Seventy-three percent of consumers say a good experience is key in influencing their brand loyalties. If they’re not satisfied with the support they receive, they’re quick to leave.
You need to provide exceptional customer support to keep your customers happy and prevent them from going to your competitors.
In this blog post, we’ll define customer support and differentiate it from customer service. Then, we’ll explore these seven key strategies that’ll help you achieve customer satisfaction:
- Prioritizing proactive communication
- Offering multichannel and omnichannel support
- Creating a knowledge base
- Personalizing interactions
- Continuously training your support team
- Implementing customer feedback loops
- Instilling empathy as a core value
What is Customer Support?
Customer support encompasses the services provided to customers before, during, and after a purchase. It involves addressing customer questions, resolving issues, and ensuring a positive customer experience. Customer support is critical in strengthening customer loyalty, as it directly influences how customers perceive a brand.
Effective customer support is more than traditional transactions. It focuses on building relationships. It involves actively listening to customers, understanding their needs, and providing solutions that increase their satisfaction.
Related: 11 Customer Support Tools for Your Business
What’s the Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Support?
While the terms “customer support” and “customer service” are often used interchangeably, they have distinct roles within the realm of customer-centric activities.
Customer Service
Customer service is a broader concept that includes all interactions between a customer and a business. It covers aspects such as marketing, sales, and the overall customer experience.
Customer service is a holistic approach that aims to provide a seamless customer experience at every touchpoint.
Customer Support
On the other hand, customer support is a subset of customer service specifically focused on addressing customers’ concerns, questions, and issues. It involves providing assistance and guidance to customers, ensuring they have a smooth experience with the product or service.
While customer service is about the overall experience, customer support focuses on the reactive elements of helping customers when they encounter challenges.
7 Customer Support Strategies That Keep Customers Happy
Now that we’ve established a foundational understanding of customer support, here are seven crucial strategies for your business to implement to ensure customer support success.
1. Prioritize Proactive Communication
Initiate proactive communication by providing helpful information before customers ask for it. Anticipate common questions and provide resources such as FAQs, tutorials, and guides. Proactive communication reduces customer frustration, minimizes negative experiences, and prevents potential issues.
In addition to anticipating needs, responding quickly to customer questions is a critical aspect of proactive communication. Swift responses show customers that their concerns are a priority. Use automated responses to acknowledge questions and for quick follow-ups.
The best way to quickly, and personally, follow-up with a customer is to use an automated texting tool like Skipio.
Connect faster and in the most convenient way by adding Skipio’s webchat, Web2Txt, to your site. You’ll close more support tickets because you’ll be able to immediately send personalized text messages to every customer. You can also set up automated messages to quickly and efficiently handle common customer questions and outreach.
2. Offer Multichannel and Omnichannel Support
Multichannel customer support means offering support across multiple channels to meet customers on their preferred platforms. Whether it’s email, live chat, phone support, text support, or even social media, being accessible across various channels ensures that customers can reach out in the way that suits them best.
It provides customers with the flexibility to engage with your company on their terms, enhancing convenience and satisfaction.
Seventy percent of customers expect all customer support reps that they interact with to have the full context of the situation. That’s why having omnichannel support is so important.
Omnichannel customer support goes a step further than customer service and provides consistent communication across all channels. The customer’s conversation history and context travel from channel to channel, allowing your support team to provide more personalized support.
This type of support helps you resolve issues faster, provide more personalized experiences, and reduce churn.
3. Create a Knowledge Base
A well-organized and comprehensive knowledge base empowers customers to find answers independently. This self-service customer support approach saves customers and your support team time. Include articles, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides to help customers quickly and to reduce the workload on your support team.
Regularly update and expand the knowledge base to cover new features, issues, and best practices.
4. Personalize Interactions
Personal customer support builds genuine relationships and connections with your customers. To do this, provide support that goes beyond just mentioning a customer’s first name, standard script, or one-size-fits-all solution.
Use customer data to tailor recommendations, content, and interactions based on individual preferences and behaviors. Send personalized recommendations, answers to questions, or even exclusive offers.
Doing this treats customers like people and not just like ticket numbers. It enhances their customer experience by creating a sense of connection and value.
5. Continuously Train your Support Team
Products and services are constantly evolving, and so should the knowledge and skills of your support team. Invest in ongoing training for customer support teams to help them stay updated on product updates and features, industry trends, and best practices for effective communication.
Regular training sessions, workshops, and access to relevant resources contribute to a highly skilled and responsive support team. They can provide more accurate and timely assistance, increasing customer satisfaction.
6. Implement Customer Feedback Loops
Actively seek and analyze customer feedback. Learn about customers’ support experiences, pain points, and suggestions for improvement. Analyze these insights to identify recurring issues and areas for improvement. Continuously improve products, services, and support processes based on the feedback you receive.
A feedback process like this helps ensure your customer support aligns with evolving customer expectations.
7. Instill Empathy as a Core Value
Infusing empathy into customer interactions isn’t just a strategy. It should be a core value of any customer support team.
Empathy involves understanding and acknowledging the customer’s emotions, actively listening to their concerns, and expressing genuine care for them. Showing empathy in ways like this can turn a negative experience into a positive one.
To start showing empathy in your customer support
- match your tone to the customer’s tone
- apologize for late responses
- don’t discourage customers from contacting support
Support teams that prioritize empathy in their interactions turn routine support interactions into meaningful connections, which creates long-term customer loyalty.
Customer Support is the Key to Business Success
By following these seven strategies, your business will be able to provide exceptional customer support. As a result, you’ll build customer loyalty, reduce churn, and increase customer satisfaction.
