Customer Support is a set of customer service to help customers in making correct and cost effective use of a purchased product. It involves helping in installation, planning, training, troubleshooting, servicing, upgrading, and disposal of an acquired product. Many companies offer this kind of service to its customers at a low price. It is not mandatory for every company to provide such support to its customers. It depends upon the policies and objectives of a company to decide whether it offers this support or not.
The basic difference between Customer Support and Service Reputation Management (SRM) is that Customer Support is a form of internal service while SRM is an external process that helps companies to overcome the perception of bad service provided by their customers. Both are very important for maintaining long term mutually beneficial relations with customers. There are many companies offering customer support services. Some of them are call centers, software development firms, support teams, and outsourced customer support agents.
Call Center Companies: These companies mainly operate from within the borders of the country as well as providing remote support to their customers. Customers mostly call from outside the country, so the support representatives should be able to speak and understand easily in other languages like Spanish or Mandarin. These companies have teams consisting of well trained, experienced people who can respond times to customers. They are supposed to be equipped with latest technologies and skilled call center employees who speak English, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu, Marathi, Tamil, and other languages as per the requirement of the customers.
Service Reputation Management: This kind of customer support service revolves around creating awareness about a particular product, testing and re-testing, analyzing the performance of the product after every improvement, and regular follow up and monitoring of the customers. The feedbacks provided by the testing team help the service rep in understanding the problem and suggesting solutions for it. Service rep also helps the managers of the company to keep track of their performance. Most of the companies now days use this method to improve and monitor their support services. Managers can monitor how the sales are going, what kind of problems are being faced, what kind of queries customers are asking, and what are the issues that need to be fixed. Most importantly, they can easily track their response times and check whether they are meeting the expectations of their customers.
Outsourced Customer Support Teams: Most of the companies prefer to hire the services of third party companies that provide them the necessary expertise and resources. The customer service representatives of these companies are well trained and motivated. These companies also have proper time scheduling system so that the representatives can handle multiple enquiries from different clients. Most of the companies prefer to outsource their customer service representatives for managing their entire customer service division.
There are plenty of companies offering outsourced customer support agents to the companies. Some of these companies can even provide these services right from the comforts of your home. You just need to make a proper search and find the best one suitable for your needs. Most of the Customer Support Outsourcing companies offer affordable plans to suit all budgets. So it is always better to look for the best one instead of hiring an expensive customer service rep.
