To get happy customers, you need to fulfill all their needs, including questions about your products or your business. Be it over the phone, chat, email, or social media, providing great customer support is more important than ever!
Get all the help you need when you outsource customer support. It’s one of the best alternative solutions to offer responsive and relevant customer interactions. This will allow you to focus on your core functions and grow your business.
Before you get started with remote customer support, let’s review everything about customer support to know which areas to improve. Learn why it’s important to your business growth, the best practices for delivering great support, and how Magic can help.
What is Customer Support?
Customer support is the process of solving pain points in the customer life cycle, from acquisition to retention. To be more exact, it’s providing timely technical assistance with products that a customer has trouble with.
Customer Support vs Customer Service
Most of the time, you’ll see customer service mentioned when discussing customer support but is there a difference between customer service and customer support? Yes, even if some would use them interchangeably, each has its distinct function in a business!
Customer service is an umbrella term for all customer interactions to help build a lasting relationship with clients. Customer support is more focused on helping clients use a product or service.
Customer service is a more proactive approach. It focuses more on helping customers before they feel the need to reach out to you. For example, informing clients about a new product or service that they may like.
In customer support, it’s the clients who reach out to you for solutions on short-term issues. That said, not every business needs to provide it. Some of the fields where customer support is needed include retail, finance, SaaS, and tech.
5 Types of Customer Support Channels
Customer support agents help clients via different channels. Before you outsource customer support, find out which channel is best for your business so users can easily reach you. Here are the most common types of customer support:
1. Phone Customer Support
Phone support is the most used channel in dealing with customer queries across all age groups. Users also believe that it’s the fastest way to resolve issues. It also provides a more natural human touch which means a more meaningful customer experience. This is great for B2B and B2C communication.
2. Email Customer Support
Email support is a great channel to initiate or maintain contact without the two parties having to be online. Due to this more eased process, many users prefer this digital channel. For businesses, it’s a low-cost method where automation can be added to make the process more efficient.
3. Chat Customer Support
Chat support delivers real-time solutions without the need to talk over the phone. It can be done in two ways: live chat and chatbot.
In live chat, human agents provide non-voice support during active business hours. This can be used to handle multiple queries at a time. It can be done through your business website or mobile messaging apps.
Chatbots, on the other hand, are AI-powered tools to automate support and free up your agents to an extent. It can respond based on sentiment analysis, collect customer data, and transfer chats to human agents. This also lets you provide customer support 24/7.
4. Social Media Customer Support
Social media support is another asynchronous channel where customer interactions can be public or private. It’s convenient to use since many people already have social media accounts on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the like.
5. Self-Service Customer Support
There are times when people prefer not to speak to an agent. Some would prefer self-service support to solve their problem on their own. This can be done by giving them access to a knowledge base about your product or service. It includes FAQs, ebooks, blog posts, videos, demos, and infographics.
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The Importance of Customer Support to Business Growth
While not every business needs to provide customer support, it’s still a crucial factor in scaling up. It isn’t just about giving quick solutions to customer queries. Customer support teams can also boost a business’s reputation and find growth opportunities over time.
Customer support lets clients feel heard—be it with their concerns, issues, or feedback. Plus, if you successfully solve their problem or give them a positive experience, clients will feel that they are cared for. This will lead to happy and loyal customers who may also become ambassadors for your brand.
It’s also a great chance to learn more about your customers. Your support team can collect data or conduct short surveys at the end of customer interactions. This will give you insight into how to address pain points at an earlier stage or improve your customer experience.
On top of that, meeting customer expectations can impact your revenue. Zendesk’s 2022 Customer Experience Trends Report found that 75% of buyers spend more when they get a good customer support experience.
Higher profit means more capacity to scale up your business. This can be bringing in new products, growing your team, or making your customer support experience better.
5 Tips for a Great Customer Support Experience
Delivering great support means you’re meeting customer expectations every time. While it’s practically just answering questions, customer support is a nuanced function that may get too complex and taxing.
That’s why you should build your customer support with care and continue to improve on it. Here are five best tips to follow to provide a great customer support experience:
1. Provide the right tools for your team
Aside from skills and expertise, what makes a support team quick and effective are the right tools. This includes product knowledge, apps, and software such as a customer relationship management platform.
Train your outsourced customer support agents about your business and how to de-escalate angry customers. They should also be in the know about new updates and features of CRM tools and other apps. Scripts and demo materials would also be helpful.
2. Add self-service customer support options
Make things easier for clients by finding quick solutions. Build self-service support options such as how-to blog posts or a FAQs page on your website.
With these options, users will be confident in their ability to solve issues before they reach out to you. This lessens the volume of support tickets you get, giving your team more time to help clients who need more assistance.
3. Bring empathy to all customer interactions
Speed is crucial in solving customer queries but your agents should also be personable while doing so. Remember to treat customers as people and not as tickets.
Your customer support agents should have soft skills along with technical ones to help win customers. Be empathic to ease users and solve issues more quickly. A positive support script can help them deal with clients.
Customers should be connected to the right agent if they feel like the problem is not on their level. Set up proper escalation management to avoid making the customer impatient or more upset. This also ensures that the next person will be the one to solve their problem.
4. Use data to constantly improve
As in other business functions, a data-driven approach can effectively improve your customer support.
Start with your customer support teams and find out what works for them and what doesn’t. Use employee satisfaction surveys to find the best approach and tools for them. Look into KPIs as well to review their performance.
In customer interactions, have your agents do a quick survey or poll to know more about your customers. You can use NPS, CSAT, and churn rates to measure and evaluate how good your customer support is.
Teams should also share data among themselves to find personalized and relevant solutions. A good CSR platform can ease data exchange within your support team and with your sales and marketing teams.
5. Outsource customer support
It’s crucial to find ways to improve your customer support experience. It can be hiring the best customer support agents for your business or automating some business processes. This way, your team won’t be overwhelmed by the work and can effectively help customers.
That said, find the right balance between human touch and automation. While automation can make things quicker, customers still want to talk to humans since they can listen and adapt.
A great way to offload work is through customer support outsourcing. It lets you quickly build your customer support without losing the human touch. They are a remote customer support team that’s skilled and trained in helping clients and even automating work.
Get Remote Customer Support with Magic
Get the customer support your business needs with Magic. We’ll help you build the best customer support team by handling the sourcing and screening. Match with the right customer support assistants within 72 hours!
Magic Virtual Assistants can do a wide range of tasks to help you grow your business. Get remote customer support to manage your support tickets across a variety of platforms. Delegate tasks in email, chat, and phone support to free up more time for you and your team.
Outsource customer support however and whenever you need it with Magic. Book a call with us to get started today!
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