Customer support. Customer experience. Customer success. Whatever you call it, customer support is THE key to a thriving and long-lasting business. A business is not a business without its customers, and a business that ignores or mistreats its customers will not be a business for long.
There is countless research out there, such as this article from Forbes that states that it can be 5-25 (!) times more expensive to acquire new customers vs retaining them. If a customer is not happy because of your customer support and leaves, then you not only lose any revenue from them, but you lose an additional 5-25 times that to acquire a new customer, not including revenue lost from potential negative reviews about your company. That doesn’t sound like a good deal to me, which is why I work as hard as I can to keep our current clients happy and moving forward. This all comes with the bonus that they are more likely to recommend our services if they are treated well!
If you ask anyone who has been around the field of customer support for a while, they will agree that it is a changing field, especially with the development of AI and other technologies. What hasn’t changed though, are the key fundamentals on how to approach each and every interaction with your customers.
Below are what I consider my personal fundamentals for how to create and maintain long lasting customer support relationships.
The Three Fundamentals of Customer Support
1. Empathy
Your customers, no matter what size business they have, are all trying to create success for their company or themselves. We never know what another person is going through and this translates very well into business as well since we never know what hardships, personal or business, that a person is having at any moment. What we in customer support may consider as a trivial and non-issue request, to them, it may mean the world and may mean the difference between making or losing money or an even more valuable commodity, their time. By treating others as we would like to be treated ourselves and remembering that everyone has their own stuff going on, we can be patient and lead with empathy to help our customers the best of our ability.
2. Curiosity
Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?
All of the 5 W’s plus How may not always be applicable to handling support requests, but their basic premise of asking questions and seeking to fully understand always apply. There is nothing as disheartening for a customer who speaks to support and receives “Oh yes, I totally understand” and then does not solve the issue, because they in fact, did not “totally understand”. In order to fix things and make things better for our customers, we need to understand what their issue is and what they are trying to achieve. A caveat to that is that often times they do not know what their issue is or will ask one question, but their root issue is really something else. Reading between the lines, using critical thinking and asking concise questions are skills that are often underestimated in customer support, but can often times end up being the difference between a thumbs up interaction and a thumbs down interaction.
3. Transparency
Of course, customers don’t need to know everything about the internal workings of a business for many different reasons, but what they can and need to know, they should be aware of it. For example, if someone made a mistake internally and said something was escalated to a technical team for review, but it actually wasn’t and caused the customer to wait for days for a resolution that was never coming, then this is something they can and should be informed of. Honesty and transparency will do more for a business and the relationship between them and their customers in the long run than hurt it.
How Aligned Are You and Your Team?
These are the three principles that I use for each and every interaction with customers and ones that I preach to anyone who will listen. That said, others may have different fundamentals that they keep in mind when helping customers. Or perhaps others will say that something like transparency should be number 1 or not even on the list!
A key thing to remember here is that if you are working amongst other customer support professionals, then you all need to be aligned on what your fundamentals are as a team and as a business. Your personal fundamentals may differ and that’s fine, but there needs to be that alignment internally so that customers receive consistent and memorable experiences each time they reach out. After all, a business is not a business without its’ customers and the happier those customers are, the more your business will grow and the greater impact there will be.
