The customer support is always required for a brand or company to connect with people, understand their challenges and help them effectively. People who are engaged in these things are ideally called a professional representative or rep. They interact well with others, build rapport and solve problems so that they stay connected and satisfied.
For these purposes, a good communication skill, technical knowledge, problem-solving attitude and gentle/friendly approach are essential.
This support job is more than just assisting customers with a range of services like planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading and disposal of a product. That’s why bettering customer care comes with overwhelming possibilities to grow in career.
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Types of Customer Support in Automation
Luckily, here is a roundup of support types to understand and find the most interesting one that is the best-fit to your persona in this world of automation:
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Automated Support
The advent of automation has made it easier to reach customers in seconds and maximize the happy time of being engaged with the organisation or its products/services. Since it’s a proactive support, these professionals minimise downtime in monitoring customer experience through a well-define automated system that is primarily designed to come across and solve their problems. The machine learning and AI work at the backstage to ensure an easy analysis for enabling proactive capabilities to let them jump across difficulties.
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Preemptive Support
This is also an automated support, which is based on the auto-collected information using an application or service like database extraction or CRM database. Since it’s related to foreseeing strategies, the support reps get deep with the pooled information to predict barriers, challenges or degrading elements. In addition, the upsides are also crystal clear, which help in controlling cost and translating woos of customers into a “wow” experience. The customer behavior is easily understood, which lets the strategies draw engaging solutions.
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Self-Support
This automated support is like a self-service, which leverages customers to use the availed online libraries and solutions like tools, videos and how-to tutorials for troubleshooting independently. Even, the virtual assistant-bots are designed in such a remarkable way that they diagnose what challenges one could be facing. Thereby, people are guided for accessing the solutions & sort the problem by self.
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Assisted Support
This is a remote help provided through a software or application that offers an easy remote access to the device of customers so that the problem can be assessed and sorted out accordingly. Certainly, it is a hierarchical process, which requires ticket raising and administering solutions accordingly.
Certainly, these are the backstage technicalities that people find really interesting if they intend to become a part of any technical customer support crew.
Types of Career You Can Have in Customer Support
This is adventurous for those who tend to come in the front lane for interacting, understanding troubles customers face and responding quickly without any glitch or misleading.
Here is a breakdown of the most common customer support jobs/profiles that are mainly required for an end-to-end customer support:
Profile | Responsibilities |
Customer Support Representative | Also called a rep, he is the one who typically resolves queries at the entry level through phone calls, live chats, emailing, web tickets and social media responses. |
Customer Support IT Engineer | These are trained and certified professionals who let customers come out from any specific technical fault or technology-based issues. |
Multilingual Customer Support | These are specialists who share the similar jobs as a customer support representative does. The only difference is that they support in the requisite language, as in English, French, German or any other one. |
Remote Customer Support | This profile represents the virtual assistance for remote customers or teams that need technical assistance on any specific domain, such as server management or quality analysis from different geographies or workspace. |
Technical Support Specialist | This role is similar to the IT support, but a bit more advanced and specialist technical assistance. The customer facing any technical challenge in installing and updating or working with a software or hardware or application, this expert helps in highlighting what the main issue is and how to overcome it.
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Customer Support Manager | Being of the managerial level, this support requires a responsible one who is able to handle the team of support reps, reduce downtime, maintain fast TAT and increase case solutions’ count. |
Types of Support Services
This is a digital era, where people love to connect through the platform that is convenient for them. Various companies and enterprises spare no space for reaching them out.
So, aspirants have a more scope to work on diverse platforms where they feel comfortable in supporting people.
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Phone Support
It’s a contact center-based service, which covers inbound and outbound call support. Various BPOs and call centers ensure benchmarked services as per requests in a quick turnaround time. Inbound calls are basically related to offering solutions (or troubleshooting) to incoming inquirers that need assistance to resolve any matter.
On the flip side, outbound call support helps to reach customers for upselling and cross selling products or services proactively or introducing prospects.
For both, IVR or Integrated Voice Response software is widely used to improve the quality of these services over time. It’s a part of the automated support. So, these platforms are open for those who have a flair to interact with customers and show their value as a problem-solver.
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Online Chat Support
The pop up appearing during a web journey is meant for an online chat support. Since messaging is what people find easy these days, the virtual assistant-bot is launched to communicate and sort out common problems of visitors. Certainly, the AI-support backs it in understanding and getting deep with the concern of customers, which helps it to come with an automated response. This response can be visible in the form of links (URLs) for lead generation, campaign management, pre-sales and post sale inquiries, steps of the process (to proceed with) or tutorials for administering complaints.
These are wisely designed to close the query right in the first attempt. However, there may be some odd situations wherein the reps are deployed to take on some critical queries that are out of limit of this bot.
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Email Support
This is the best practice for the people who do not require an immediate reply. It comes with a lot of leverages like responding any time, polling, apologizing for negative experience, explaining what may have gone wrong, offering context of any bad experience, reassuring for timely and accurate service, showing gratitude or offering incentives, offers or discounts, troubleshooting and complaint registrations etc..
People find it less invasive and highly advantageous, as trouble ticketing system and CRMs come with follow-up emailing option to an individual or group of customers. Amazon, flipkart and many other eCommerce websites have been overwhelmingly seeking these purposes.
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Remote support
Many outsourcing companies that offer specialised solutions are grouped under remote support. It requires an IT infrastructure to remotely attend problems and settle it down through the digital space. The applications are there to get remote server access in no time, which enable professionals to gain an access of the server and resolve the query from off-site. Here, the professionals who are able to see through analytical lens are required here.
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On-site support
It’s a traditional support system, wherein the professionals or technically trained experts reach onsite to install hardware or software or troubleshoot in response to the query. The companies that deal in hardware are commonly seen in need of these assistants, which fulfill the requirement of repairing and installing gadgets or machines.
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Social Media Support
Facebook, Twitter and Instagram don’t need any introduction on why this type of support is needed. People are more likely to spend most of the time on these platforms. Companies find it easy to catch them up there and seek their business objectives or customer engagement-based goals.
The versatility of this media allows analysing customer journey, their comments and then, responding /making decisions accordingly. Brands and companies use it for reputation building in a quick turnaround time. That’s why professionals are needed for this purpose.
Customer Support Salary
This is the most interesting part, which often attract career seekers. As per Glassdoor, the customer support executive’s average payout is over INR 18K plus incentives every month.
The average base salary in the US is $33,648 per month.
There are differences in the payouts in different locations. So, the career seekers should thoroughly research to figure out the accurate average salary package.