Customer service is so essential to the success of a business that it can truly make or break the business overall. Hence, if you want your business to succeed as much as possible, you need to learn as much as you can about customer service. One important aspect of this is ascertaining the various types of customer service that are available for you to provide. The important types of customer service are listed below.
#1 Live Chat
This essentially involves using a chat client to instant message customers and have them message you back. It is a very fast-paced manner in which you can provide your customers with top-notch service and support, and there is also the fact that it requires a fair amount of multitasking skills as well. This type of customer support requires specialized training as do all others because it requires a unique set of skills to excel in, so if you want your CSRs to get the job done you will have to put a fair amount of effort into teaching them.
#2 Live Answer
This is one of the most common forms of customer service along with being one of the more traditional ways in which people attempt to get the customer support that they are looking for. Live answer means a phone service, a number that customers can call if they want their complaints addressed and their queries fulfilled. Performing live answer customer support requires an entirely different set of skills than live chat. It involves talking to customers following call handling best practices as you attempt to solve the problems they might be facing.
#3 Interactive Voice Response
This is in a way related to live answer except instead of reaching a customer service representative you are going to be talking to a chatbot that would give you a lot of different responses through a simulated or pre-recorded voice. It is quite a good way of giving your customers the support they need while managing to attain at least some level of automation, something that is essential if you want to be able to scale your business and begin boosting your profit at an exponential level.
#4 Email Support
This is a rather old-school method of delivering customer support but it works and is well trusted. It is a more relaxed version of the live chat feature, and although it takes away things like instant gratification it is still an admirable way of serving your customers and handling all of their queries and complaints. Another benefit of this type of customer service is that it is, once again, quite easy to automate. The important thing to note here is that email support is highly underrated, so if you are not taking an interest in it because you feel like no one would use it think again!
#5 Social Media Support
This is the newest form of customer support out there, and it has some things in common with live chat. It essentially involves managing forums and threads on social media sites where a lot of your customers and users are going to be making their complaints. The important thing to note here is that social media requires a level of informality that is not present in most of the other customer service types that you have seen above. This is why you should prep for it perhaps more than the others.
As you can see, there are a lot of different types of customer service. If you truly want your customer support to be as good as it can be, you are going to have to look into all of them and try to excel. This is probably quite a stressful concept for you because you have so many other things that you are going to have to deal with. This is why you should look into a help desk ticketing system software such as the one being offered by Kayako. This software is going to help you get ahead of the competition and create a customer support solution that is truly brilliant.
