Providing good support for patrons is an important goal for any startup business. After all, it ensures more revenues. But there are two different routes this can take: product support and customer support. Let’s take a look at how each works and how you should use them for greater success.
The Difference Between Product Support And Customer Support
To have an idea of how each category of support will fit into your overall strategy, you need to understand their differences. Those differences mainly center on the orientation of the provided support.
In the case of customer support, the focus is on helping customers who are encountering different issues. The goal here is to improve on the experience that they have. Additionally, support agents can take a more proactive approach and initiate a conversation with the customer to help them.
On the other hand, product or technical support is geared towards helping customers use products. This consists mainly of assisting them with technical concerns surrounding these products. Tech support also aims to resolve these problems within the initial contact with the customer.
Different Scopes In A Startup Business
Another important difference between customer support and technical support is their scope. Customer support generally applies at all stages of the buyer journey. During presales, they respond to customer questions about the products before buying. After the sales itself, service reps communicate with customers for continued assistance.
Product support mainly happens during the after-sales stage. Here, customers are still figuring out the products they bought and will be asking a lot of basic questions. It then extends beyond the initial sales period depending on the concerns of the customer.
Note that there is some overlap at this point. The technical support staff will often need to rely on the same customer service skills to help those people. On the other hand, customer service agents might initially handle product support concerns before handing them over to the technical support team.
It is also worth mentioning that not every startup business will have both. For instance, if your startup business is selling non-sophisticated products, you might not need a technical support department. Any product questions will just be handled by customer service agents.
Different Customer Engagement Approaches For A Startup Business
Because of their different orientations, customer service and product support also have different approaches to interacting with customers. With customer support’s focus on improving people’s experience, agents need to approach it more emphatically. They need to assure the customer that their concerns are being addressed and will be resolved as soon as possible.
Image from Justi
On the other hand, product support agents focus more on getting as much detail from the customer as possible. This helps them determine which solutions would best resolve the issue at hand and deliver it quickly. They also need to ensure that the customer understands the detailed steps of these solutions.
Building Better Product Support For Your Startup Business
As product support is integral to a startup business’s overall customer assistance strategy, you must have a good plan for it. There are five levels of support you need to take into account when building your strategy.
- Pre-support: The customer tries to resolve the issue themselves by consulting the product user manual or online resources.
- Self-service: This is the point where the customer might go through your knowledge base for answers.
- First-line support: The initial product assistance request might come from your general customer service channel, where agents handle basic questions.
- Second-line support: This stage is when the customer service team hands over a more complex assistance request to the product support team itself.
- Third line support: This is when the customer is directed to a product expert for more advanced concerns. This stage requires the most attention, as it involves custom solutions.
Note that not all product support interactions go through these five levels. However, it would still help for you to build your strategy in anticipation of this. That involves creating the right protocols for the proper escalation of support requests.
Improving The Product Support Process
One of the main challenges customers encounter when seeking product support is the complexity of the process. Often, they will have to go through several steps and agents to get the solution they want. To resolve that, you need to develop strategies that will streamline the process.
Omnichannel support is one strategy that you can explore here. By developing a more cohesive presence across your different channels, you can better anticipate customer problems and be ready with the solutions.
For instance, different social media listening tools will let you listen to online conversations. These tools work round the clock, giving your tech support teams the opportunity to monitor issues even if customers do not report them. Meanwhile, customers can easily start from any channel and get the solutions that they get without needing to go through various handovers.
Outsourcing Product Support
Another way to bolster product support is by outsourcing it. Your goal with this move is to increase your reach and respond to more product concerns. Additionally, it can help you reduce the cost of providing expert product support since the outsourcing firm will be providing those experts. This will help your startup business better sustain customer engagement.
Here, you have things to consider before outsourcing.
- Can you guarantee that the experience will be consistent every time?
- How do you measure the level of product knowledge that agents have?
- Are customers expecting to interact with the kinds of agents they are familiar with?
By answering these questions, you can determine whether outsourcing will be a fit for your overall strategy. You can also better decide on how to go through with the effort.
Combining Product And Customer Support In Your Startup Business
While they have different purposes, product support and customer support are more intricately linked than you might think. Thus, you need to come up with a way to effectively use these two together. One way to go here is by placing product support as an important subset of customer support.
Image from Intercom.
With that thinking, you need to determine how your level of product support will affect the overall customer experience you want to deliver. On the other hand, you can look for ways to apply customer service strategies to product support activities. For instance, using the more empathic approach favored by general customer support will help your product support team better guide customers to the right solutions.
Take Advantage of Both Support Types For Your Startup Business
Effective product support can do a lot of wonders for your startup business goal of delivering greater customer satisfaction. And to achieve that, you need to have the right team behind you. Connect with us today and we will be ready to be that great support team for you.