Different Businesses – Different Needs. How Customer Support May Differ With Accordance to Your Specific Business Needs

The world of business is a fascinating place. There are so many opportunities and so many branches for development that it is quite easy to get lost while choosing what to do and what field to develop in. There is also another very important choice to make here — which support provider to pick and what qualities to look for in them?

One may ask here — why is customer support important at all? After all, there are so many AI chatbots and other solutions that there is simply no way, that people can top what machines do, right? Not at all. But, those who love to choose, indeed have several options here.

So, let’s dive into the different models of customer service!

Types of customer support

1. 🔧 Self-service options

Good-old tier 0 customer support. These are the different learning materials that your customers can find themselves, be it a Q&A section of your website, a video tutorial or a ‘How To’ article with the most common issues and resolutions described. 

For sure, having these really makes the UX of your end users pleasurable. Plus, it makes the working process of your support consultants easier, as they do not have to deal with frequent and easy questions, but instead can focus on more challenging tasks and tickets. 

2. 📞 Contact center

Contact center is essentially where all the support consultants are working. They accept users’ inquiries from chats, emails and via phone calls. Even though they might seem obsolete, 63 percent of the users shopping online still prefer talking to a real human who can help them resolve their issues and tickets. This means that the demand for them is not going to decrease for a long time to come. 

3. 💻 Digital solutions

AI chatbots are a perfect example of a digital customer support solution — a tool that helps end users get help with their issues without having to talk to the support consultant at all. And even though this way of resolving issues has its disadvantages — AI cannot display empathy or care about a customer, — there are some businesses that still opt for it. 

What types of businesses do SupportYourApp work with?

We at SupportYourApp are a classic example of a contact center. Our support consultants help end users of different businesses resolve their issues in a timely and efficient manner. And our clients come from different fields and have different sizes, goals and expectations. This means that we have to be very flexible to fit all of our clients’ needs.

We have expertise in providing customer services to different types of businesses, understanding specifics and needs to deliver the most effective support. We deal with the clients from:

• B2B model (business to business) — businesses that work and serve only to other businesses;
• B2C model (business to client) — businesses that deal with the end users directly. 

B2B and B2C are very different, so they require two completely different kinds of customer support. 

• SaaS segment (software as a service) — businesses that develop and sell their own software but have no resources or desire to build an in-house support team;
• GameDev segment — developers of video games;
• FinTech segment — development and integration of modern and innovative financial services and solutions;
• E-commerce segment — vendors selling wares via the Internet;
• Cyber Security — vendors who develop and sell computer security solutions. These typically require tech savvy consultants who will be able to quickly respond to difficult and technical question.

These, among others, are the fields that our clients are operating within. And in order to provide them with the best outsource customer support, we have to make sure that we expand our team with the people who not only possess the right skills from the get go, but are also willing to gain new knowledge along the way.

Why your field matters to us?

Before signing on another client, we have to make sure that our KPIs fit all of their needs and there are not going to be any of the surprises — we are as open as we can be, and we also always try to fulfill all the client’s needs to the fullest extent. 

Of course, those operating in e-commerce have completely different needs and expectations from those operating in SaaS or cybersecurity. Depending on the field, we search for the candidates with: 

• Different level of tech-savviness;
• Different soft skills;
• Different language skills (right now SupportYourApp speaks more than 30 languages);
• Different working hours preferences (working with the clients from all over the world, SupportYourApp provides 24/7 customer support).

All of this matters because different businesses have different KPIs and different channels of communication that they need covered. They also have different types of requests and tickets. The more difficult they are, the more tech-savvy the team has to be. 

As a result, the client’s field of operation gives us certain guidelines as to which way to go to build a perfect support team just for them.

Different needs — different means of communication

While working with the clients from different fields, it is important to understand that, most likely, they will use different means of communication. This raises the need to cover all of them or to develop some solution that is going to integrate with all of them. 

For that we have developed our own QCRM system that can fully integrate with whatever means of communication with the end users is implemented by our clients. This ensures that there is no painful software jump, during which the client’s customer base will suffer losses. We do everything to ensure that our clients have a smooth integration period with us.

KPIs and outsource support — which ones are the most important?

In our experience, the customers look for two groups of KPIs: qualitative and quantitative. 

Let’s start with the quantitative: 

1. ⏱️ Average pickup/response time — how long does it take our consultants to answer the phone, chat or email. Of course, this KPI varies by importance for different business types. It is obvious that for vendor from Fintech segment the response time must be shorter than for those operating in E-commerce. In short — we keep up with the demands of our customers and keep the pickup time as short as possible for each individual product. Surely, this KPI also varies on the size of your team and the fact whether it is dedicated or shared. 
2. 📈 Satisfaction rate — how many end users are fully satisfied with the service they got from us.
3. 🤙 Handling time — how much time can one consultant dedicate to being on a call or in a chat conversation. The more complicated the product is, the longer this time is, as more difficult products’ clients’ inquiries require more time to be resolved. 
4. ✅ Resolution time — how much time on average does it take to fully resolve the case. Times here vary for different products, as more technologically demanding tickets require more time to be tested, described and resolved.

Qualitative:

1. 🙏 Empathy level — how invested our consultants are into each and every ticket?
2. 🈺 Language skills — will the level of their language allow them to understand and resolve any ticket in a timely manner?
3. 👔 Feeling of responsibility — no consultant should be late to their shifts (to ensure this we use Zoomshift), and they must maintain the KPIs set by our clients even if they are not working from the office.

We at SupportYourApp always make sure that we expand our team with the people right for the job and that all of them possess just the correct skills for the position and can fit the KPIs of our clients perfectly, no matter what area of business they operate in.

We understand the importance of providing the best support services for the businesses, operating in the different fields. Good customer support is crucial for any business, as it ensures that the end-users stay loyal and can easily rely on the support team for help.

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