What is Customer Support?
Customer Support is a service that businesses provide to help their customers when they have queries, complaints, or need to understand and use products or services correctly.
Customer support can take many forms, such as solving problems, answering questions, offering guidance, providing technical assistance, facilitating product returns and exchanges, handling complaints and feedback, and conducting follow-up inquiries to ensure customer satisfaction.
Video – What is Customer support?
The goal is to ensure that customers and prospects have a positive experience with the company and its offerings. A prospect is a consumer who the company believes has a good chance of becoming a paying customer.
In today’s digital age, customers have higher expectations than they did fifty or a hundred years ago. Any online business aiming to earn consumer trust and credibility today must provide customer support.
Mindmesh.com has the following definition of the term:
“Customer support refers to the assistance and guidance provided to customers before, during, and after the purchase of a product or service. Its purpose is to address any issues or concerns the customer may have and ensure their satisfaction with the company’s offerings.”
Customer support helps build trust and loyalty
In today’s fiercely competitive marketplace, customer support is essential for any business. Apart from helping resolve issues, it also builds trust and loyalty among customers.
When consumers feel supported and valued, they are much more likely to become repeat customers (regular customers). They are also more inclined to recommend the company and its products or services to others.
How to provide customer support
Customer support can be provided through various channels. The most common are:
- Email:
Allows customers to send detailed messages and documents at their convenience. - Live chat:
Offers real-time assistance, typically found on service websites. - Social media platforms:
Enables support through channels like Twitter or Facebook where customers spend their time. - Self-service knowledge bases:
Provides articles and FAQs for customers to solve issues on their own. - Video conferencing:
Facilitates face-to-face meetings remotely, useful for complex issues. - Support forums:
Community-driven support where users can post questions and receive answers from peers or support staff.
Each of these channels has its advantages and drawbacks. Some people prefer the immediacy of a live chat or phone call, while others might opt for the convenience of social media or email interactions.
If you are not fluent in the language used by customer support agents for telephone or live chat services, you may find email communication to be a preferable option. It offers the advantage of allowing you more time to understand and craft your responses, without the immediate pressure of a real-time conversation.
Availability
Ideally, a company should have round-the-clock or 24/7 customer support to accommodate people in different time zones. Many businesses offer this type of support, especially those that operate online.
Having help available for customers and prospects whenever it is needed can help improve a company’s brand image.
Quality
Quality customer support requires knowledgeable and friendly staff who are skilled and thoroughly trained to provide high-quality assistance.
Feedback
Feedback helps businesses understand what they are doing well and where they can improve. Many major companies actively seek customer feedback through direct communication or surveys. The information they gather helps them improve their products or services, and their support staff.
Bots and AI in Customer Support
Chatbots and AI (artificial intelligence) are transforming customer support by providing instant, automated assistance to inquiries. Their ability to operate 24/7 and manage multiple interactions simultaneously makes them increasingly popular.
As AI technology improves, these tools are expected to become even more widespread, significantly enhancing efficiency in the customer support sector.
The word Bot stands for Internet Robot or Web Robot.
Customer support vs. customer service
These two terms have similar, but not identical, meanings. Customer service is a broad term and includes all customer interactions from providing pre-purchase information and helping people make purchasing decisions to after-sales service, handling returns, and more.
Customer support is more focused on helping people when they have a technical problem, need help in using the product, or need to solve a problem.
You could say that customer support is a subset of customer service.
Conclusion
For the customer experience, customer support is vital. It aims to help customers get the most out of a product or service, resolve any issues they face, and make sure that they feel valued and supported. Customer support can boost customer satisfaction and loyalty.