Customer support

Customer support is a range of customer services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.

Regarding technology products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support.

Customer support is considered as one of the main data channels for customer satisfaction research and a way to increase customer retention.

In more and more companies, especially in the technology field, the responsibility for customer support is placed within the Customer Success team, especially if the Customer Success team has a C-level executive leading it

Automation of service organizations aim to achieve, for example, lower mean time to repair (MTTR).

Customer support automation involves the building of a knowledge base of known issues and their resolution to support incidents with delivery mechanisms, often by expert systems. A service automation platform includes a suite of support solutions including proactive support, assisted support and self-support.

With automated support, service organizations can make their services available to their customers 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, by monitoring alarms, identifying problems at an early stage and resolving issues before they become problems. Automated assisted support enables remote access to sites that need instant problem solving. By automating the collection of information of devices and applications coexisting with the supported application, problems can be quickly detected and fixed.

Automated self-support, automates the self-support process, freeing users from self-help diagnostics and troubleshooting from on-line libraries or knowledge bases. Support automation solutions can be integrated with customer relationship management (CRM) systems and network management systems (NMS), and provide full customer reports to management tallying problems and incidents that were solved mechanically ensuring compliance to industry regulations like Sarbanes Oxley, 21 CFR part 11, and HIPAA.

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