Why Customer Support Is Important

In our eBook released last month, we covered the typical roles you'd find on a Customer Success Team and why you need them. In this post, we'll specifically discuss Customer Support, why it's important, and the role it plays in the post-sale world.

A customer support organization fields trouble tickets related to the product or service. These are typically point questions or problems related to bugs, configuration, or usability. Like professional services, this may be a separate VP-level organization.

Customer support is differentiated from customer success in terms of approach. Where customer success is proactive in managing accounts, customer support is reactive in fixing broken issues and questions. As such, customer support agents are frequently located in lower-cost areas of the world and trained to handle high-volume tasks.

Surprisingly, we find that there is typically little overlap between customer success and customer support. Customer support executives have scaled contact centers to thousands of agents. It is a very different mindset and skillset than handling product adoption, executive business reviews, and renewals.

Nonetheless, CSMs should be well aware of how their customers are interacting with the support team, and the nature of support tickets being filed. Similarly, the support team knows the frequently asked questions and problems based on ticket volume, and should feed that back into the customer success and product teams.

“My job is responsible for helping troubleshoot and resolve critical customer issues, while also providing direction to customers so they feel empowered to complete these tasks on their own.”

- Michael Weiland, Technical Support, CommerceHub

For more on Customer Support: