What Is Customer Support? 6 Customer Support Strategies

Customer support is the process of resolving customer concerns, and it’s key to building and maintaining a positive brand reputation.

“Customer support is a happiness department,” says Gyve Safavi, cofounder of sustainable electric toothbrush company Suri. Emphasizing high-quality customer support from the start helped his company generate positive word of mouth and weather the ups and downs of building a business. 

“Things go wrong in an early-stage company, but those moments actually led us to better relationships with our customers,” he says. “If you can delight customers, they go on to tell other people about how amazing your customer service is.”

Here’s what customer support is and six strategies to help you build a customer support program that fosters loyalty and drives business growth.

What is customer support?

Customer support is the process of helping customers solve problems and answer questions about your product or service. 

Common tasks include responding to prospective customer questions, troubleshooting order and delivery processes, helping customers solve technical problems, and navigating product complaints or use queries. 

Customer support is delegated to support team members (also known as customer support agents), who field incoming queries and interact with customers over phone, chat, or email. 

Customer support vs. customer service

Technically, customer support is a subset of customer service, which includes any activity designed to help your customers succeed in their relationship with your business—not just troubleshooting.

Not all companies distinguish between customer service and support operations. Consider Suri, for example: The company combines customer service and support processes to emphasize the quality customer interactions that characterize both. 

“We don’t separate service and support because the reality is that as you get bigger, your only point of contact with customers is through your support channel,” Gyve says.

Strategies for excellent customer support

• Build a great customer support team
• Empower your reps to make decisions
• Integrate support teams
• Provide self-service options
• Take advantage of scripts
• Take advantage of AI

Here are six customer support strategies to help your company exceed customer expectations with quick and effective solutions to customer issues:

Build a great customer support team

Great customer support starts with hiring customer service representatives. “It takes a special type of personality to run customer success, and that’s the kind of person who is willing to turn people around,” Gyve says.

To find these people, Suri asks prospective customer service agents to respond to a hypothetical customer inquiry, prioritizing candidates who aim to delight, not mollify. “Can you solve people’s problems and make them happy?” Gyve says. “That’s the metric.”

Empower your reps to make decisions

Suri also emphasizes the importance of giving your reps freedom to provide great customer service experiences by allowing them to make decisions about how they serve customers.

“We want customer service representatives to feel like they were owners of the business, in the sense that they can leverage what they had within reason to make it better for customers writing them,” says Gyve. 

This approach encourages reps to engage their soft skills, using support interactions to understand customer needs and improve relationships. “We give our consumer experience leaders freedom to credit people’s orders, to give them things, and to just use their own judgment, rather than being like ‘Our policy only allows this.’“

Integrate support teams

Suri integrates its customer support representatives into its larger team, an approach that facilitates the sharing of customer feedback across departments and emphasizes the critical role customer service reps play in the company’s mission. 

“Even when we’ve worked with outsourced BPOs [business process outsourcers] at times when we need to scale, we really strive to make them feel part of our team. They join our team meetings, we fly out to where they are, we give them products, and we will meet them multiple times a year,” says Gyve. 

The idea is that support representatives who are engaged with and excited about a brand are in a better position to bring customers along with them. “We want them to feel part of the family and see what all the buzz is about,” says Gyve. “At a quickly scaling company, it’s got to be fun. It’s got to be contagious.”

Provide self-service options

Self-service options allow customers to solve problems on their own, which can reduce your team’s workload. “If people can self-serve, it’s way better,” says Gyve.

He recommends starting with your company’s frequently asked questions. “We had a customer-facing FAQ that our web team owned, but it became really clear that customer support needed to own that,” says Gyve. “Our customer support reps were like, if the information were there, customers wouldn’t be asking me that.”

Based on their experience fielding customer questions, agents can create FAQ responses that allow customers to solve their own problems. 

Take advantage of scripts

Gyve encourages his team to create and use scripts, which are saved responses to customer inquiries. “When you get a question that is unique or difficult, write a really good response, and then copy it and save it to a macro or a script,” says Gyve.

If you’re just getting started, Gyve recommends returning to your FAQs (or borrowing from the competition). “Think about the questions people will ask. They’re going to ask a lot of the common FAQ questions—and if you don’t know those, just go and look at somebody else’s FAQ and get some ideas,” he says. 

You can store these responses in your customer service platform or in a spreadsheet or document—Suri saves scripts in Gorgias, allowing the team to access scripts and respond to messages from the same interface.

The judicious use of scripts can help your team increase efficiency, but Gyve cautions against deprioritizing personalized service. “Scripts are a function to help people respond faster, but they don’t always get it right,” he says. “If you get too reliant on them, you might answer the question wrong.”

Instead, Gyve encourages reps to use scripts as a starting point and customize as needed: “Take your script and modify it to make it sound real and personal.”

Take advantage of AI

Gyve recommends using AI customer service tools for support, but not as a replacement for human representatives. “We are implementing AI to help build capability and efficiency. We’re not looking at it as a way to optimize the people we have on our team, but if we can make them more efficient, then that’s a win for everybody,” he says.

Suri uses Gorgias’ built-in AI to prompt responses that function like scripts, increasing efficiency with the careful oversight of a skilled human agent. The company also uses Sprout Social’s AI function to identify support requests on social platforms and funnel queries from multiple channels into the Gorgias inbox. 

“We use AI to catch and sort irrelevant messages,” Gyve says. “Many brands do social media contests, and you can imagine all of a sudden getting 3,000 comments on a post, and it just blows up the inbox. We use AI to catch that type of message and close them, which is a really quick way to reduce our response times.”

Suri also offers a self-service chatbot that can assist customers with routine questions about order status, return requests, and other common queries.