Customer Support Evolution

Customer support isn’t the same thing as customer service, although it employs customer service techniques. And it’s not the same thing it was 50, 20, or even 5 years ago — the definition is still evolving.

Client bolster has experienced some sensational changes since that time — beginning with the coming of call focuses in the '60s, when all of a sudden organizations could resolve client issues, if to some degree generically, on a bigger, more proficient scale. 

Pair with expanded rivalry and evaluating weights, that effective however indifferent pattern surged drastically, and by the '80s and '90s, organizations were offloading any administration additional items that couldn't be specifically fixing to their main concern. Administration offices were outsourced to reasonable areas. You could dial one for this and two for that, look out for hold for 60 minutes, at that point begin once again in the wake of being separated. (Obviously, those days aren't altogether finished, however we'll get to that.) 

In the 2000s, we saw the appearance of client mind programming, and in addition clients taking to online networking to voice their sentiments and concerns (and the more brilliant organizations got on to that). Group discussions, for example, Get Satisfaction enabled clients to crowdsource their own help. Stages like Yelp helped individuals recognize "great" organizations from "awful," and Twitter and Facebook gave organizations another intensification stage and their clients another channel to look for help. 

The organizations who comprehended the ROI of these one-on-one connections adjusted rapidly, and they fused well beyond client benefit as a key part of their advertising methodologies. "Group administration" turned into an occupation part and, alongside the multiplication of online help instruments, offered approach to client bolster in its present incarnation.

What is ‘the new customer support’?

Timely, empathetic help that keeps the customer’s needs at the forefront of every interaction.

The new customer support applies the principles of customer service in helping customers solve problems and make decisions, but in addition, functions as part sales, part tech support, and part customer success.

When 86% of customers quit doing business with a company due to a bad customer experience, today’s subscription-model, customer-retention-oriented businesses need to approach every support interaction as an opportunity to acquire, retain or upsell as well.

In the self-service internet age, customers don’t need go-betweens to assist them with what should be simple functions, like canceling their account. Many businesses continue to direct their energies toward protecting revenue by putting these speed bumps in place, but they waste time that could have been spent solving a problem that only a human can solve. And what’s more, people have grown to expect self-service — if you let them get to a point where they have to reach out, you’ve gotten in the way of usage and adoption.

Customer-driven companies remove a lot of that friction by automating that which can be automated and freeing their most valuable resource — their team — to work on problems that can’t be automated away. Hence the shift away from hiring your average “people person,” toward hiring highly skilled, empathetic problem-solvers.

Even the call centers of yore are making way for contact centers: “partners in revenue generation and customer experience, populated with highly educated staff that have career paths and incentives beyond calls-per-minute.”