Exceptional customer support is crucial to a business. Customers value businesses that offer superior after-sales support. Therefore, having a dynamic and highly-available customer support channel is critical to the success of a business.
A well-oiled customer support mechanism is what truly separates a business from its competitors. A supported customer is a happy customer, and a happy customer buys more, promotes more and is loyal. On the contrary, bad customer support will lead to the customers finding better alternates.
Having customer support channels is essential to attain and retain customers. Customers become loyal, and their lifetime value increases. Also, while serving the customers, the business can develop tremendous insights into the customer problems, product expectations and potential revenue streams.
Customer support is the true test of a business's service or product quality. After-sales, the business needs to have a real-time understanding of the product or service's performance. This will allow the business to evaluate features, pricing, positioning and more. Interaction with the customer from an Agile development point-of-view is worth in gold.
Faithful customers help a business grow in many ways: Statistics show that loyal customers are four times more likely to buy from the company and twice more likely to refer. A loyal customer will spend more money and invest more time than new customers. A loyal customer is an excellent source of referrals.
The accurate measure of competent customer support is the highly-available nature of it. What is the point of a customer support channel which is inactive! Ideally, a customer support channel should be available 24-7, but 12-7 is an acceptable standard.
Customer support is fulfilling for customers when the business representative identifies them by their personal preferences. By knowing the name, personal preferences and profile, A business will be better positioned to understand the customers and might be able to cross-sell or up-sell services.
Customer support needs to be solving problems for the customer. There is no value to customer support that doesn't 'support'. The mechanism needs to ultimately deliver a successful solution to the query or issue that a customer has faced. Customers develop a sense of trust when ever-ready, skilled, and problem-solving customer care is backing them up.
Customer support needs to be proactive. The ultimate aim of the customer support exercise has to be solving a problem for the paying customer. While solving a problem, the business might realise a lacuna - that could be corrected or compensated. The company might discover a new opportunity - that could be created as a new service or a product vertical.