Customer Support Services
Customer support is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.
Widely considered to include a range of services that help customers optimise their use of a product or service, customer-support agents help customers with anything concerning installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading or disposal of a particular product or service.
These teams are often the modern incarnation of internal technical support that most companies used to employ. The rise of software as a service (SaaS) made remote installation and operation of software much easier, leaving traditional tech-support teams open to concentrating on more interesting tasks that focus on partnership – presenting an opportunity to go beyond explaining why #REF! keeps popping up on someone’s spreadsheets. SaaS and the rise of e-commerce also contributed to the shift, as customer support grew into a prevalent part of the business that was, previously, only necessary in physical shops.
These support agents are experts in your product line. They should be capable of diverse and proactive technical support, while maintaining the patience and people skills to guide frustrated customers towards a solution. A customer-support interaction begins when the customer contacts you on their preferred channel with a problem, and the interaction should not end until the customer is satisfied with the help they've received. Customer-support interactions aren’t the best time to push products and services – no one wants a hard sell in the middle of dealing with a stressful issue – but good customer service might open the door to this type of conversation in the future.
