Customer Support vs Customer Service: What’s the Difference?

Customer Support and Customer Service.

These terms are used almost interchangeably across most industries.

After all, these two do share a large number of similarities. However, if you want to get down to the technicalities and details of Customer Service and Customer Support, there are very detailed differences.

First, we’ll need to break down and define each of these concepts.

What is Customer Service?

Customer Service refers to a set of processes and best practices that seek to improve the interactions between customers and business during all stages of the purchasing process.

Customer Service starts from the moment a customer becomes interested in a business and its products to months or years after their purchase.

The end goal of customer service is to make sure that every single customer has a pleasant experience when interacting with the business. 96% of customers  will leave you for bad customer service.

What is Customer Support?

Customer Support refers to a specific set of interactions that a customer might or might not share with a business.

For example, you can picture this scenario: a customer enters a store, is nicely greeted, quickly finds what they needed, quickly goes through check out while chit-chatting with the cashier and exits the store feeling pleased with their purchase.

While that customer experienced good customer service, they did not require customer support.

Customer Support focuses on assisting only certain customers who might need further assistance out of the ordinary. This generally involves customers who might be running into issues or have questions that might need a one-to-one interaction to answer.

What is the difference between Customer Support and Customer Service?

The difference between customer support and customer service is that customer service is a set of processes and best practices that are aimed at improving customer interactions, while customer support is a specific set of customer interactions that are aimed at assisting only certain customers who might need further assistance.

Both customer service and customer support are important for businesses as they seek to create positive customer experiences. However, customer support is more focused on assisting customers who are running into issues or have questions that might need a one-to-one interaction to answer.

Closing Thoughts

As you can see, the difference between Customer Service and Customer support is quite subtle.

However, most businesses still use these terms almost interchangeably. So, in reality, the difference between these two terms won’t matter in most cases.What does matter is providing good customer service throughout your purchasing process. Here’s why Customer Service is important and how it can increase your business’ revenue.

Originally published Nov 11, 2019, updated January 24, 2022