;)
Achieving brand differentiation solely based on your products and services is becoming more challenging. With the market growing more competitive, customer expectations are bound to evolve. In a scenario like this, delivering superior customer experiences becomes a great tactic to win customer trust and gain a competitive edge in the market.
This is why you should consider stepping up your customer support. After all, great support is always the building block of a memorable customer experience. Plus, 89% of consumers are more likely to make a repeat purchase after a positive customer service experience.
So, in today’s digital-first world, you need to understand why customers want responsive and relevant support. They want businesses to be where they are—whether over the phone, email, social media, or messaging. If you’re where your customers are and solve their problems quickly, it means you have provided them with amazing support.
In this blog, we will explore customer support in detail and understand its definition and importance for your business. We will also analyze the customer support process, key metrics, types, channels, and examples together with discussing key strategies.
Customer support is the help provided to customers when they have trouble with a product or service. It’s the assistance that is delivered before, during, and after a purchase, aimed at solving the problems of customers.
Customer support may look different for each company or industry but the ultimate purpose is always the same: to be there when customers need help. From answering queries to ensuring satisfaction, the scope of customer support is large and includes everything that improves customers’ experience with the brand.
Most organizations have a team of professionals to perform support roles and enhance the user’s experience with the brand. Traditionally, it’s been human personnel – working as a team – responsible for building trust through help and turning customers into loyalists.
However, over time, AI technology has made its presence in the customer support sphere, minimizing reliance on human capital and bringing smart tools into focus. Today, AI enables automated support through chatbots and virtual agents.
On top of that, AI-powered tools are advanced enough to handle repetitive queries and provide instant responses. They can analyze customer behavior and ensure personalized recommendations.
The emergence of AI technology has helped businesses improve response times with support and provide 24/7 support. With digital assistants performing the bulk of support tasks, human agents can prioritize more complex issues, which ultimately contributes to enhanced experiences.
Online customer support can come in different flavors. Since there are a variety of channels, and customers may choose whichever they like, support too can look different from case to case. In general, businesses can leverage various customer support tools in combination and offer amazing support.
Some popular types of customer care support include –
When you want to handle several customers at a time and provide real-time support to them all, live chat remains the best option. It’s a great type of customer support for businesses that want to combine the best of email and phone. Using live chat, you can offer protective support and stay available round the clock. Maybe that’s why customers who use live chat are 63% more likely to return to a website than those who don’t.
AI-powered bots are the best tool to automate support, stay available 24×7, and give amazing experiences to customers. Chatbots also give options to transfer chats to human agents, collect customer data, and respond based on sentiment analysis. Plus, you can use bots to put support on auto-pilot and free your agents to a great extent, saving 30% on customer support tasks.
People still use phones to reach out to brands. And phone-based customer support is still favored the most for resolving complex customer issues. Needless to say, this type of customer support ensures more natural human-to-human interactions and therefore delivers an improved customer experience.
Many customers still find email a trustworthy and professional channel. 99% of consumers check their email every day. Offering customer support via mail is something that is very much in demand across industries. Above all, email support does not cost much and also allows some form of automation. That’s why a study says email is still the most commonly used digital customer service channel.
Not all customers like to talk to agents. And not all would have faith in your customer support solution. Some even prefer self-service before engaging with agents. For that reason, many companies now make it a point to add a knowledge base on the website that includes FAQs, ebooks, how-to posts & videos, demos, etc.
67% of customers find contacting customer support on social media convenient. This shows why customers love social media and expect businesses to solve problems themselves. Whether Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or any other channel, you are always determining which channel a customer might use to reach out to you. Plus, social media customer support is quick, and real-time, and ensures personalized experiences.
Customer support process is the strategic and structured approach to solving customer problems related to products or services. It aims to meet customer needs efficiently and ensure enhanced experiences for customers. This process is the total of all the activities involved in offering service to customers. It has different phases, starting from the moment customers contact an agent through the information gathering and finally delivering help.
The customer support process of a business includes various steps and phases –
This is the first step of the customer support process. It denotes how every support starts with a customer contacting the business for a solution. Customers may use one of various available channels to contact a business including phone, email, social media, live chat, or even in person. This step is vital as it lays the foundation for the entire interaction. For a business, the main goal in this step is to create an accessible way for customers to engage with the brand and start communication.
Every customer that contacts a business expects the support team to listen to their problems and understand the issues. Support teams can better understand the customer’s needs and concerns only when they listen carefully. What’s more, when customers are listened to attentively, they feel heard and valued, which enhances their experience with support interactions.
Support teams will move forward to devising an appropriate solution strategy for customers after understanding the concerns fully. They will identify the best solutions and recourse to meet customer’s specific needs. The purpose of this step is to offer a solution that not only solves customer issues but also elevates their expectations. Agents can leverage a knowledge base, assess company policies, or collaborate with other departments to ensure great support for customers.
The agent will always rely on a formulated solution strategy to solve the customer’s problems in a structured manner. Depending on the nature of the issue, the agent may troubleshoot or guide the customer through a solution, or employ other tactics to resolve the issue. The agent will also keep the customer in the loop and inform them about the reach step.
Support teams have a big responsibility to conclude customer interactions on a positive note. Even customers feel great when the conversations end with a friendly tone. This step is always an opportunity for the support team to thank the customer for their patience, acknowledge their trust, and reinforce loyalty. Agents may even invite feedback to gauge customer satisfaction levels with the support.
Customer support is always a key factor in business growth. It has the potential to set the tone for satisfied customers through value-added conversations and assistance. Through support, a business can drive engagement and earn loyalty. Plus, support solves problems and creates happy customers and we know how 72% of customers share their good experiences with others.
Let’s understand the importance of customer support for business growth –
Support interactions help businesses identify pain points and challenges that customers face. They are a valuable tool to get customer insights and feedback on product or service improvement. Support teams can engage with customers and gather data on consumer behavior, needs, and preferences.
Support has a huge role to play in the way customers perceive a brand. When the support is prompt and solves the problem immediately, it can be a great tool to boost customer satisfaction. On the other hand, poor support may leave customers frustrated and even force them to switch to competitors.
Every business strives to engage customers for a long-term association. Support is thus always a huge opportunity to provide resources or solutions to ensure the success of your customer engagement strategies and build trust. When the engagement is meaningful, it always drives conversions and boosts profits for the business.
Customers trust brands more when the support exceeds their expectations. Therefore, having a trained team with in-depth product knowledge can deliver timely solutions and help retain customers. In contrast, the churn rate is higher when a business fails to meet customer expectations.
The real meaning of support is to assist customers and fish them out of the problem. Any business that works on this principle goes on to win loyalty and turn customers into brand evangelists. Customers show loyalty only when a brand cares for them and values them. Support is a great opportunity to show customers how much you care for them.
Customer support serves as a great catalyst for product and service improvement. It enables deep insights and data on what customers like and what not. A business can leverage support interactions and utilize the feedback of customers to make data-driven improvements. For that reason, offering great support always leads to an increased rate of product or service innovation and improvement.
Delivering great support does not happen by chance. It involves systematic planning and action on your part. Without having the mindset to serve customers, there can never be great support. More importantly, to ace the support game, you must have the right match of personnel and approach.
Here are some effective strategies to improve customer support –
Do you know what makes a support team effective in most situations? Yes, it’s the product knowledge and the tools it has for the task.
While regular training can sharpen their product knowledge, your team may still need the right tools to do the job efficiently most of the time.
And if your team is not adequately equipped, it will fail to provide great support for sure.
Make sure you –
– Provide them with dedicated customer service software
– Give them all the tools and technologies designed specifically for support tasks
– Make sure they have everything to respond to customers and track engagement metrics
It’s always important to give your support team the right tools and software so that they can do justice to the job.
Some form of automation has become a support necessity in today’s time and no business can ignore this fact. You need it to do all the routine and repetitive tasks that often keep support agents busy.
Plus, automated support also helps deliver quick, error-free responses to everyday questions. For that reason, the trend of offering conversational support is gaining more traction across industries.
All however is not that rosy with the use of automation as chatbots are not 100% accurate in most cases. They are not able to comprehend complex questions most of the time which causes frustration for customers.
Before going for full automation to support, you need to understand –
— There may be problems that require critical thinking only humans are capable of
— There may be lots of customers who don’t like generic responses to complex questions
It shows how having the right mix of human touch and automation could add value to your customer effort. This type of arrangement can help you manage a perfect balance between automated responses and human touch.
The purpose of the support is to make it easy for customers to find solutions to their problems. And not all customers like the spoon-feeding types of support, particularly when the issues are not that complex.
It’s therefore important to bolster your support with self-service options and let customers help themselves sometimes. And when you ease online customer service, customers feel confident in their ability to solve problems on their own.
To employ the self-service option, it’s important –
— You have a knowledge base with the right resources, guides, and how-to materials for customers
— Logically structure your knowledge base so that customers find the resources quickly
It takes a good team to offer great support. And if you don’t have a team with the right mindset and skills, all your support efforts might not bear the results you anticipate.
If your support team is up for the job, it can handle any type of support challenge head-on and ensure value in every situation. In a way, such a team will help deliver the kind of support customers often expect.
Building a support-ready team means –
— Hiring skilled professionals who are well-versed in the art of customer communication and have customer service etiquette
— Training your support team to develop deep product knowledge and a mindset of resolving issues of any complexity
If you manage to build a competent team, you will find it easy to deliver amazing support most of the time.
72% of customers say that having to explain their problems to multiple people is poor customer service.
Some of the best support happens when agents don’t have to make customers wait, or when no escalation is involved. When support people can make decisions on their own, it reduces friction and improves value for everyone involved.
On the other hand, even the best of agents would feel helpless when there is too much burden of escalation. If there are too many rules to follow, how can agents exercise their own wisdom and judgment?
To have a culture of escalation-less support indicates –
— You empower support people to solve customer problems on their own without having to check with the management
— You have policies and guidelines laid out for the team to access and follow in case of any complexity
— You provide the support team the freedom and authority to take tough calls no matter what the outcome
The purpose of the support is to be available when customers need you the most. You also need to be available on all possible channels that customers might use to reach your business.
Unless you’re available, how can you fix the issue and ensure a great experience with your product or service?
Unless you offer 24×7 customer service, how can you feel confident in being there all the time?
When you’re always available for customers, it shows –
— You follow an omnichannel approach as you know customers often choose the channel of choice
— You include chatbots and live chat in your support effort as you know how the 24×7 availability is necessary for today’s time
— You provide contact details and make every effort to customers easily find you
— Your team understands the value of follow-up in customer service and practices it more often than not
It shows how you need to be available on various customer support channels together to serve your target audience in the best possible manner.
Adopting a data-driven approach to customer support can prove very helpful in terms of improving value for end-users. If you regularly track and measure engagement metrics and support performance, you will get tons of data and insight into customer support.
Make sure you –
— Have a regular review of customer service KPIs to determine areas to evolve and improve
— Evaluate the CSAT, net promoter scores (NPS), and churn rates to measure the effectiveness of support
If you’re not reviewing the performance of your support agents, you will always find it difficult to understand customer pain points or deliver value.
Customers feel happy when the support is prioritized for their convenience and comfort. Adopting an omnichannel support strategy can help the business offer consistent support across various channels. This strategy gives customers the freedom to reach out to support agents or businesses through their preferred channel or method, whether live chat, social media, or email.
To adopt an omnichannel support strategy –
– You need to unify customer data across channels so that agents can access them easily
– Give customers the option to choose their preferred communication method for engagement
– Maintain consistency of messaging and tone of voice across platforms to deliver omnichannel customer experiences at each stage
More customers prefer personalized support as it makes them feel valued. This form of support reduces wait time and frustration for customers as agents have access to data and context. The real value of personalization lies in leveraging customer data to create tailored experiences that match customer needs and preferences.
Key aspects of personalizing customer support include –
– Empower agents to easily access key details about a customer’s past interactions with the business
– Offer tailored recommendations to customers that fit their preferences and past search data
– Follow up with the customer with a personalized message
Anticipating the customer’s needs before they become pain points is often one of the key features of support. By being proactive in approach, a business can ensure value as and when it’s needed the most.
Adopting a proactive approach is important because all the customer effort would be futile if customers could not get quick responses to their questions. 33% of consumers would recommend a brand that offers a quick but ineffective response.
Make sure you –
-Use customer feedback and data to identify frequent issues
-Give real-time updates to customers on their orders, shipping delays, etc
-Use the live chat on your website
The success and growth of a business sometimes also depend on the quality of support it provides to customers. For that reason, you should regularly track key metrics and monitor customer support performance.
Let’s look at key metrics to analyze and monitor customer support –
Customers feel frustrated when they are directed to one agent from another to fix their issues. They want their issues resolved at the earliest, preferably on the first point of contact. A business can track the first contact resolution rate and measure how many customer complaints require only one contact for resolution.
First contact resolution = the number of cases resolved on the first contact/total number of cases
In the business world, a spike in support tickets is common after a new product or feature release. However, more customers engaging with the business is not always a good sign. Sometimes, it indicates a problem with your product, service, or support process.
You should keep an eye on and check if the number of requests goes up in a specific period. You can rely on the customer ticket request volume metric and measure the actual growth in complaint volume.
To calculate this metric, all you need to do is compare the volume of support tickets over a specific duration to get clarity.
Customer experience is improved when agents deliver quick replies to queries. On the other hand, wait times lead to poor customer experiences. This shows how customers always expect a fast reply. That’s why measuring the first response time metric can help you understand whether or not your support team is delivering instant replies.
First response time = time of first response – time of customer request
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) is a key metric to understand how satisfied customers are with a specific aspect of your business, be it the product, service, or support interactions. You can customize this metric and measure the efficiency levels of your support team.
While tracking CSAT, you need to prepare multiple questions and then encourage customers to rate on a scale of 1-5 for customer satisfaction rating. You can then categorize the response like those giving a rating of 5 should be considered “highly satisfied” while those giving 1 “not satisfied”.
CSAT = (number of satisfied customers/number of responses)x100
Customers are more loyal to brands that offer great experiences to them. They stick with a business that is easier to connect to. Customers don’t like it when they have to make a lot of effort to engage with a business. The customer effort score is a useful metric to know how much effort a customer has to make to get their issue resolved.
To measure this metric, you have to send a survey to customers where you ask a question and see responses in numerical value. You ask customers to rate on a scale of 1-7 and tell “how much effort they had to take to get their query resolved.”
You can calculate the scores to get an average score.
Many organizations know how to get their customer support right, and they are reaping rich rewards. They have great tools to serve customers and help them find solutions. You can also get inspiration when you analyze customer service examples of these companies.
Some customer support examples include –
Kuwait Telecommunications Company (STC), a subsidiary of the Saudi Telecom Company or STC Group, operates the largest 5G network in Kuwait. The company was looking to transform its customer service and deliver a more seamless experience to customers. So, it implemented REVE Chat’s AI-powered chatbot and live chat solutions.
The implementation of AI chatbot and live chat solution has significantly enhanced its customer service operations. It can now respond to customer inquiries quickly and provide context-aware and highly personalized responses. The technology leverages AI and natural language processing (NLP), and also incorporates large language models (LLMs) and generative AI.
Le REVE is an eCommerce platform that was looking to drive customer engagement and ace its support. It uses REVE Chatbot to help its customers to get a seamless chat experience. The bot is available 24/7 so the company can ensure support even outside business hours.
The chatbot and live chat help actively engage customers through personalized experiences. It offers instant responses, personalized recommendations, and interactive shopping assistance. The implementation of AI-powered tools helps keep customers engaged throughout their shopping journey.
The Commercial Bank of Kuwait has taken its customer support to an altogether new level by partnering with an advanced solution. They have integrated an omnichannel customer engagement solution powered by REVE Chat to serve customers better.
The chatbot helps CBK provide round-the-clock customer support, handling inquiries, and transactions from anywhere and at any time. The company has also automated its routine inquiries and services, which resulted in reduced wait times for customers.
In addition, using the chatbot is key for the company in assisting customers in multiple languages. It has also integrated the chatbot with its online and mobile banking platforms which helps it deliver excellent user experience and quick access to services.
The landscape of customer support has evolved considerably in the last decade or so. The traditional mode of support has gradually made its way for modern and AI-powered support. Support is more accurate, efficient, and personalized now than it has ever been before.
Similarly, the data-driven approach is replacing the conventional intuition-based support, resulting in more benefits for both customers and businesses. The growth of AI customer support has coincided with higher customer satisfaction and lower operational costs for companies.
Smart AI tools and software have helped improve agent productivity, resulting in quick, consistent responses. More businesses now look to leverage the power of AI to create a seamless and customer-centric support experience.
Let’s analyze the AI-driven momentum shift in support from traditional to modern –
Traditional support is no longer the preferred industry choice. It seems the world has moved onto the modern version and there’s a reason for that. This form of support was heavily reliant on manual processes where human personnel managed everything, right from handling calls to getting insights from clients.
In traditional customer support, efficiency was reliant on the workforce. This caused long wait times for customers and also burdened organizations with high operating costs. Chances of errors were high because humans are prone to err.
Similarly, service quality was reliant on so many variables that it had to suffer, and it was mostly inconsistent. The support was reactive, so customers were helped as and when they approached the business. The worst aspect was the lack of data on customer preferences and behavior.
Traditional support was full of limitations. Since it relied on too many variables, it failed to match the evolving needs of new-age customers. This is where modern support powered by AI entered the space. It replaced the “manual with the automated” and made support faster and highly efficient.
In modern support, AI tools like chatbots handle routine queries whereas human personnel only manage complex issues. Support is now a 24×7 phenomenon, neutralizing time-zone restrictions and widening the scope for businesses.
Agent workload has been greatly reduced and instant responses are par for the course. Operational costs are down and it’s even possible to scale support without increasing additional costs.
Support is more consistent now with meaningful engagement backed by data analysis as a routine feature. The best part, businesses can now offer proactive support and reach out to customer even before their problems become pain points. This is how AI customer experience is being redefined.
The market is growing competitive and customer expectations are evolving at a rapid rate. Delivering excellent customer experiences thus becomes necessary to win customer trust and gain a competitive edge in the market.
In this blog, we have explored in detail what is customer support and understood it definition. We learned how AI is reshaping the contours of support and adding a new dimension to it.
Moving further, we touched on different types of customer support as well, including, live chat support, chatbot support, phone support, email support, and so on.
There was also a detailed analysis of the customer support process of a business. We also saw the vast importance of customer support for business growth. We listed many reasons why support is important, including –
The blog also dwelt on effective strategies to improve customer support and key metrics to analyze and monitor customer support. In the end, we laid down some examples of excellent customer support before concluding with how AI is transforming customer support for businesses.
So, when it comes to meeting the standards of your target audience, you need to have the right customer support software and tools in the arsenal.
With REVE Chat, you can start a free trial of customer support software and take a solid step towards delivering incredible experiences to customers.
Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required
Praveen Singh is a content marketer, blogger, and professional with 15 years of passion for ideas, stats, and insights into customers. An MBA Graduate in marketing and a researcher by disposition, he has a knack for everything related to customer engagement and customer happiness.
As a writer and analyst, he pours the heart out on a blog that is informative, detailed, and often digs deep into the heart of customer psychology. He’s written extensively on a range of topics including, marketing, AI chatbots, omnichannel messaging platforms, and many more.
Mr. Singh also has a passion for subjects that excite new-age customers, be it social media engagement, artificial intelligence, machine learning. He takes great pride in his learning-filled journey of adding value to the industry through consistent research, analysis, and sharing of customer-driven ideas.
Stay updated with the latest trends and ideas we share
Once upon a time, customer acquisition in banking was not a point of concern. Droves of people used to stand...
Ever wondered how you can improve your WhatsApp marketing techniques? Why don’t you try WhatsApp marketing tools to make the...
Keeping up with customer demands for instant support and personalized experiences is tougher than ever. With over 2 billion people...
