Modern Customer Support

Modern customer support, and its characteristics are actually pretty straightforward. If you’re prompt, if you’re answering questions with the right product knowledge and if you’re doing it with a tone that backs up your brand, then you’re providing good customer support.

For a SaaS company today, this type of modern customer support can be delivered by focusing on three things:

• Hire great people that are really excited about your product
• Give them tons of product knowledge
• Teach them how you talk to customers

Whether you describe your team as customer support, customer service or customer success, start with these three simple things and it’s hard to go wrong.

• Modern customer support is expensive. But it’s an investment.

Einstein described compound interest as the eighth wonder of the world. “Those who understand it, earn it. Those who don’t, pay it.” While modern customer support isn’t a revenue generating tool, it is something that pays off for your brand in the long run.

For example, the safest way to invest in the stock market is to put away the same amount of money over a regular period of time. If you don’t adjust your behavior, and keep your investments really diversified, you’ll eventually build a fortune. The same goes for customer support teams. If you want a great support team you need to keep investing in it, and keep adding to the team at the right rate so that the work is getting done properly.

• The importance of consistency

A key ingredient of modern customer support is consistency. Every customer support experience should be an absolute reflection of the way the CEO talks, the way your product talks, or the way your marketing team talks. A customer should never feel like they’re getting a different experience in your onboarding, and then a different experience with customer support. It should all be seamless.

• Make it a priority from the start

Zappos’ culture of customer support didn’t happen by accident. It started with customer support having a seat at the top table of the organisation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence Intercom’s founders made a customer support person their fourth hire. By spending so much time designing and building, they knew they weren’t doing a great job answering Intercom’s very earliest customers. If they didn’t give those customers a great experience, they weren’t going to tell other people about it and build that cycle of organic growth.

By having dedicated customer support early, it’s also easier for them to stay connected to the product and to know everything about it. Bringing in customer support retrospectively automatically creates a sort of division.

That said, it’s always possible to build a bridge between your support and product teams

The benefits of modern customer support are two-fold: it reduces churn and provides word of mouth-driven growth for your business.

The first one is obvious. If you give your customers a crap customer experience, or if you refuse to invest in customer support and let it degrade over time, you’ll see a slow migration of users to a competitor who looks after them better. Good customer support is one of the best ways of avoiding churn for any company.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nI8hSGqM_w