Customer Service vs. Customer Support: Difference Explained

In the world of customer experience, there are two main types of people: those who provide customer support and those who provide customer service. While these terms may seem interchangeable to some, they actually have a very important difference between them.

Let’s take a look at what each one means so you can understand how to differentiate between them.

The Difference Between Customer Service and Customer Support

For most organizations, customer service and customer support are part of the same department. 

The difference between customer service and customer support can be categorized as follows:

– Customer service is a group of people who interact with customers to provide them with value, increase their overall satisfaction with your product or service and overall contribute to the customer experience.

– In contrast, a customer support team handles mostly technical issues. The staff of this team helps customers handle any issues that arise from their interaction with the company’s products or services.

In conclusion, the difference between customer service and customer support is quite simple.

Customer service is a process that involves providing assistance to customers in relation to their purchases or services. It includes answering questions about products, policies, procedures, etc., as well as helping people with problems related to those products.

On the other hand, customer support is an activity performed by employees of companies who are responsible for resolving issues raised by customers. It includes troubleshooting, problem-solving, and repairing technical glitches.

An organization may choose one over the other depending on how it wants to differentiate itself from its competitors. Customer service is often used for companies that want to boost their reputation by providing great care for their customers. 

Let’s explore each of these teams’ roles for a better understanding.

What Does a Customer Service Team Do?

These are the main responsibilities of a customer service agent:

• Assisting the customer before, during, and after using the product/service
• Building relationships with customers
• Contributing to the overall good customer experience
• Help customers with their complaints, worries, and questions

The customer experience is a vital part of a company’s success. Most companies have customer support teams that help solve problems and answer questions from customers. However, the customer experience team has a much broader definition. It involves interactions with the company’s customers that are aimed at enhancing customer experiences and improving relations with the company in general, whereas customer support is just one part of that.

Customer service can be defined as taking care of a customer’s needs by providing helpful assistance before, during, and after the sale of a product.

What Does a Customer Support Team Do?

These are the main responsibilities of a customer support agent:

• Help customers solve specific issues, mostly technical
• Alert the IT team if a new and unexpected problem occurs
• Handle errors, orders, cancellations, others

Nowadays there are many customer support services, some of which are dedicated to assisting customers with the planning, installation, troubleshooting, maintenance or upgrading of products. Others focus more on the disposal of old products after they have become obsolete.

The term ‘customer support’ mostly relates to teams in SaaS & tech companies who work to help clients with products and services that require ongoing tech support.

How to Help Your Customer Support & Customer Service Teams Do a Great Job?

The customer support and customer service teams are the brand ambassadors for the company, so finding ways to help them succeed will in return benefit the company ten-fold.  

Take a look at these two simple, yet effective ways in which you can help your customer support and customer service agents do their best:

Provide Them With Helpful Tools

If you are looking for a helpful tool and one that is multi-functional, then a power dialer is guaranteed to work for your team. A power dialer offers many features and tools that are helpful to both the agent and the manager. Here are some of the features you can expect:

• Live call coaching
• Personalized voicemail drop 
• Built-in CRM
• Set reminders 
• Send Emails & SMS
• Reports
• Custom campaigns 
• Lead status 

While these are only a few of the features that power dialers offer, this should be enough evidence to support our case that they are a valuable tool. 

With the use of tools, agents can focus more of their attention to providing excellent customer service/support. There doesn’t need to be any more wasted time on redundant tasks if you invest in worthwhile tools like a power dialer. 

Create Self-Service Assets

Here is a statistic that will interest you – almost half of customers now prefer self-service over human interaction. Yes, nowadays people prefer to search for information on their own and resolve their problems before reaching out to customer support. This is why your website needs:

• A help portal
• FAQ pages
• How-to guides and videos
• And even a chatbot

It is important to keep the target audience of your products/services in mind while making and providing these assets. Think about your audience and what format, questions, functions, etc will appeal most to them. Of course, it also needs to be user friendly and easily accessible on the platform in which the tools are placed. With those things in mind you will be able to serve your customers and help your team better!

If you want to enhance your knowledge about how to improve your customer service, you can continue reading our guide on how to provide amazing phone customer service.