What is Customer Support?

When it comes to buying decisions, people in the past made their choices based on several factors like price, quantity, and quality. Today, a lot has changed. The overall customer experience often referred to as the brand experience, counts as the main factor in the buying decision process.

As a business owner, client, manager or potential buyer, this post will offer you an insight on what customer support is all about, what you should expect or do when it comes to customer support, depending on your view-point.

🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth  🚀

What is Customer Support?

Customer support is a word business and customers use or come across almost every day. However let’s pause for a moment, cast aside what we know, and look critically into the meaning of this two worded phrase.

The most basic definition of customer support is that it’s a support company provides to their clients or customers before, during and after the purchase. Digging a little deeper into the definition of support, it’s a support company provides to clients or customers by supporting them with valuable information and assistance. Furthermore, customer support agents solve any challenges they might encounter regarding the company’s goods and services in order to create a trusting environment.

The support that customers expect from the company is not restricted to the point of sales. Rather the opposite, customers expect the support before, during and after they have made a purchase. 

Today customer support has gone beyond the traditional telephone support agent. Supports can be rendered via various media which include email, online chats, SMS messages, social media and many more. In order to help customers access help 24 hours a day, some service providers create a self-service system (chatbot or a knowledge base) which answers most of the questions a customer could have, even when there’s no available agent to attend to them.

Therefore if you want to grow your business and retain your customers, you can’t do it successfully without being a customer-centric brand. You should set up a customer-centric strategy that will help you not only manage your sales with customers but also develop a customer relationship management system for your company.

Find out more about your customers; let them know that they are actually the king from the way you attend to them.

Why Customer Support is Important in Running a Successful Business

Today there are lots of businesses that offer a similar level of customer services or sell similar products. Some of these services or products are regulated which means, there might be little or no difference when it comes to pricing.

In such situations, what normally sways a customer to a particular vendor is customer support and customer experience. Running a customer-centric organization is the key to retaining customers in the midst of business competition.

According to Gartner Research, 89% of companies today compete with their competitors on the basis of customer experience. When your customer service support agents go the extra mile to make a customer happy while rendering your services, it creates room for you to upsell and even sell other relevant services to the customer.

Bad customer relationship management as you already know is the fastest key to driving away customers. About 68% of customers have driven away when they get upset with the way they were treated. Do not let this happen to your business.

Customer Support Benefits

In order to attract and retain your customers, run your business in a way that your customers have a customer-centric experience. This implies amazing customer service, good brand experience, personalized shopping, and fun marketing campaigns tailored to their preferences. This will not just make them loyal customers; it will attract more customers to your business and have a greater impact on your business bottom line. Read about the best examples of omnichannel marketing strategies from omnichannel first brands! 

With the internet being accessible to almost everyone globally, it’s quite easy to build a bad reputation for your brand just by treating a single customer badly or have him less satisfied. With messages, tweets, and comments spreading like wildfire across the social media networks, a single bad review can lead to the destruction of your business.

On the other hand, you can leverage the power of social media to build more reputation for yourself when your customer experience is excellent. Bear in mind that the strongest marketing is often the word-of-mouth or recommendation marketing. Just like one bad review can lead to company destruction, one happy customer can bring you up to 10 new clients! And this means, more profits and increased brand awareness.

Customer Support is the New Marketing

In conclusion, building a customer-centric brand is not just the latest trend but something you must get on with. It’s a smart business direction and strategy. When you put your customers first, they won’t just love you, you will also have your profits increased as customers are always willing to pay more for a better experience. So now that you know how important customer support is, it’s time to stop thinking of it as a cost center. Recognize it as a great opportunity or channel to build profits, leverage its power and get your business to the next level.