It is preferable to have a specific tool for customer service to deliver real customer care. Your customer care team may start concentrating on crucial areas of assistance like proactive support, self-service, and more by providing them with tools made expressly to deliver seamless services, such as a knowledge base or a support chatbot. Let’s discuss the differences between customer support and customer service and how Sales CRM can help the teams improve their task efficiency
What is customer service?
Helping customers with their more general, non-technical needs—from locating a product to invoicing, upgrading, or even getting a refund—is the goal of customer service. Customer care and satisfaction should always come first, and a company’s customer service department’s main goal is to support clients throughout their purchasing process.
Although it may sound like customer service, it isn’t the case. Here’s why.
What is customer support?
A more specialized area of providing customer service and managing technical issues is customer support. Agents of customer service usually possess more in-depth technical knowledge.
But in the present era, customer service can even be automated with bots trying to assist users. Customer support aims to provide technical assistance to help resolve customers’ problems, whether you use human agents or automated systems.
Customer Service vs Customer Support
| Customer Service | Customer Support |
| Usually an entry-level position with limited opportunities for future advancement outside of management roles | Many possibilities for growth in addition to management. |
| Focuses on friendly, efficient client interactions | Focuses on enhancing the interface between the product and the customer experience. |
| Measures transactional parameters such as initial contact resolution, average handle time, and CSAT. | Examines business-related indicators such as net promoter score, customer effort score, and turnover in addition to transactional information. |
| Every sector that provides customer service has openings, including retail, fast food, banking, hospitality, etc. | Positions are typically available in e-commerce and SaaS enterprises. |
| Connects clients to pre-existing solutions and answers | Involves identifying new solutions and answers as well as troubleshooting and addressing technical problems. |
Why customer service and customer support are both important
Important facets of the customer experience include both customer assistance and customer service. Notwithstanding their variations, customer assistance and service both improve a company’s reputation in several ways:
- Promotes satisfaction: Following a contact, both kinds of services have the potential to raise client satisfaction and encourage repeat business.
- Establishes trust: When a company is dependable to respond to questions or issues professionally, it fosters a degree of confidence with its clients.
- Builds a loyal customer base: Consumers who experience a sense of caring are more likely to stick with a brand, make additional purchases, and advocate for it by telling others about it.
- Controls reputation: Good customer service encounters can enhance a business’s reputation with prospective customers and enhance its overall perception.
- Improves retention: Long-term clients are more inclined to stick with a company when they are pleased with their service and feel devoted to the brand.
Building the foundation for a positive client connection is essentially the significance of offering excellent customer service and assistance.
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Bonus tips for great customer service/support
Provide your team with the right tools.
Having a team of experts is crucial when it comes to customer service or support. However, to maximize their efficiency, you must arm your team with the appropriate resources. Customer inquiries from various sources must be handled by customer service and support. They may therefore perform poorly as a result of switching between interfaces.
Assist your clients in assisting themselves
“40% of customers now prefer self-service over human contact/interaction” is an interesting support statistic from
Yes, in this day and age, clients would much rather solve their problems than contact customer care or assistance. Because of this, you must include Knowledgebase content on your website, including How-to tutorials.
You run the danger of the consumer selecting a rival over you if you don’t offer this option.
You have around fifteen seconds to grab the user’s interest. In reality, it’s probably not even fifteen seconds. Thus, having a suitable self-service customer support portal is essential.
Offer assistance in multiple channels.
Verify that the appropriate support teams are reachable by phone, email, chat, social media, and other methods. This will enable you to assist customers at each point of contact and throughout their whole journey.
A customer support representative utilizing a cloud contact center, for instance, can keep an eye out on social media for mentions of your company in messages, tags, or comments.
In this manner, your service person can promptly connect a client who is having technical difficulties with the appropriate support agent.
Pay attention to feedback from customers.
Feedback is by far the best way to enhance your customer service and support. It’s the most effective approach to learn what your business is doing well and poorly.
Statistics from SuperOffice support indicate that 86% of consumers are willing to pay more for excellent customer service.
Using customer service software is one alternative if you do not currently offer the ability for customers to provide feedback. You can use it to provide customer service surveys with ease. For example, you can incorporate surveys for feedback following every live chat session.
Evaluate your team’s skills.
Soft skills are crucial to consider during the employment process. Technical proficiency is important, especially when starting a tech support team, but in addition, agents should be patient, empathic, and solution-focused when working with clients. Additionally, this needs to be supported by continuing coaching and training.
Elate sales CRM enables your service and support teams
By consolidating client information and interactions onto a single platform, a CRM system such as Elate Sales CRM helps improve customer care and support. In this manner, several teams may swiftly obtain information and offer more individualized problem-solving experiences. Elate sales CRM also simplifies processes, collects reports, and automates repetitive operations for your teams, all of which contribute to higher service quality overall.
Let’s examine some of Elate sales CRM’s capabilities in more detail and see how they might benefit support and service teams.
Task automation
You may design personalized automation using Elate Sales CRM, eliminating the need for manual labor. For instance, you can program automation to send a client an email whenever you modify the status of their query on your board. This saves teams time and guarantees that those little but crucial jobs won’t be overlooked.
Integrations
With more than 200 apps and integrations, you can keep using the same productivity tools that your team is accustomed to. Elate sales CRM allows you to integrate all of the tools for your support team in one location by integrating with programs such as Freshdesk, Service Buddy, Zendesk, and more.
Collaboration components
To make sure the proper person is managing each customer case, users on Elate sales CRM can add updates on each job, tag collaborators, or allocate assignments to specific agents or departments. When a client contacts a customer care representative via a technical problem, the agent can quickly forward all the relevant data to a technical support agent with only a few clicks.
Contact management
Elate sales CRM makes it simple for customer service and support teams to maintain contacts in one location. Elate sales CRM simplifies the process of collecting and storing customer data. This enables businesses to offer more personalized customer experiences based on factors such as past interactions.
The collaboration between customer service and customer support
While not every organization may require customer care and support, those that do must function seamlessly and cooperatively to provide outstanding customer experiences. Building trust and loyalty, improving brand perceptions, and ensuring a customer-oriented approach to customer care are all made possible by seamless coordination between support and service. Whether it’s a general question or a technical issue, customer service staff can collaborate and deliver the finest solutions by using a platform such as Elate sales CRM.