Customer support vs customer success – two terms that have been seen as the same function in some companies, while also operating as completely separate groups within others. While customer support is key to solving customer problems and producing great experiences, customer success is responsible for empowering customers, keeping them happy on your platform/ through your services, and bringing them back for more.
As Kelly Uhlrich, Vice President and General Manager of CX company Humach, explains, “the proper focus and investment of time and budget requires a more strategic approach. It’s not a marketing problem or a technology initiative.” Authentic customer-focused culture is far more exhaustive than just researching your customer experience or observing a segment of your market.
Customer service has grown to become a critical function across industries including airlines, software companies, retail, and even real estate companies. Because of this, a career in customer service is growing in popularity, while companies and individual employers continue to struggle with scaling their support teams as their business grows.
When chatbots were first introduced in customer support, they were only capable of executing rule-based commands that often led to poor customer experiences. Chatbot features back then weren’t developed keeping user experience in mind, and caused frustration instead of offering solutions. Chatbots have evolved over time, but so have customer expectations. Customers today do not accept experiences that are less than ideal.
All sorts of businesses need to provide service desk solutions, whether to help with in-house issues encountered by employees, or to better assist customers with whatever problems they encounter. Of course it’s not enough to simply set up a service desk and hope for the best; you have to put strategies in place to optimize the effectiveness of this resource, and to extract every drop of value from it as well.
