How To Create A Knockout Customer Support Strategy

The strength of your customer support strategy goes a long way to determining the health of your business.

That’s because a customer support strategy can either:

It’s up to you to decide which.

To stay on the right side of this choice, a key part of building a successful customer support strategy is ensuring that everyone across your organization understands and is aligned to a set process.

To do that, you’ll need to develop a customer support strategy template that ensures every member of every team is singing from the same song sheet. And crucially, that also makes sure your customers receive a connected and coherent customer experience at every touchpoint.

Now if that all sounds a bit doom and gloom, we have good news: in this article, we’re going to explore everything you need to know to create a knockout customer support strategy.

This includes key definitions around what a customer support strategy actually is. The key business benefits of a well formulated customer support strategy. And of course, how to develop a well formulated customer support strategy in the first place – one that covers the full spectrum of customer support tiers.

If you want to jump to a specific section of the article, you can use these links:

Now, let’s get going…

What is a customer support strategy?

A customer support strategy is a guiding framework for your business, outlining exactly how you provide support to your customers at every interaction point.

It includes detailed information on how you resolve issues customers are having with your product or service, including the processes, structured approaches and technologies you use to achieve desired outcomes.

The ultimate goal of a good customer support strategy is to articulate clearly how your company intends to use customer support to create a better overall customer experience.

Essentially, your customer support strategy is a plan for turning customer interactions into positive experiences. Because a customer support strategy aligns your teams around a centralized vision, it’s an essential tool for ensuring consistency across your customer support teams. The kind of consistency that builds trust, drives loyalty and makes customers want to return, time and time again.

To do all these things effectively, your customer support strategy needs to be easy to understand. Stuff it full of industry jargon or overly complex explanations and chances are, no one will actually use it – which will make the entire process a monumental waste of time and resources.

Your customer support strategy should be clear, concise and grounded in the realities of your customer interactions.

Now, let’s look at the benefits of a customer support strategy in more detail.

Benefits of a customer support strategy for your business

The benefits of a customer support strategy for your business depend on the specific goals you want to achieve but some typical benefits include: helping you align your teams, ensuring brand consistency, and improving customer loyalty.

To take this a level deeper and access the benefits specific to your business, our top tip is to start with outcomes first, then work back from that point (we talk about that more in the next section).

But before we get too ahead of ourselves, let’s unpack the broader benefits of a robust and coherent customer support strategy so you can benchmark your goals against them.

How to get started with your customer support strategy

To get started with your customer support strategy, we suggest following two key principles: define the outcomes you want to achieve, and match your strategy to your product, industry and customers.

Sounds easier said than done? Let’s unpack each principle in detail.

1. Define the outcomes you want to achieve

Start by mapping out the outcomes you want your customer support strategy to achieve. These should be linked to business goals, so should look something like: ‘achieving a customer satisfaction score of 90% or higher’ or ‘increasing first call resolution rates by 15%’ (rather than ‘hiring X number of support agents’, ‘deploying a chatbot’).

Our top tip here is to start with the outcome and then work back from there. That way you ensure that all the moves you’re making across your customer support strategy are actually laddering up to the goals you want to achieve as a business. This will help keep your processes lean, reduce cost wastage – and ultimately lead to a more coherent and effective customer support program.

2. Match your strategy to your product, industry and customers

Next, you want to make sure that your customer support strategy matches up with three key really important things: your product, your industry and your customers.

Let’s imagine you’re a SaaS company. In buying your service, your customers are embarking on a seriously complex journey. To guide them through that, you’ll need a high-touch customer support model that involves pre-sales support, hands-on implementation support, and a continued support program. Typically you’ll also need to pair this with a comprehensive customer success plan.

But now let’s say you’re a healthcare provider that deals predominantly with elderly customers.

This is a different game entirely. Here you'll want to prioritize human contact, a simplified resolution process, and ensure your agents are able to manage customer conversations with empathy and sensitivity. Which will impact your hiring and orientation processes. Especially because you’re also going to need to ensure HIPAA compliance which sets the standard for sensitive patient data protection.

Compare that to customer support for a company that sells dog toys. It’s a simple product with a single consumer buyer journey, with more standard data protection issues, and only requires a level of empathy synonymous with customers that might be being dragged down the sidewalk during the call.

Either way, the best, most effective, and most efficient strategy is the one that’s specific to your product, your industry and your customers.

How to develop your customer support strategy

With these building blocks in place, it’s time to step up the development of your customer support strategy. We suggest doing some or all of the following:

Map out and analyze the customer support journey

Map out the entire customer support journey, from initial contact to resolution and follow up. Analyze touchpoints to identify and address pain points that may cause dissatisfaction. This approach helps improve customer support, reduce churn, and build loyalty by understanding and predicting customer needs.

Think about how you structure your customer support team

Assemble a team with strong customer service skills, empathy, and make sure they are all fully aligned with your company values. This ensures they can effectively handle customer issues, even under challenging circumstances, leading to higher customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Consider how you use automation to support your customers

Use automation technology like chatbots on your website to handle routine customer queries and provide immediate, real-time support. Not only will this help customers to reach resolutions faster, it also reduces the workload on human agents, allowing them to focus on complex issues – all of which will enhance overall customer satisfaction. (Read more about customer support automating in our article here).

Ask your customers for feedback:

Bring your customers into the fold by regularly requesting customer feedback through surveys, emails, or social media to gather insights for improving your service. This shows customers that their opinions matter, strengthening their loyalty and helping you make data-driven improvements to your customer support strategy.

Establish and track KPIs:

Articulate and track essential KPIs like Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and First Response Time. Analyzing these metrics helps you identify areas for improvement, ensuring your customer support strategy remains effective and aligned with customer expectations.

Aim to meet customers on their preferred channels:

Ensure your customer support is accessible across multiple channels – website (via live chat or chatbots), social media, phone, email – and use customer data to focus resources on the most popular ones. This omnichannel approach makes it easy for customers to get the support they need, enhancing their overall experience with your brand.

Implementing a customer support process

So you’ve mapped out the benefits, and developed a customer support strategy that’s primed to make an impact. The next big thing you need is a customer support process that ensures you’re able to consistently deliver on that strategy.

In this way your customer support process is like a set of rules or guidelines that detail how your company follows everything that needs to be done to help customers.

This process needs to be clearly articulated to make it easier for your teams to provide consistent and connected support – all of which ultimately leads to a better customer experience.

A customer support process should cover the following stages:

1. Initial contact

This is the first interaction a customer has with your company, so the emphasis is on making a great first impression. And the problem with first impressions? You only get to make one.

To make sure you nail this vital interaction, you should offer a selection of different communication channels and methods depending on the customer’s preference, whether that’s by phone, email, or chat, and use the channel they find most comfortable.

If they are speaking to a human agent then you should provide guidance on how to greet the customer. Don’t forget, this initial contact will only be a human touch point if that’s part of your strategy. Some products and goals might not warrant this. Low cost, simple user journeys might be better served better with self service options first or a chatbot.

And if that first contact is automated, make sure you provide a readily available ‘escape hatch’ to talk to a human.

2. Gathering information

At this stage, your goal is to actively listen to the customer’s issues. And when we say active listening, we mean active listening.

To deliver on that, ask open-ended questions which allow you to gather more details, confirm your understanding by summarizing or repeating what the customer has shared back to them in a new way.

Avoid interrupting, making assumptions, or jumping to conclusions. The customer’s details and issues should be documented in a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or ticketing system. One there they should be assigned a unique reference number to track the case’s progress and history, ensuring clarity, preventing confusion and customer frustration.

3. Finding a solution

Now, you focus on analyzing the customer’s problem and determining the best solution or alternative. You should present a clear, feasible solution that aligns with the customer’s expectations.

Explain the steps involved in executing the solution and provide a realistic timeline, ensuring the customer agrees with the proposed plan of action. If the problem requires escalation, you should inform the customer about the escalation process and anticipated resolution time.

4. Ensuring Satisfaction

In this final step, your aim is to make sure the customer is happy with the solution and conclude the interaction positively. Follow up to confirm that the solution has resolved their issue, offering any additional help if needed. And don’t forget to actually thank them for their patience and cooperation. From there, you can invite them to share feedback or suggestions for improvement. Update the CRM or ticketing system with the case outcome and resolution, and formally close the case.

How an outsourcer can help you develop a customer support framework for your business

One of the easiest, most effective, and most cost efficient ways for developing a customer support framework or strategy for your business is to find an outsourcing partner who can help you develop it.

A good outsourcer should be able to help you flesh out the various aspects of your customer support strategy, cover everything above and more. And a really good outsourcing partner will help you implement a continuous improvement model that ensures your customer support strategy always evolves ahead of customer expectations.