Overview: Customer Support

Supporting Your Customers

Providing support to your customers from your solution is a non-trivial, omni-channel effort. Let’s begin with the first scenario in which you support your customers directly. It should go without saying that one of the most important functions for your business will be supporting your customer once they have signed up. No matter how well your solution is planned, provisioned, operated, or monitored, problems will arise — and those problems will need to be remediated. It’s your job is to offer support to your customers to deal with user issues, outages, breaches, inefficiencies, and disaster scenarios. Solution providers need to consider the level of support that makes sense for their product — in terms of resources and revenue — as well as what makes sense to the customers they serve.

SUPPORT MODEL

How do you package and sell your support? The typical options are to provide support either on a retainer basis (where the customer pays a monthly fee for up to a certain number of “use it or lose it” support hours/instances) or per incident (where the customer pays a fee every time they utilize your support). You must also define your support availability so your customers have a realistic expectation of when they can access your support services.

SUPPORT INFRASTRUCTURE

How will you manage customer support requests and track them to closure? Many businesses offer premium support offerings that support tracking, reporting, and escalating an issue.

ESCALATION PROCESS

How does a customer get help at the right technical level? For your support process to make economic sense, avoid having your most skilled and most expensive resources answer every support call. For your particular solution offering, consider implementing a tiered support offering of junior-level staff that are equipped to handle common issues. These staff members should be equipped to escalate a customer support case to a more senior-level support staff member once the common issues have been ruled out. You will need to decide how many levels of tiered support to offer, but two to three tiers are most common. When defining your escalation process, do not forget about the basics. For example, how do customers get in touch with you for support in the first place? This could be a dedicated support telephone number, chat widget, forum, Twitter handle, email address, etc.

Tips on Support System Requirements

CREATE CONSISTENCY AND LOYALTY

Provide the seamless service your customers expect by meeting them where they are with the information they need, every time.

• Give customers great service on their channel of choice.
• Make help easy by providing relevant, personalized service.
• Proactively address issues by detecting customers’ intent and social sentiment.

MAKE YOUR AGENTS’ JOBS EASIER

Give your agents complete information — in a single customer service software app — to make smart decisions and provide great service.

• Reveal customers’ case histories, preferences, and feedback.
• Provide guidance on entitlements and service-level agreements.
• Display it all in a single interface tailored to their job and skill set.