Customer Support Experience: How to Help and Retain Customers

Customer Support is much more than just solving problems for your customers.

After all, when your customer needs help from you, it creates the perfect opportunity for you to earn their trust for what could be a lifetime.

Today, we will go over how you can provide incredible customer support experiences to your customers and increase your recurring revenue.

Customer Support vs Customer Service

First, we need to detail the difference between Customer Support and Customer Service, as you might be confused between the two.

Customer Service refers to a set of best practices that seek to improve every interaction between the customer and business. It caters to every single one of your customers.

On the other hand, Customer Support seeks to help customers who require special assistance that most customers wouldn’t require. It caters to a subset of your customers who require help.

The confusion between these two terms stems from the fact that Customer Support agents need Customer Service skills to properly do their job. But so do Sales Reps, Cashiers, Marketers and every other employee interacting with customers directly.

Want to learn more? Read about the differences between Customer Support and Customer Service.

Improve your Customer Support Experience

Now it’s time to talk about your customer support operations and how to improve them.

Let’s break it all down.

1. Nail your Customer Support Model

First, you’ll have to decide on a customer support model in order to structure your team.

Does your customer base benefit more from 1-on-1 interactions via phone? What about self-service customer support platforms such as a knowledge base or a support wiki?

Maybe your customers would benefit more from live chat technologies that can integrate with CRM platforms.

Maybe you have enough resources to implement them all.

Read our guide on customer support models and which one is the best for you.

2. Build a Strong Customer Support Team

Now that you’ve chosen a model, it’s time to build a strong customer support team around it.

Carefully choosing the members of your Customer Support team is key in providing a great experience to your customers.

As we mentioned before, you want to make sure that good customer service skills are a big priority when looking for team members.

Want to make sure you’re hiring the right people? Here are the questions you ask during customer support interviews.

3. Start tracking your Customer Support KPIs

Now that you have hired a strong customer support team, it’s time to start tracking your team’s performance.

We encourage you to get into the habit of tracking your Customer Support KPI’s since day one. After all, there’s no better way to know how your team is performing than by tracking their key metrics.

However, you have to keep in mind that KPIs are just indicators and metrics, the context in which they exist is just as important.

For example, your team might be solving more tickets than the prior month, but if customer satisfaction scores are dropping at the same time, something is wrong.

Want to learn more? Check out our guide on customer support KPIs and which metrics you should be tracking.

4. Follow Customer Support Best Practices

You have chosen a support model, hired a team and chosen the support KPIs you want to track.

Now it’s time to get to work. First, you’ll want to make sure that your team is properly on-boarded on the new tools you have implemented.

For this item, we’ve written a guide on how to use live chat for customer support.

Taking it a step forward, you’ll also want to make sure to follow Customer Support Best Practices, including collecting more customer data.

Closing Thoughts

You are now set up to build a strong customer support operation in your business, which will then significantly improve your customer support experience.

And remember the value behind a strong customer support experience. After all, it’s usually cheaper to retain an existing customer than to acquire a new one.