Differences between Customer Service vs. Customer Support

Businesses these days need to go the extra mile to retain existing customers and woo new ones. This includes interacting with people before they become customers and catering to their needs and questions after they become one. To the inexperienced, customer service and customer support look like the same thing, but there are, in fact, several points of difference between them.

It is important to understand the difference because chances are, you may be offering one and inadvertently missing on the other. Or, the quality of customer support offered by your organization may be exemplary but sadly lacking in the other.

Primary difference between customer service and customer support

1. Objective - Customer support is aimed at helping customers with their queries about using the products or services of an organization. A person working in the support unit must have strong product knowledge of what questions may be raised by customers and tackle them. Customer Service, on the other hand, is designed to enhance the experience a customer has with the organization. A customer service rep need not have in-depth knowledge of the business' offerings, but their interpersonal skills, such as empathy, patience, and friendliness, needs to be on-point always.
2. Presence - Customer Service units are present in the organization of every industry. The logic is simple - all businesses will have both satisfied and unhappy customers who want to share their feedback or have basic queries. Customer support, on the other hand, are more specific to businesses that offer complex services or products. Examples would be IT companies and banking institutions
3. Process - A customer service rep would usually provide responses to general queries from clients. They don't need to perform much research or analysis but have sufficient knowledge on the workings of the business. The customer support team, on the other hand, will have to gather all details, analyze them, and troubleshoot the issue. Some of the resolutions may not be conventional ones and either.
4. Performance Parameters - Customer service agents' performance is usually based on parameters such as customer satisfaction, average holding time, first contact resolutions, and average hold time. For customer support agents, the parameters are churn, customer effort score, and net promoter score.
5. Business relations - Customer support tends to focus on tackling a problem rather than creating an experience for the customer to retain them with the business. These may be mutually dependent on reality, but it's not compulsory for the agent to achieve it. Customer service, however, is primarily designed to keep a customer satisfied at all costs. Customer service experience here refers to how they perceive an organization on a personal level than on a technical one.

While customer support is used more commonly than service, the fact is agents have to incorporate rules of both branches to have an overall positive impact on the people they interact with.