Here's What 33 Months in Customer Support Taught Me

Hello reader 👋 , I’m glad that you chose to read my blog. Let’s get started!

During my college days, I did not envision that I would take the customer support responsibility among other roles in any company!

But I got an offer that I couldn’t resist, and in hindsight, I don’t regret. I became a freelance customer support agent with my domain knowledge in Software Development to my advantage.

And eventually, customer support is one of the several responsibilities in my current job.

To be honest, at first, it took some me time to get used to customer support. This role grew on me. Having helped more than 1000+ customers, day after day, changed my perspective, and the way I view this role. By now, I have gained such a huge respect for customer support that I felt I had to share my journey. Here we go!

Always Stay Grounded

I learnt this lesson the hard way. Through constant self reflection over time and with deep analysis of my work. By reading behind the lines.

Emotions must be set aside when dealing with Customer Support Emails.

When customers are emotional like angry, dissatisfied, confused, curious, or demanding, it’s because they are stuck and they need help. Don’t take it personally. They are worried about the product/service they paid the price for.

Avoid angry replies. There’s always a way to reply in a professional manner. Even when the customer is crossing the line, we don’t need to. We have to make sure that our job is to provide Support without bias.

Principles

The golden rules I started to follow.

Respond within 24 hours. Always! Nothing beats immediate action.

Stand in their shoes: Understand the customer’s perspective.

Categorize the diverse set of support emails. (Covered in detail below).

Inbox Labels

Use labels to categorize similar support queries.

Take advantage of Filters and Rules in Email Inboxes that can help clean up emails from other platforms and business-type emails.

For example, if the email inbox you manage always gets an email from any Payment platform used by the business, you can easily apply filters to these emails and label them. So that they are securely saved under a label that can be easily accessed and don’t get lost.

Additionally, these filters can help us archive such emails so that the email inbox is clean and we can make sure that most of the time we only receive customer support emails.

And using labels is very efficient for accessing important emails quickly all in one place.

FAQs

Once you answer enough queries, 1000+ Emails in my case. Preparing a documentation to save Frequently Asked Questions is very helpful. I used simple Windows Notepad tool and Notion docs to save such commonly asked queries.

Because most of the time, 80% of the Support queries raised by customers, will be 20% of the queries/concerns that are frequently asked. (Pareto Principle).

Eventually, I also created an FAQ page for our company, and it has been beneficial. So much so that we attached the FAQ page link to our Auto-reply email so that customers can go through it until I can respond to the support query.

How Does It Feel Working as an Agent 🕵‍♂️ (a Customer Support Agent)?

Satisfaction: Once customers are satisfied, I’m also equally satisfied.

Insightful: When we want to improve our products & services.

Empathy: The more you help each customer with personalized care, the better you become in understanding the customer.

Physical pain: Pretty much what you may experience in any other desk job.

_Repetitive and Boring at time_s: FAQs idea will help ease this pain.

Scope of Customer Support in the Future

You may have heard that Customer Support is an evergreen field. I believe that it is true.

Now, I know that in the Age of A.I., so many companies and businesses have introduced and/or even replaced this space with the help of chatbots and GPT-trained models or even implemented a blend of both bots and customer support agents. Bots do help with FAQs.

In my opinion, human intervention along with AI bots works the best. You may have noticed that several companies are already implementing such systems. And I’m optimistic about this approach.

My Request to Customers (Like You!)

I became more compassionate in my interactions with other customer support agents. I greeted them with a simple “Thank you”, or “Have a nice day”, or an acknowledgement that my issue/concern is resolved.

All of us are customers of several products and services, myself, the author and you the reader. All I request you is that at the end of each interaction with the customer support agent/team, if you can respond with a simple acknowledgement like “My issue is resolved” and with simple greeting like “Have a nice day” or just a “Thank you” would be awesome. Because that’s all I expect when I answer Support Emails. It makes the end of our day happy and filled with a sense of accomplishment and joy.

PS: Thank you for reading my blog! Have a nice day!

Photo by SEO Galaxy on Unsplash