Customer Support Vs Customer Service
The difference between customer service and customer support is that customer support teams support a product, while customer service teams provide service to a customer.
Customer support will be involved in the whole decision making process for building the product and user experience
Which one are you doing?
Is it customer support? Or sales support?
Customer support is after they have ordered a new product or service, sales support is when they are choosing a product or service.
Sales support refers to a variety of functions that help your sales representatives focus on actually selling and closing deals
Customer Service Jobs are Changing
Customer service is not about talking to customers to solve their problems. It is about building and managing a system for customers to get support and continually improving it. If you are working in customer service then it is important to learn about the trends and changes and the overall customer service experience and how to build and manage a system. Learning about user experience and building and managing a product are essential skills.
What are the goals?
The goals of customer support are to support customers to use the service so they have a successful experience and that any problems are resolved quickly and efficiently.
What is most important?
It is easy, it is simple, it is fast. Speed is extremely important, they don’t want to be waiting to get back.
Whats the customer support model?
Self-service first; skilled and empowered agents can help with more complex questions and requests.
Customers prefer self service channels because it is faster and easier. It also reduces cost.
What are self service channels?
- Static web pages
- Training program videos
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Knowledge bases
- Chatbots
- Online customer service communities
- In product customer support prompts and information (so the product actually works)
How do you build these?
- Go through existing questions and create a report of what the questions are now
- Add these onto your website through static web pages
- Ensure that these are accessible
- Building web pages is easy enough as long as they are accessible and easy to navigate
How to build a knowledge base?
- Use an existing platform. There are lots of options:
- Zendesk
- Zoho knowledge base
- Use screenshots / videos where possible
- Send customers to your knowledge base
How do you measure success?
- Volume of inquiries that are coming in before and after
- How much the tool is being used – analysing the data
- Feedback from customers
How to build a chatbot?
It’s easy to make a chatbot, but its not easy to make a good chatbot. Many companies have chatbots – they can work for most of the time, but there are so many cases where you can just get frustrated that it doesn’t understand what you are saying which just creates a terrible user experience and it can be damaging to the brand and experience.
I think this needs a new article to really dig deep into chatbots and the options and how they work.
How do you measure customer support success?
