When it comes to customer interactions, the terms customer service and customer support are often used interchangeably, but there are subtle differences that should not be dismissed.
Customer service is a broad term that encompasses all interactions between a customer and a business, including marketing, sales, and post-sales support. On the other hand, customer support refers to the assistance provided to customers with issues or technical problems with a product or service.
While customer service evokes help towards achieving a solution or objective with a brand, customer support suggests troubleshooting issues to ensure the customer can use the product or service effectively. Understanding these distinctions is crucial for businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
What exactly is customer service?
Customer service is the backbone of any successful business. It refers to the support a business offers its customers before and after they buy and use its products or services.
Providing excellent customer service involves delivering proactive and immediate support across various communication channels, including phone, email, text, and chat.
As customer advocates and brand ambassadors, customer service agents are essential in retaining customers. Retention is crucial since keeping current customers is cheaper than attracting new ones.
Customer service also sets brands apart from competitors offering similar products or services. Personalized experiences that cater to customers' needs and preferences are essential to building loyalty. As such, customers say that the experience a company provides is as important as its products or services.
On the flip side, bad customer experiences can result in churn, with 86% of shoppers abandoning a brand after two negative experiences. Providing excellent customer service is essential to maintain a positive brand reputation. One negative review requires roughly 40 positive reviews to outweigh the damage, and customers are 49% more likely to share negative experiences online. In summary, customer service is a critical component of any business strategy, playing a crucial role in retaining customers and differentiating brands from competitors.
Why is customer service important?
Delivering great customer service is critical for any business that wants to succeed in today's competitive market. Here are four reasons why customer service is so important:
Customers will pay more to companies with better customer service.
Studies have shown that customers are willing to pay more for a product or service if they know they will receive exceptional customer service. Businesses can set themselves apart by prioritizing the customer experience and building long-term customer loyalty.
Customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition.
It costs significantly less to retain an existing customer than it does to acquire a new one. Therefore, by delivering exceptional customer service, businesses can keep their existing customers happy and reduce spending on expensive marketing campaigns to attract new customers.
Increased customer lifetime value.
Customers satisfied with their experience are more likely to become repeat customers and spend more money over time. This not only increases customer lifetime value but also helps businesses to establish a loyal customer base.
Increased revenue.
By providing exceptional customer service, businesses can build a positive reputation and attract new customers through word-of-mouth marketing. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend a company to their friends and family, leading to increased revenue and business growth.
What does delivering excellent customer service involve?
Businesses need to take several steps to ensure their customer service agents can meet expectations. First, businesses must serve customers on their chosen channels, whether by email, social media, phone, or chat. It's essential to be proactive and provide timely assistance to customers, anticipating their needs and resolving problems as soon as they arise.
Empathy is also a critical customer service skill. Agents must be able to relate to customers and put them at the center of everything they do. Customer-centric companies are on the rise, and they look for people who are driven to deliver a truly great customer experience. Comprehensive employee training is an essential aspect of developing empathy in customer service. By providing well-thought-out training programs, businesses can equip agents with the necessary skills to understand customer needs and deliver empathetic support.
Personalization is another key aspect of delivering excellent customer support. Customers expect businesses to remember their preferences and previous purchases, and agents should be able to provide a tailored experience. To deliver personalized customer support, brands must use data responsibly to understand their needs and preferences. This includes tracking previous purchases, communication preferences, and other relevant information to provide tailored experiences. In addition to using data, brands can provide a context-rich, omnichannel support experience. Seamless support should be accessible across multiple channels, including phone, email, social media, and chatbots.
Moreover, businesses should make it easy for customers to help themselves. Self-service options such as knowledge bases, FAQs, and community forums can help customers resolve issues without contacting support agents. Finally, it's essential to respond to customer inquiries quickly, whether it's via phone, email, or social media.
What does the future of customer service look like?
The future of customer service is all about driving value for customers. Expectations include immediate and empathetic assistance, self-service tools for simple concerns, and a real person to talk to for complex questions. Another expectation of the modern customer is personalization. 52% of customers say they expect personalized offers, and 66% expect companies to understand their unique needs. Better customer service can therefore save companies money through process automation and IT partnerships.
Customers want a seamless, connected experience across any channel, and contact center agents need timely, relevant data to respond with knowledge and empathy. To meet these growing expectations, brands are turning to AI-powered chatbots to provide 24/7 support and improve response times. Chatbots can handle routine inquiries and frequently asked questions, freeing up agents to focus on more complex issues. They can also work overnight, providing customers with support outside traditional business hours.
The customer journey, which refers to the process a customer goes through from initial awareness to post-purchase support, is a critical component of success for service organizations. Investing in the right teams and tools can help businesses streamline and optimize the customer journey, ultimately leading to cost savings and improved customer satisfaction. As the industry continues to grow, we are seeing the emergence of new service roles, such as the chief customer officer, who are dedicated to overseeing and enhancing the customer journey.
What is customer support?
Customer support refers to the subset of customer service that addresses technical issues customers may encounter when using a product or service. It involves providing quick and effective solutions to user problems, often through reactive and short-term interactions.
Customer support agents are responsible for tasks such as troubleshooting, installation, maintenance, upgrading, and product disposal. In addition, they may also create product documentation, conduct usability studies, and provide input into product development.
While customer support is focused on technical problem-solving, it is still essential to the overall customer service experience. Support agents often interact with customers on a regular basis and can provide valuable feedback to product development teams. Therefore, empathy, people skills, and product expertise are key attributes of an effective agent.
Common responsibilities of customer support agents
Customer support agents have a range of responsibilities. A crucial aspect of their role is onboarding assistance. They must help new customers understand how to use a company's products and services to establish a strong foundation for long-term association with the brand.
Another crucial responsibility is troubleshooting. When a customer reports a technical issue, the support team must effectively communicate with them, take note of all essential details, and help them resolve the issue as seamlessly and timely as possible.
Customer support agents also help customers with maintenance and upgrading. By keeping customers up-to-date with the latest versions of the company's services, they can ensure high performance and security levels.
Lastly, support agents must share customer feedback with other departments. Some of the most efficient ways of collecting feedback include surveys, emails, social media, and the brand's official website. Customer feedback fosters product innovation and development, improves marketing performance, and enhances the overall customer experience. Effective agents possess technical proficiency, empathy, and excellent people skills to provide customers with the best possible experience.
Types of customer support
There are various types of customer support that brands can use depending on their individual customers' support needs. These include:
Self-support
Self-support is when customers try to find solutions to their queries using a brand's internal knowledge and resource base. Common forms of self-support include FAQs, white papers, user guides, and case studies.
Anticipatory support
This is a type of support offered to customers proactively, foreseeing their needs at various points during their lifecycle. Customer support teams must maintain a database of common customer support inquiries to anticipate frequently occurring issues, allowing them to address them even before they arise.
Responsive support
Responsive or reactive support refers to when a customer reaches out with a query or complaint. Although responsive support is important since not all customer issues and concerns can be foreseen, customer support teams must aim at offering more proactive support as it improves customer experience.
Social media support
Social media channels, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, can be utilized by brands to provide customer service. Customers can reach out with inquiries or complaints through direct messaging or comments, and brands can respond publicly or privately.
Chat support
This involves providing customer support through live chat on a brand's website or mobile app. This type of support offers customers immediate assistance and real-time communication with a support agent.
Phone support
Brands can also offer support through phone calls. This approach provides a more personalized experience and enables support agents to resolve complex issues in real-time.
By offering a combination of these customer support types, brands can provide a comprehensive support experience to their customers, improving their overall satisfaction and loyalty.
The future of customer support
Customer support is continuously evolving to keep up with customer needs and technological advancements. Brands must make transformative moves to stay ahead and meet the growing demand for a digital-first experience.
The future lies in AI-powered chatbots, personalized experiences, omnichannel support, and social media customer service. With the increasing use of digital channels, brands must also prioritize data privacy and security.
In addition to the trends mentioned above, the industry is also seeing an increase in customer expectations. Customers are demanding faster response times, personalized support, and real-time communication across multiple channels. Brands must adapt to these evolving needs to stay competitive and provide exceptional customer experiences.
Community-based support is also gaining popularity as customers seek peer-to-peer support and connect with like-minded individuals. Self-service is also becoming more prevalent, with customers preferring to troubleshoot issues on their own using knowledge bases, chatbots, and other self-help tools.
Customer service vs. customer support
While customer service and customer support are often used interchangeably, they differ in form and function. Customer service is focused on providing a positive experience to a customer, while customer support is focused on supporting a product or service. In essence, customer service teams aim to improve the customer experience, while customer support teams aim to improve the product or service.
Let's take a closer look at the main differences between customer service and customer support:
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Purpose: The primary purpose of customer service is to provide customers with a positive experience, such as answering questions, providing information, resolving complaints, and offering support. In contrast, customer support is focused on supporting a product or service. This includes providing technical support, troubleshooting issues, and feedback to the product team.
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Scope: Customer service is typically broader in scope than customer support. It covers all aspects of the customer experience, including sales, marketing, and customer retention.
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Skills: While customer service and customer support require many of the same skills, they differ. Customer service reps need to have excellent communication skills, be able to think on their feet and have a good understanding of the company's products and services. Customer support reps need to have technical skills, be able to troubleshoot issues and have an in-depth understanding of the product or service.
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Integration: Customer support teams are often more closely integrated with product teams than customer service teams. This is because customer support reps are typically the first to hear about issues or bugs with a product or service. They can then provide feedback to the product team and help improve the overall product or service.
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Feedback: Customer service reps typically focus on collecting customer feedback about their experience with the company. On the other hand, customer support reps focus on collecting feedback about the product or service. This feedback is then used to improve the product or service and ensure that it meets the customers' needs.
Tips for delivering excellent customer service and support
Define a unified philosophy and process
Your approach to customer service, specifically customer support, should be unified to ensure your customer service delivery is consistent and reliable. Start by defining your customer service principles and philosophy, which will provide a set of values that will guide each of your company's customer service interactions. You could also create a customer service playbook that outlines standard processes and best practices for your team. This will include instructions for processes like reporting bugs and errors, how and when to create support content and protocols for documenting customer feedback.
Equip your team with the right tools
Equipping your team with the right tools frees them up to serve and support your customers. Good-quality support tools make the lives of customers and agents much easier. They also give the impression that you run a professional, slick operation. For example, offering your customers omnichannel customer service means they can reach out to you through whatever channel suits them best, whether it's live chat, social media, in-app messaging, phone, or email. Make sure your agents have access to a comprehensive knowledge base to help them answer customer inquiries quickly and accurately.
Communicate clearly with customers
Clarity is key when speaking with customers. Unclear communication leads to confusion and avoidable mistakes, which can damage the customer's confidence in your brand. To minimize miscommunication, strip away technical jargon and industry slang from your messaging, use simple words where possible, and don't overwhelm the customer with too much information at once. Another important part of clear communication is transparency. If the customer asks a question, and you're not clear what the answer is, it's okay to let them know you're not sure and that you'll get back to them as soon as you find an answer.
Use positive language to support and motivate customers
Making a customer feel heard and understood means being in tune with their needs, a facet especially important for customer support agents to remember. Customers contacting support are often stressed and frustrated, even if the problem they have is, in fact, an easy fix. Instead of diving headlong into solving the technical issue, support agents need to take the time to show empathy for the customer's unique situation (even if it's the eighth time they've addressed that same issue today!). Likewise, building rapport with customers - addressing them personally, asking questions about their business, and showing excitement about their plans - goes a long way toward creating a human-centered customer experience.
Practice first-contact resolution and close conversations properly
Whether reaching out to customer service or support, customers want their problem resolved in one go. In fact, churn is preventable if issues are solved the first time they occur. This means you should make a first-contact resolution - or first-call resolution - a top priority. This means equipping your agents with the tools and knowledge to solve issues quickly and efficiently. It also means investing in your products and services to ensure they work as expected and that technical issues are minimal.
Real-life examples of high-quality customer service and support
Great customer service is the hallmark of successful brands that continue to stand out in a crowded marketplace. Here are brief summaries of four examples of brands that have mastered customer service:
Zapier
Zapier’s CEO, Wade Foster, believes in offering the best customer service, even if they can’t have the highest quality product or the cheapest deals.
To achieve this, every employee has to do customer support for four hours a week, and they hire empathetic employees who can write well. Their customer support agents deliver bad news in a thoughtful, empathetic way to ensure customers feel valued.
Southwest Airlines
Founder Herb Kelleher believed that their airline was in the service business, not just in the business of flying airplanes.
Southwest treats employees like customers and nurtures a customer-first approach in them. The CEO gives weekly shout-outs to employees who demonstrate good customer service, and the company prioritizes employees over profit-making. Leaders take a cue from Kelleher, who walked the talk regarding customer service, often arriving early to clean planes and assist with baggage unloading.
Eventbrite
To ensure consistent quality services, Eventbrite has a playbook for hiring and training employees.
They make a great first hire, provide balance and flexibility, and hire for success. Candidates must demonstrate creativity and presence of mind. Employees have the freedom to make support decisions, and there are no fixed times or days for customer support.
Nordstrom
Nordstrom’s employees prioritize customers before company policies, and the company provides additional services that enhance customers’ experiences.
Nordstrom's employees routinely go above and beyond to delight customers, and customer service stories are an essential part of inducting new employees. Nordstrom is an example of both online and offline companies providing superlative customer experiences.
Zappos
Zappos is an online retailer that has built a memorable brand by offering great customer service. They have an obsession with customer service and offer unlimited customer call times. Their support representatives are free of scripts and textbook replies, and they’re encouraged to develop personal connections with customers. Zappos employees discuss anything that helps forge good customer relationships.
Measuring customer service and support
Measuring customer service and support is essential to determine the success of your business. To identify whether your customer service and support is good, you need to measure it. You can achieve this through customer service metrics or Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These metrics can help you track your customer service team's performance over a given period and offer valuable and actionable insights into customer experience and the quality of your customer support and service.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES), First Response Time (FRT), First Contact Resolution (FCR), Overall Resolution Rate, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are some useful metrics that can help you track your customer service team's performance. These metrics indicate customer loyalty, satisfaction, and willingness to recommend your products and services to others.
Apart from customer service KPIs, there are other methods to help you get more qualitative and nuanced insights into what your customers like and dislike. Some of these methods are web analytics, customer reviews on product review sites, social listening, and surveys. These methods offer cues into customer behavior, needs, and expectations and can help you fine-tune your customer service strategy.
The Power of Exceptional Customer Service
Understanding the differences between customer service and customer support is crucial for any business that aims to provide an exceptional customer experience. While both are essential to a customer-centric strategy, they require different approaches and metrics to measure success. Integrating customer service and support in a way that respects their differences can lead to improved customer satisfaction, loyalty, and, ultimately, a positive impact on the bottom line and brand reputation. By prioritizing the needs and expectations of customers and continuously striving to exceed them, businesses can differentiate themselves in a crowded market and build lasting relationships with their customers.