Types of customer service 

When your company has to deal regularly with customers, it sometimes becomes daunting to handle every customer interaction. Some customers prefer live chat, some like email, and while some of them will like to call you. This doesn’t matter what system you choose, your customer service has the ability to make or break your company’s reputation. In a survey by American Express, a customer who’s happy with your business will tell about it to nine friends – which is like getting nine referrals. If a customer is not satisfied with your products, share them with sixteen friends. That’s sixteen people who are less likely to try your product. There are four types of customer service: live chat, e-mailing, social media, and self-service customer support. You should try to pick the one that resonates better with your company and needs and where you will be more consistent. 

1) Self-serve Customer Service

There are solutions available that don’t entirely need customer service representatives. These solutions let customers and leads find the solution on their own without taking the help of anyone else. This is best for those who would spend time and do the research on their own rather than asking for a customer support team to help them. That might be because the users want to limit their interactions with another human as minimum as possible. The other reason could be that the user is an expert in his field. They know how to run the software, and are just looking for important information on their own will be the best decision. 

Keeping all this in mind, every business should include some level of self-serve customer service solution as there will be some industry-experts and introverts using your services or products.

The best thing about this customer service is that once it’s public you can forget about it. There is always some updating of the resource until you can make changes to your offer. 

Example: Zendesk

The way to get started with self-serve customer service is to let your users do their research on issues and to build a knowledge base.

The knowledge base is a one-serve solution to those who want to know how your product works and how they can fix the issues for a particular problem. A well-designed and updated knowledge base is a great way to support your customers with a self-serve solution.

2) Live Chat Support

In some cases, customers need an answer to their questions quickly. In such cases, the best way is to connect with an expert who can provide a good solution and guide them on what can be done to their problem. You can provide this kind of direct service by implementing the live chat on your company’s website. 

After the implementation, anyone who visits your website will be able to start a conversation with one of your customer sales representatives. Through live chat, you will be able to quickly solve the problems of your users within minutes. Live chat works best for those who want quick solutions and the queries are also resolves instantly. 

Example: Livechat

LiveChat is a live chat solution software that can be implemented on your website. It’s a great way of providing quick, smart customer service and allowing your customers to connect with your customer support reputation team. Live chat not only solves your customer’s issues but also brings new sign-ups and leads, as your lead might have a few questions before making a purchase. Live chat solution works as the low-friction way of connecting with someone who can provide an effective answer to their queries.  Live chat can be used on your website and other channels. It allows your customers to chat 24/7 with the support agents. This helps to help more customers quickly and in a shorter period of time. 

3) Social Media Support

With 2.38 monthly active users on Facebook, it’s hard to ignore the power of social media. To make full use of social media you will have to constantly monitor all the available channels. So that you can resolve all your customer’s social media queries and can use a social media monitoring software that will notify you whenever someone mentions your brand or product. Also, you can use a software similar to live chat and can let anyone who visits your Facebook business page connect with your customer support representative via chat. This method works best when there are lots of people visiting your company’s profile. You’ll be able to make better use of social media and also make sure that none of them gets bad service. 

Example: Brand24

Brand24 is a great software that lets you monitor your social media and get feedback whenever someone mentions your brand. This way you’ll be able to react quickly whatever the case is. You can get quick feedback whenever someone mentions your brand name. Thus, you’ll be able to react quickly and put the situation under control.  

4) Email support

Email support is one of the most used and popular forms of support. To use email support you’ll need someone to handle queries. The only thing you have to do is to show the email address on your contact us page and in the website’s footer. Through email support, your customers can contact your customer support team without directly contacting them. Email is also a good way to explain the complicated issues to your customers as you can take your time in writing down the response and explaining it properly. 

Example: China World Hotel, Beijing

China World Hotel provides its services in the accommodation sector. The hotel makes sure that their customers from different time zones can make an inquiry through an email–which is perfect to make inquiries from any time zone. 

What is your option among this to improve your business?

These are all different types of customer service that you can choose for your business. Speculating that you want to run your business as long as possible, it’s considered best to mix speed, comfort, personalization, and self-service to create good customer service for your brand. It doesn’t mean you have to use costly solutions for your customer service. You can always start with the solutions– like Chatgen which is affordable, flexible, and works according to your business requirements.