Customer service and customer support play a crucial role in providing a great customer experience and winning customer loyalty. However, there are still differences between them that you need to point out. Sometimes, it could be a challenge for you to fully understand the differences.
Once you have understood, you can define each team’s responsibilities more clearly, build a better work structure and maximize customer satisfaction by giving them exactly the service they need.
In this article, we help you fully understand the differences between customer service and customer support and provide you with the best tips to help you develop services better. Let’s dive in immediately.
Table of Contents
- What is customer service?
- What is customer support?
- Why is it important to have excellent customer service and customer support?
- Differences between customer service and customer support
- 4 tips to provide great customer service and customer support.
- Providing great services and support makes your business grow
What is customer service?
Customer service is a big term that covers the act of supporting larger and non-technical problems of a customer. It can be anywhere on the customer journey, from the first time customers interact with a brand’s touchpoint, to after they have used your products or service. Customer service teams aim to support customers throughout their life cycle and make sure that customers take value out of most of your offerings.
There are some common types of customer services you should know:
- Provide customers with useful blogs, knowledge, and content containing their needed information.
- Give customers self-service such as FAQs.
- Provide customers with after-purchase services such as insurance.
- Use Social media support, email support, live chat support, interactive voice support, etc.
What is customer support?
Customer support is the act of supporting and providing help when customers have trouble with products or services. Moreover, Customer support teams aim to solve customer questions and close tickets, and ensure that customers are satisfied with the company.
There are some common acts of customer support:
- Onboarding new customers.
- Answer customers’ questions on social media and in communities.
- Resolve customer questions about technical and non-technical issues.
- Help customers with billing and delivering issues.
- Ask for reviews and feedback from customers.
Why is it important to have excellent customer service and customer support?
The role of customer service
By providing top-notch customer service, your business can generate more marketing and sales opportunities, increase customer retention, find opportunities to up-sell or cross-sell, and improve the products or services quality. Moreover, your business can achieve customer satisfaction and loyalty to your brand.
The role of customer support
The customer support team is a necessary part of any successful business that offers products or services. This team contributes to achieving customer satisfaction, customer engagement, and customer retention.
Each support team must develop specific skills and capabilities aligned with unique customer needs. They need to have a deep understanding of the products and services to solve particular customers’ non-technical or technical questions. Moreover, support teams also need to develop an alignment with sales teams. Therefore, 2 teams need to work with the same vision and metrics with the aim to satisfy the customers.
Differences between customer service and customer support
Although both customer service and customer support aims are to focus on achieving customer satisfaction, they approach it in some different ways
| Customer service | Customer support |
| Applied to the entire customer lifecycle with the aim to get more value out of the product or service they purchased. | The acting of directly supporting customers in solving and troubleshooting technical problems |
| Long-term proactive interaction consists of business guiding in the entire customer lifecycle. | Short-term reactive interactions respond to customers’ questions whenever a customer has a problem. |
| Available in any industry that serves customers such as fast food, banking, hospital, etc. | Available in some companies such as SaaS, tech, and e-commerce. |
| Mostly used to measure transactional metrics like CSAT, average handle time, and first contact resolution | Mostly used to measure business-related metrics like net promoter score, customer effort score, and churn |
| Not always involve customer support | Involve customer service |
4 tips to provide great customer service and customer support.
Provide the right tool for your teams
Providing your teams with the right tools will allow them to serve and support customers more efficiently. It also impresses your customers with how fast and professional your teams are.
NestDesk can help you to reach out to customers across all channels. NestDesk is an omnichannel customer support app to help turn your browsers into customers. Furthermore, with NestDesk, you can easily improve your customer’s service and customer support by using many great features:
- No more missing conversation because NestDesk integrates all your channels to gather your customers into only one place.
- The private note allows agents to leave specific tickets about customer insight. It is very important to improve your internal operations. Besides, The private note is only visible to your agents.
- Easy-to-reach customer information because it is shown right on the chat dashboard.
- Automation rules enable your teams to quickly respond to your frequently asked customer’s questions.
Personalize customer service
Survey shows that 40% of customers say they want better human service. Besides, Customers want to talk to a real person, not a bot, to solve their specific questions.
Moreover, companies need to gather customer data about the individual customer’s hobbies, interests, birthdays, etc. It helps service systems find out customers’ insights. Thus, your services and support teams can reach and talk to customers like you know who they are. That’s when NestDesk comes to help you. By using NestDesk, you can have your customer information shown next to your messages. Moreover, internal notes let you leave tickets about customer insight to inform your teammates to support customers better.
By providing personal customer service, your company will win customer loyalty, and customer retention and generate more sales.
Communicate clearly and friendly
Clear information is the key when you communicate with customers. If there is a missing piece of information, it will lead to customer misunderstanding or confusion which can damage customer brand loyalty.
To communicate clearly, try to use simple words. Simple as much as possible. Besides, don’t overwhelm customers with too much information, technical jargon, or industry slang. Sometimes, it is okay to let your customer know you may not know the answer and will get to the customer soon after you find the answers.
On the other hand, being positive and friendly is one of the most important keys to winning customer impressions and loyalty to your brand. Thus, the right attitude of your customer support can change a negative customer experience into a positive one.
Emails or SMS lack body language and facial expression. This can lead to the customers misunderstanding your text messages. Therefore, try to use some emojis and positive words to express your friendly attitude towards your customers. Other ways, don’t be afraid to pick up your phone and help your customers.
Listen to customers’ feedback
The best way to improve your products and services is through a feedback system. It’s one of the most important factors in your product development. Without listening to your customers, it’s hard to create what products they want.
Making room for customer feedback is necessary. The Customer support and services team can gather feedback by asking directly through emails, SMS, or face-to-face calling.
Once you receive feedback from customers, you need to manage it well. It’s such a good thing to have positive feedback. However, there is some negative towards your services and products.
Try to keep a positive and friendly attitude to solve them. By doing so, your company can win much more customer loyalty.
Providing great services and support makes your business grow
Customer services and support are the most important teams of your company. Making them work efficiently means your business is going to scale. By using NestDesk, we will help you to support customers across all channels and turn your browsers into new customers. With many great features such as integrating all channels, private notes, automation rules, and easy-to-access customer information which enable your teams to support customers whenever they need, in only one platform.
