What is customer support?

15 January 2025

Authors

Matthew Finio

Content Writer, IBM Consulting

Amanda Downie

Editorial Content Strategist, IBM

What is customer support?

Customer support is the practice of assisting customers with inquiries, issues or concerns regarding a product or service by providing guidance, solutions and a positive experience to help ensure customer satisfaction.

The primary goal of customer support is to create a seamless experience by resolving technical challenges, troubleshooting errors and assisting with product functions. Customer support is often more technical and solution-oriented than customer service, which encompasses all direct interactions with customers and emphasizes building relationships and helping ensure overall satisfaction.

Successful customer support requires equipping support teams with the necessary tools, training and knowledge to deliver effective solutions. Customer support representatives work closely with customers to understand their challenges and deliver actionable solutions, helping ensure that they can continue to use the product or service without interruption. These teams can also serve as a bridge between customers and internal teams, providing valuable feedback to inform product improvements and innovations.

Customer support operates across various channels to meet customer preferences and help ensure accessibility. These include:

  • Phone calls and email: These traditional methods remain widely used for direct communication. Phone support and email allow customers to explain complex issues or receive detailed responses. 
  • Live chat: Available on websites or apps, this technology provides real-time assistance and is ideal for quick resolutions. 
  • Social media: Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) have emerged as vital support channels, enabling companies to address public inquiries, complaints or feedback in an open and interactive manner. 
  • Customer self-service options: FAQs, knowledge bases and AI-powered chatbots help customers resolve issues independently.

By using these diverse channels, businesses can provide seamless and flexible support tailored to individual needs.

Ultimately, customer support plays a critical role in customer retention and brand loyalty. When performed effectively, it resolves immediate customer issues and fosters trust and confidence in the company's commitment to customer success. By prioritizing responsiveness, empathy and technical support, businesses can maintain a positive and productive experience for their customers.

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Why customer support is important

Customer support is essential because it directly impacts the overall perception of a company and customer satisfaction and loyalty. And loyalty is important: A McKinsey study found that companies need to acquire three new customers to make up the business value of losing one existing customer. 1

When customers encounter issues or need assistance, responsive and effective support can turn a negative experience into a positive one. A seamless support experience reassures customers that the company values their needs and is committed to their satisfaction. 

Word-of-mouth and online reviews play a significant role in acquiring new customers, shaping public perception and supporting business growth. Good customer service and support can lead to glowing recommendations, while poor support can deter potential customers. By providing timely, empathetic and efficient solutions, businesses can position themselves as reliable and customer-centric, which can improve brand reputation, serve as a competitive advantage and increase the bottom line.

Also, customer support serves as a valuable feedback loop for businesses. By interacting directly with customers, support teams gain insights into recurring customer problems, unmet needs and potential areas for improvement in products or services. These insights can inform strategic decisions, drive innovation and enhance the overall customer experience.

Customer service and customer support

Customer support is a subset of customer service, often with a narrower, technical focus. Alternatively, customer service is about the overall experience and relationship with the customer. While both involve interactions with customers, they differ in focus, purpose and scope.

Customer support is primarily about solving specific technical or product-related issues. It is reactive and solution-oriented, helping customers troubleshoot problems, answer technical questions and navigate the use of a product or service. Support teams often specialize in technical know-how to help customers efficiently resolve challenges.

For example, a customer support representative might help a user reset their password or fix a software glitch. Customer support is especially common in industries such as technology, software and e-commerce, where products often require detailed guidance to function effectively.

Customer service is broader and encompasses all interactions. Customer service agents are more relationship-driven and aim to help ensure customer satisfaction. Customer service teams focus on creating a positive overall experience throughout the customer journey. Great customer service includes assisting customers before, during and after a purchase, as well as addressing nontechnical inquiries such as product recommendations, billing questions or complaints.

For example, a customer service representative might help a customer find the right product, address a delivery concern or handle a return.

Both customer service and effective customer support are critical to building loyalty and reducing customer churn. Successful businesses often integrate the two to provide a comprehensive and satisfying customer experience.

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Customer support responsibilities

The responsibilities of customer support revolve around helping ensure that customers have a seamless experience with a company’s products or services.

Key responsibilities include:

Troubleshooting and resolving issues: One of the primary functions of customer support is resolving technical or operational problems. This focus includes diagnosing the issue, identifying the root cause and providing effective solutions.

Responding to customer inquiries: Customer support teams handle questions and requests related to products, services, billing and policies. This requires clear and accurate communication so that customers receive helpful and timely answers.

Providing product and service guidance: Customer support often involves educating customers on how to use a product or service effectively. This might include offering step-by-step instructions, explaining features or recommending best practices to optimize usage.

Managing customer complaints: Support teams address complaints by acknowledging customer concerns, empathizing with their frustration and working toward a satisfactory resolution. Handling complaints effectively helps turn negative experiences into positive outcomes.

Collaborating with internal teams: Customer support serves as a bridge between customers and internal departments, such as product development, engineering or sales. They relay customer feedback, report recurring issues and advocate for customer-centric improvements.

Providing proactive support: Proactive customer support involves anticipating potential issues and addressing them before customers encounter problems. This might include notifying customers of system maintenance, sharing updates about known bugs or offering preemptive solutions to recurring challenges.

Assisting with account management and transactions: Support teams often help with account-related tasks, such as updating customer information, managing subscriptions, processing refunds or handling billing discrepancies.

Documenting and tracking interactions: Customer support representatives must document interactions, issues and resolutions accurately in a customer relationship management (CRM) system or ticketing platform. This documentation helps ensure continuity, facilitates follow-ups and provides valuable data for process improvements.

Collecting and analyzing customer feedback: Gathering feedback through surveys, reviews and direct interactions is a key responsibility. Support teams analyze this input to identify patterns, understand customer needs and suggest improvements to products, services or support processes.

Helping ensure customer satisfaction and retention: Customer support ultimately aims to enhance the customer experience by addressing concerns effectively, supporting customer satisfaction and fostering loyalty. Their efforts contribute to maintaining strong customer relationships and improving retention rates.

Strategies for providing successful customer support

Providing exceptional customer support is essential for fostering trust, loyalty and satisfaction. By applying these key strategies, companies can elevate their customer support to a higher standard:

-Offer omnichannel support
-Prioritize speed and responsiveness
-Provide training for support teams
-Focus on empathy and active listening
-Empower support agents
-Use technology and automation
-Offer self-service options
-Gather and act on customer feedback
-Be proactive in addressing customer needs
-Monitor metrics and continuously improve

Offer omnichannel support

Providing support through multiple channels helps ensure that customers can reach out using their preferred method, such as email, phone, chat, social media or self-service portals. This inclusivity accommodates varying customer preferences and increases accessibility. Multichannel support requires seamless integration between platforms to maintain consistency and continuity in customer interactions. A unified communication system allows customer support agents to track conversations across all channels and provide personalized service.

Prioritize speed and responsiveness

Timely responses are critical in customer support. Quick resolution of issues demonstrates attentiveness and helps maintain customer satisfaction. Implementing systems to monitor response times and set service-level agreements (SLAs) for urgency can streamline support processes. For complex cases, setting clear expectations for resolution time and providing regular updates builds trust and reduces frustration.

For example, a global leader in home appliances used IBM’s next-generation virtual assistant technology to reshape their after-sales customer support. After the technology was implemented, the client was able to handle 120,000 conversations per month, with each interaction down to an average of 53 seconds (a 25% reduction in handling time) and only nine messages exchanged, setting a new standard.2

Provide training for support teams

Well-trained support teams are fundamental to delivering exceptional service. Training should cover product knowledge, communication skills, conflict resolution and customer empathy. Continuous education helps ensure that agents stay updated on new features, policies and industry trends. Also, fostering soft skills, such as patience and adaptability, helps ensure that agents can handle diverse customer personalities and challenges effectively.

Focus on empathy and active listening

Empathy is a cornerstone of great customer support. Actively listening to customers helps ensure that their concerns are fully understood before offering solutions. Demonstrating understanding and compassion can diffuse tense situations and create a more positive experience. Customer support professionals should practice acknowledging customer frustrations and aligning responses with their emotional state while staying solution-focused.

Empower support agents

Empowered agents can decide without constant managerial approval, leading to faster issue resolution and higher customer satisfaction. For example, allowing call center or help desk agents to offer refunds, upgrades, special pricing or replacements within a set policy during support interactions can speed up resolutions and create happy customers. Empowerment also requires clear guidelines and trust in the team's judgment, helping ensure consistency across interactions.

Use technology and automation

Technology can significantly enhance the efficiency of customer support. Tools such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, ticketing systems and chatbots streamline issue tracking, categorization and resolution. A CRM system, for example, might provide an agent with a customer’s history, allowing them to tailor responses based on past interactions. Customer automation of routine tasks, such as acknowledgment emails or common query responses, allows human agents to focus on more complex problem-solving.

Offer self-service options

A well-structured customer self-service portal enables customers to find answers to common customer questions independently, saving time for both customers and support teams. 

For example, IBM designed a flexible online portal for a Swedish telecom company—orchestrating Salesforce Experience Cloud and Service Cloud—that provides customers with a single AI-backed digital interface to open support tickets, have live chats, collaborate on user forums and view network data. 

As a result, 900 institutional customer accounts now have self-service capabilities, customers’ technical issue resolution times are projected to be cut in half and the need for engineers to visit customer sites is projected to be reduced by 25%. Even dangerous tower climbs are targeted to drop 10%, helping ensure safer working conditions for employees.2

Gather and act on customer feedback

Regularly collecting feedback through surveys, reviews and follow-ups helps identify strengths and areas for improvement. Analyzing feedback can reveal recurring issues or gaps in the support process. Acting on customer insights demonstrates a commitment to improvement and helps refine service strategies, aligning them with customer expectations.

Be proactive in addressing customer needs

Proactive customer support anticipates potential issues before they escalate. This can involve monitoring product performance, sending alerts about updates or known issues and offering guidance on best practices. Proactivity not only minimizes disruptions but also builds customer trust and loyalty by showcasing the company’s commitment to their success.

Monitor metrics and continuously improve

Key performance indicators (KPIs), such as first response time, resolution time, customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) and net promoter score (NPS), provide insights into the effectiveness of customer support. Regularly reviewing these metrics helps identify patterns, areas for improvement and successful strategies. For example, if first response times are high, consider reallocating resources or automating initial responses.

Technology, AI and customer support

Advancements in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI), automation and hybrid cloud, are revolutionizing customer support by improving efficiency, personalization and the overall customer experience. Customer support and customer service software allow businesses to offer faster, smarter and more personalized services while optimizing resources and increasing profitability. Maintaining a balance between AI-driven automation and human empathy is critical to help ensure a holistic and satisfying customer experience.

Here are some key ways technologies and AI are impacting customer support:

AI-powered assistance and automation: Generative AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants handle routine queries such as FAQs, password resets and order tracking with conversational, human-like interactions. These tools resolve issues in real time, escalate complex cases to human agents when necessary and offer real-time assistance to agents by providing suggestions, templates or knowledge base articles.

This automation helps ensure full-time availability, speeds up response times, reduces operational costs and allows human agents to focus on high-priority cases.

Personalized customer experiences: AI analyzes customer data to deliver tailored interactions. By using customer histories, preferences and behavior patterns, support systems can offer personalized solutions, product recommendations or proactive assistance, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Enhanced self-service options: AI powers sophisticated self-service tools such as knowledge bases, interactive FAQs and tutorial systems. Customers can quickly find solutions to their problems without contacting a support agent, saving time for both customers and businesses.

Voice recognition and IVR systems: AI-enabled interactive voice response (IVR) systems use voice recognition technology to assist customers over the phone. These systems can identify customer intent, provide relevant options and direct calls to the appropriate department or agent.

Sentiment analysis and customer insights: AI analyzes customer interactions to assess sentiment and tone in real time. This ability helps agents adjust their approach during conversations and provides insights into overall customer satisfaction, allowing businesses to identify areas for improvement.

Predictive support and proactive outreach: AI can predict potential issues based on historical data and usage patterns, allowing companies to address problems before they escalate. Proactive notifications, such as alerts about system outages or subscription renewals, reduce customer frustrations and enhance the support experience.

Efficient ticket management systems: Technology-driven ticketing platforms use AI to prioritize, categorize and route support requests to the appropriate team or agent. These systems improve efficiency by helping ensure that urgent issues are addressed promptly and by matching cases with agents who have the necessary expertise.

Scalable and global support: Technology enables companies to provide support at scale across different time zones and languages. AI-powered translation tools and multilingual chatbots help businesses cater to a global audience without significantly increasing costs.

Data-driven decision making: AI and analytics tools process vast amounts of customer data, uncovering trends and patterns. These insights help businesses effectively optimize their support strategies, improve product design and address recurring issues.

IBM successfully implemented an AI model that automated the process of writing case summaries, a task previously handled manually by nearly 25,000 support agents. Using watsonx.ai, time spent on summarizing extensive case details was reduced from thirty-five minutes to just a few seconds, saving around 125,000 hours each quarter and nearly USD 12M from digital labor efficiencies. This increased the pace at which studies were produced and ensured that almost all resolved cases now receive summaries.3

Continuous learning and improvement: AI systems learn from past interactions to improve their performance over time. This ability helps ensure that automated systems and chatbots become more accurate and efficient, enhancing the quality of support provided.

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Footnotes

1 Focusing on existing customers to unlock growth, McKinsey, 16, August, 2023 .

IBM, 2023.

3 IBM, 2024.