The Importance of Customer Support to Enhance Customer Experience

Today, there are few things more important than customer service, and customers know what they want from businesses they shop with. Consumers have more options than ever before, and one poor interaction with a business could lead to that customer moving on and making future purchases with another brand instead of yours.

For this reason, it’s extremely important that your business’s customer service experience provides everything a customer is looking for. Regardless of the types of customers you serve, developing good customer service routines will help you build a better reputation and see an improved return on investment (ROI).

Customer Support and Your Business

Customer support can be defined as a team of professionals providing services to support the customers of a business. Customer support teams may handle technical challenges, problems with products or services, and other matters.

The customer support team is in a customer-facing role, which is why it’s so important that it is well-trained on how to interact with customers, troubleshoot problems, and leave customers feeling good about their experience with the brand’s in-house team. Customer support agents may interact with your brand’s customers via live chats, support tickets, phone, social media, email, or other contact methods.

Customer Support vs. Customer Service

The customer service experience is designed as general assistance. Customers might seek out customer service support before or after buying a product or service.

A customer service team member will be trained to answer questions about products and offer great customer service when dealing with order processing or complaints.

Customer support is different because it focuses on specific help customers need. For example, if the customer needs technical support or has a particular problem with a new product, the customer support team should be ready to step in.

The customer support team handles anything from troubleshooting to onboarding a customer. This team will need to have excellent problem-solving skills, deeper knowledge about your products or services, and be ready to offer great customer service.

The Importance of Providing Excellent Customer Support

Businesses should always prioritize good customer support, as doing so offers many benefits for your brand.

The simple answer for why you have to provide good customer support is that customers are the people who support your business. When you interact with customers, you need to show them that you recognize and appreciate what they’re doing for you. This customer-centric philosophy can help your business grow.

Remember, when you provide a customer service experience, the goal is to leave customers feeling satisfied with what you’ve done for them. When customers are happy with the interaction, they’re more likely to remain loyal to your brand. They’re also more likely to tell others about the positive experience and help support your positive brand image.

Ensuring your customers are satisfied and can use your products or services correctly fosters a longer customer lifetime and improved customer lifetime value (CLV), both of which can help your business grow with adequate support.

How To Create or Improve Your Customer Support Strategy in 5 Steps

A successful customer support strategy considers all types of customer interactions and prepares to handle them with appropriate attention to detail. Here are several ideas you can use to improve your customer support strategy and increase the likelihood of customers walking away happy:

Invest in a Prepared Support Team

The first thing you need to do to ensure an excellent customer service experience is to train your support team. A prepared support team is ready to tackle almost any situation that comes its way thanks to having an adequate background in possible customer issues and resolutions they can offer.

It is extremely important to coach your agents on all support situations. Talk about the preferences the company has for handling technical support problems, complaints, and other types of customer support issues. By doing so in advance, your agents will be more likely to be able to handle even the most distraught customer’s problem.

In addition to doing these things, remember that you need to help your customer service team develop skills such as empathy or problem-solving, which will allow them to handle almost any problem that comes their way with the grace and attention to detail that customers expect.

Choose Adequate Tools

Another thing you can do to improve your customer support strategy is to meet your customers where they are with the right tools to help. Customers often prefer to reach out through different communication options, such as social media messaging or email. In fact, 93% of customers have stated that they spend more money with companies that have customer support available through their preferred communication channels. It’s in your brand’s best interest to choose those preferred tools to support your agents in answering questions and tackling issues across multiple channels.

For example, with AI-powered communications in a single inbox, Podium helps you reply to customers across multiple channels, including social media messages, calls, chats, and texts. With this kind of inbox, it’s easier to provide an excellent customer experience by responding to all your leads in five minutes or less from a single tool.

Focus on the Customer in Each Interaction

Your customer experience team can make a big difference in how customers perceive your brand by being personable and focusing on the customer during each interaction. Customers should always be treated like the individuals they are, not like numbers or just another support ticket.

Whenever possible, your support agents should try to handle a customer’s problem independently. In the case that they need to hand the customer off to another agent who can help them, they should be polite, give the customer more information about why they’re assigning them to another agent, and ensure their questions are answered as clearly as possible before they’re transferred.

To avoid sending customers from one agent to another, your brand can build a knowledge base. That knowledge base should be accessible to all of your customer service agents, so they can deliver customer service with knowledge, authority, and empathy.

It’s necessary to ensure your customers have a good experience if you want to improve customer retention. Happy customers are loyal customers.

Measure and Improve

Measuring your customer support team’s results is necessary to know how well they’re performing and if you need to take action to improve it. You can measure customer service results in several ways.

One of those ways is through the use of a Net Promoter Score (NPS). A Net Promoter Score (NPS) determines if customers are likely to spread the positive word about your company. In other words, it will tell you if customers refer your brand to others.

Other options to learn more about your customer service agents and the services they provide include customer surveys, feedback requests, and Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) metrics.

Prioritize Downtime

As a final aspect of your customer support strategy, remember that everyone who works in customer support needs some downtime to unwind. This downtime is particularly important when the customer service agent has had a tough call or difficult interaction with an angry, frustrating, or exhausting customer.

To provide great customer service every time, downtime to relax, cool down, unwind, and find balance is key.

5 Customer Support Best Practices

Your customer support reps need to provide the highest quality service possible. Here are several best practices your team should consider when providing customer support:

1. Make Customer Support Fast and Easily Accessible

Customer support should always be fast and easy to access. Whether that means adding a live chat to your website and letting customers click to chat or placing your phone number at the top of the site’s page, you should make it easy to see how to contact customer support.

2. Train Your Team With Hard and Soft Skills

Your customer support agents need to have both hard and soft skills to handle customer concerns correctly. Hard skills, such as customer management skills, training on your preferred computer programs and apps, and reading and writing skills, help them get the physical parts of the job done.

Soft skills, such as learning to communicate, building empathy and patience, learning decision-making techniques, and collaborating with others, can help your customer service reps interact with customers in positive ways and improve the overall customer experience.

3. Automate Certain Steps of the Process

It may be possible to automate some parts of the customer service process. As a part of your customer support plan, you may decide to use a tool like Podium’s AI Employee, for example. This helpful tool can respond to your customers within moments, helping improve communication and ensure no customer inquiry is left unseen. Keep in mind that automation must be closely monitored and as personalized as possible so customers feel they’re receiving appropriate care from a representative who can really help.

4. Personalize Interaction

Automation helps you respond to customers quickly, but you shouldn’t put automation features above personalized support. Not all AI tools are created the same. While something like a chatbot can help you serve more customers, the wrong chatbot can feel repetitive and like a one-size-fits-all solution. Problematically, automation features like chatbots can misunderstand questions or provide canned answers that help very few customers seeking support. That’s why Podium’s AI Employee was built to be intuitive and empathetic to provide the best customer support possible.

To improve customer interactions, you need to provide human-like support. Customers want their names to be used, to be transferred to a human agent if they need one, and to know that their needs are important to your brand..

5. Self-Support Options

Sometimes, customers can get more done by handling their technical issues on their own. Beneficially, when they are able to do that, you free up your own customer support team’s time.

To help customers handle minor issues on their own, start by creating a knowledge base. A good knowledge base will have basic FAQs, content such as how-to articles or product walkthroughs, and more.

3 Real-World Customer Support Examples

There is no better way to see excellent customer support in action than by looking at real-life examples. Here are three real-world situations that reflect high-quality support from big brands.

1. Amazon

Amazon is one of the most well-known operations in the world, and it didn’t get there with sub-par customer service. It makes its customer service agents stick to six customer support principles.

The rules include advocating for the customer, trusting them and the associates to make good judgment calls about their requests, and anticipating the customer’s needs. It also requires that all customer service agents deliver personalized support, escalate problems when necessary, and eliminate customer effort by providing support by an expert associate (or through other approved means, such as self-support).

2. Disney

Disney offers excellent customer service. In fact, its customer service is so good that it’s something customers often talk about.

Disney has a simple set of guidelines that its team members have to stick to on the job. They include smiling and making eye contact, welcoming customers, looking for ways to interact with guests, providing service immediately when needed, managing body language, preserving the guest experience, and thanking all guests for their time, feedback, or other interactions.

3. MADE.com

MADE.com is another example of a company with excellent customer service. Unlike Disney, it doesn’t have a large list of requirements for its customer service agents. Instead, it focuses on responding to each and every comment that an audience member leaves for them.

MADE.com also keeps all comments, and it never deletes or ignores them. By doing these things, it shows it values its customers and will reply directly when a concern is raised.

Offer Quality Customer Support With Podium’s AI Employee

Getting back to your customers is easy with a consolidated inbox powered by AI. With Podium’s AI Employee, you can respond to customers day or night, whether your human agents are online or off. Podium’s AI employee communicates directly with customers, helping resolve problems, provides the information they need, or escalates issues when necessary. Watch a demo to see how Podium’s AI Employee can work for you.