There is no doubt that better customer support results in sales conversion. Customer support teams help customers to improve their experience by interacting with them and giving product feedback. They help in solving technical problems, troubleshooting, and finding new solutions and answers.
Customer Support Team use customer service skills to improve customer experience in consumer products or services. This team is not a Customer Service team but closely related.
Customer support is about reacting to a customer’s problem with products in solving queries and problems related to the product. They aim to improve the experience of customers and are closely integrated with product teams. They also include documentation, conducting usability studies, and being involved with the end-to-end customer experience.
Customer Service vs. Customer Support
Customer Service and Customer Support Teams are all customer-facing teams critical to your business’s prosperity and growth. They are closely related but differ from each other.
What is Customer Service?
Customer service is more proactive than customer support. Customer service guides the customer before they know about the products. They may contribute to upselling and link selling. They assist customers from welcoming to finding products or closing the deals. But they are not forgiving product feedback or solving customer’s problems – exchange, technical problems, answering possible tech queries, etc.
What is Customer Support?
When it comes to the customer support team, it’s about reacting to a customer’s problem. They aim to react to and solve customer problems quickly. They are more time-sensitive, reactive. They focus on problem areas, technical support, and knowledge base. The customer support team exists on day 1 for all businesses.
With world-class customer service and support teams; it results in better customer success. Does your business need or have a Customer Support Team? Here are some best techniques to boost your customer support experience and increase sales revenues.
How to Improve your Customer Support Experience?
You may already realize the importance of customer support and customer service in your business, especially if you are selling products or services; you must need these two teams to increase sales revenue.
Checklist to establish customer support team in your business;
1. Customer Support Team Structure
To improve your customer support experience; first, it’s important to know your customer support team structure. To finalize your best team structure, you need to list the natures of help that your custom requests. Understanding your customer request, you can design your team structure with several departments or units.
There could be several types of requests that your customer looking for;
- Billing, Demos, Technical Issues, and Training
- Return, Exchange, and Refund
- Renew
- Communication and Content Creation
- Documentation
- Technical Issue etc.
2. Designing Roles and Responsibility of the Customer Support Team
Based on your business nature and your customer’s request; the customer support team’s role and responsibility may vary.
Here are some common customer support responsibilities that every business practices.
- Answering customer’s phone calls and handling customer inquiries.
- Replying to customer emails and working on tickets in the customer support queue.
- Conduct live chats on your website for customer’s requests.
- Responding to social media comments, messages, and questions.
- Content creation to educate your customer about your products or services.
- Writing self-help center.
- Conducting training and demo for the customer about your products or services.
- Deals with a customer complaint, feedback, or commendation.
- Handel subscription, upgrade or cancel
- Follow-up the customer to give better customer satisfaction
- And more…
3. Channel for Customer Support
The customer support channel is the medium where you interact with your customer. There could be hundreds of customer inquiries regarding your products or services. To handle those inquiries, you have to choose the right channel to interact with customers.
Some of the common practice customer support channels are:
- Phone
- Social Media
- Webinars
- Live Chat, Audio/Video, and Messaging
- Tickets
- Software
- Community Groups
- Help Center’s and FAQ
4. Improve Customer Support Skills
You may have a customer support team with roles and responsibilities, an effective channel to interact with the customer; but without customer support skills, your team cannot be a successful customer support team. CSR teams need exceptional skills to face customer queries and solve them patiently to meet customer satisfaction.
Here are some tips to improve your customer support skill within your team:
- Effective communication skills
- In-depth product knowledge
- Skills to handle difficult customers
- Empathy
- Multitasking skills
- Time management skill
- Energetic
- Problem-solving skills
- Flexibility
- Documentation skills
- Skills to operate selected software
Techniques to Improve your Customer Support Strategy
The customer support team gives an exceptional experience to your customers. From product inquiry to handling technical problems, these teams face customers and give them a good shopping experience.
But, if your team is not experienced enough to handle customer inquiries and complaints, it negatively affects your brand and customer perception of your products and services.
Here are some tips to boost your customer support strategy and achieve customer success:
1.Understand your team’s capability.
Analysis of the staff ability and skills; if needed to improve provide them various training programs.
2. Improve the communication skills of your team.
Customer services and effective communication skills are key tools that the customer support team used. With effective communication, your teams can build good relations with customers and solve their problems easily.
3. The right person in the right place.
There could be several departments or units in the Customer Support team, such as General inquiry, technical problems, exchange, return, live chat support, etc. Understanding your rep’s ability and assigning them to respective positions helps to give a better result.
4. Conduct capacity-building training programs regularly.
Make sure to monitor your Customer Support Team frequently. and be sure that you provide enough tools and solutions for the Customer Support team. To strengthen them with skills and strategy, conduct capacity-building training programs regularly.
5. Use the right channel to interact with customers.
There could be several channels that businesses use to conduct customer support Service. Some of them are e-mail, phone, live chat, content creation, training, demo, etc.
6. Improve documentation skills.
Documentation skill is critical in CSRs team. It helps track customers’ inquiries, related problems, customer data, and their feedback that helps solve customer problems. It also helps to collect data, which is helpful for a future marketing campaign.
The products team and customer support team must work side by side. It’s very beneficial for any business house to integrate their customer support team and products team. Or at least run them side by side. It’s because; there could be several times that a customer is asking for in-depth product-related queries, which only the product team can answer very well. Or, in the time of guiding the customer in troubleshooting or product guide, the product team knows better than the customer support team.
And for the product team, it’s very beneficial to document the customer feedback about their products. With this data, they can improve product features or continue. This feedback helps the product team to know which product works and whatnot.