Customer support is an integral part of any organization. It helps prospect to become a customer (pre-sales to Eng.), and it has a huge impact on renewal business. Bad customer service results into increased customer churn, revenue loss, bad word of mouth.

Recent Research from Zendesk shows that over 60% of customers are likely to switch to a competitor after just one bad experience, an increase of 22% compared to previous years. According to the 2023 Zendesk report, over 50% of consumers will tell others about a bad customer service experience, which can amplify the loss of potential new business. 
 
Some of the recent experience that we have working with big companies with Visa, Apple, X has been horrible on various integrations. Getting a production key takes more than 6 weeks, 2 months is just unbelievable. Customer support /Engineering is almost impossible to reach. Their developer’s group responses were redundant as if they didn’t even investigate your email/challenges you are facing. Some of the emails were to just to let to let us know to keep patience. Unfortunately, there is no escalation point either.  
 
At this point – Some of the questions that comes to anyone’s mind - Is it because they are too big or is it because We are small compared them? And more importantly how SMB like us can serve our customer and how engineering can help in this cause – so that our customers don’t face the same challenges.

Running customer support for a small organization can be both rewarding and challenging but it needs to be taken very seriously with almost zero tolerance.

1. KYC

• Know Your Audience: Identify your customer base and their needs. Have a chat with customer personas.
• Feedback Loop: Periodic feedback from customers to improve your products or services also keep them engaged.

2. Set Up Communication Channels

• Email Support: Set up a dedicated support email address. Avoid autoresponders.
• Phone Support: Consider a dedicated phone line for customer support. Ensure availability during business hours. 
• Live Chat: Implement a live chat on your website/support portal for real-time assistance. Gen AI is good way to handle most of the issues – but have a communication channel to teach to Eng team.
• Social Media/Blog/Community: Monitor and respond to customer queries on social media platforms.

3. Strengthen Support Team

• Train Your Team: Ensure your support staff is well-trained on your products and services.
• Knowledge Base: Create a knowledge base with FAQs and troubleshooting guides to empower both customers and support staff.
• Escalation Process: Establish a clear escalation process for handling complex issues with properly defined SLAs

4. Add Support Tools  

• Helpdesk Software: Use tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, or like manage tickets and customer queries or even CRM integration can help.
• Analytics: Use analytics tools to monitor support performance and customer satisfaction. Perform various surveys

5. Setup a Support Strategy  

• Prioritize Issues: Triage customer queries based on urgency and impact.
• Response Time: Set and communicate expected response times to manage customer expectations.
• Proactive Support: Reach out to customers before they experience issues, such as through follow-up emails/monthly/quarterly connects. Limit surprises for customers

6. Maintain a Personal Touch

• Personalization: Address customers by their names and reference their history with your organization.
• Empathy: Always respond with empathy and understanding, even when delivering bad news.

7. Continuous Improvement

• Monitor Performance: Regularly review your support team’s performance through metrics like first response time, resolution time, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.
• Training: Continuously train your support team on new tools, soft skills, and product updates.

Engineering can play a big role here, picking up some of the integration question helps prospects to be real customer and at the same time reduce integration time by a lot. At the same time building some customer specific features which are important to the customer can help a relationship go long way. It’s also needless to say communication channel between customer support, sales engineers and core product engineering team need to be very fluid and open. 

Internal IT team can put together software/install support software and manage them effectively to keep this communication channel open. They must ensure all the support mediums are integrated so that support group can have a unified view of the support queries.