support platform for web3 organizations. It enables you to seamlessly support your community across multiple channels from one powerful, secure dashboard. Moreover, Mava will provide an instant overview of a user's on-chain activity to help streamline support queries. 

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Discord customer support best practices

So now you know the importance of providing Discord support, let's look at some of our top tips for helping you get the most out of Discord as a customer support platform.

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Top tips:

1. Separate and clearly mark your support channel
2. Stop DM'ing; use a ticketing system
3. Clearly visible FAQ section & canned responses 
4. Organize and automate
5. Leverage data to improve your support

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1) Separate and clearly mark your support channel

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Not having a separate and clearly marked 'contact us' or 'support' channel will result in your users posting, sometimes private, support questions across your Discord server. 

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Have a specific channel that's clearly marked and easy to find. Write a message in this channel to clearly explain to users what type of support questions they can ask.

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If you want to provide public & private support, it's a good idea to have two separate channels, one for community support and another for private/sensitive issues that you can manage with a ticket system.

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2) Stop DM'ing; use a ticketing system

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Although some support questions can be easily answered by your moderators or the community in a public channel, many support queries should be addressed privately. These could range from issues requiring the users to provide a transaction ID or wallet address or where they need to raise a bug report or share their screen with support. 

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Asking users to DM (direct message) a moderator is inefficient and also creates a common attack vector for scammers who impersonate moderators and lure your community into clicking links or revealing personal information. 

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Using a ticketing system like the one Mava offers will enable users to open a private, secure thread with the support team and reduce the risk of a community member being scammed within a DM. Private threads mean only the users and the admin/moderators can see the communication. 

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Other ticketing tools currently create a new channel instead of the private thread system that Mava uses. There are two main issues with using channels instead of private threads:

• Discord limits the number of allowed channels, so having >500 unresolved tickets will break your Discord server and not allow users to open a new ticket once that limit is reached.
• Once a ticket is closed, users won't be able to reopen a ticket if their issue hasn't been fully resolved, resulting in duplicate tickets and user frustration. Moreover, private threads are searchable by the user later, making it much easier to find conversations.

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3) Clearly visible FAQ section & canned responses 

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Many users will still ask for a simple answer that could be found within an FAQ. Having a clearly visible FAQ section will help cut down on common questions, don't be afraid of having the FAQ section in multiple places within your Discord. We recommend including it in your 'support' channel and an 'official links' channel as a minimum.

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Even with a clearly visible FAQ page, users will likely still ask common questions they could resolve themselves. Sound familiar..?

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"Wen WL ser?"

"GM, what's this project about?"

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Answering this type of question wastes your team's time and resources. Using the Mava dashboard, your team can link your FAQs and create custom 'canned' responses to common questions. This saves a tonne of time and ensures that answers are well-written and consistent. Soon, we will also automatically be able to help you identify the most common questions your community is asking and automatically respond to them. 

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4) Organize and automate

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Automatically assigning a 'category' (e.g., Bug report, sales, collab request, or WL query) to tickets as they are generated, helps different teams within your organization manage inbound requests. This is powerful to help track and identify common issues and enables the right person to filter tickets relevant to their department. It can improve ticket response times and save lots of duplicated work or manual categorization.

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Beyond just organizing tickets, setting automations can also save your team lots of time. With Mava, you can automatically send users additional information (link to a partnership request form), request information from them (e.g., transaction ID), or provide a canned response (e.g., instructions on how to join the WL). Implementing these automations will significantly reduce the number of tickets that require a response.

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5) Leverage data to improve your support

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Last but not least, any serious community manager or web3 organization should be looking to make support more efficient to provide a better user experience. Data is the key to this.

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Using the Mava analytics dashboard, you are able to gain valuable insights into your customer support operations from the median time to the first response, understand busy periods during the week, collate customer feedback and satisfaction scores, plus loads more.

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Conclusion

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Omni-channel customer support has many advantages for your community members and your organization. As more web2 users enter web3, the bar for customer support will increase, and we are already seeing communities looking at support as a critical competitive advantage over other communities and projects. 

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The importance of Discord to web3 communities can't be ignored and providing a consistent experience wherever your user is is key to a positive customer support outcome. Setting up a good quality ticket tool, automating workflows, and helping your team improve with canned responses and data insights will enable you to level up your customer support.

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Learn more about how Mava can help you level up your web3 customer support on our website and book a demo. 

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