In a customer driven market, excellent customer support is key to success. When you provide an awesome customer support experience, you are actually working to set yourself apart from your competition by delighting your customer. And the faster you are able to delight your customer, the sooner you are creating a sticky consumer experience and making it hard for the customer to walk away.

Customer support done right can save you a lot of money and directly translates to more revenue. Think marketing costs – a good customer experience will result in good recommendations and word-of-mouth publicity for your product or service. And that itself makes for a pretty solid case for doing customer support right! Great support lets you keep customers at a cost way cheaper than getting new ones. Acquiring a customer definitely costs more than retaining one, and hence it is imperative to have a system in place to retain existing clients. Agree, right?!

So what makes for a “delightful” customer support? Well, we say start right off the bat! In other words, ensure proper onboarding – don’t wait for your customer to get frustrated trying to figure out how to use your product or service. This is your touchpoint where the customer relationship can go wrong, as the customer needs the most information and support as they begin to engage with your product or experience your service. At the same time, make sure you don’t abandon your customer after you finish your sale. There are numerous studies that clearly show that customers are willing to spend more with companies that provide excellent after sale service and support.

Put emphasis on both reactive and proactive approaches for your customer support. With reactive we mean – make your customer complaints your top priority! Acknowledge, agree and react to provide the best solution. And mind you, it doesn’t end there. Follow up to ensure the solution provided helped the customer and all is taken care of now. Well, so that was focusing on your reactive approach. Time to look into your proactive approach – Make the first move! Yes, you have a customer onboard; now don’t wait for them to contact you at the time of an issue. If you detect a problem, reach out to your customer before they do and offer the solution. Now, that’s also building customer loyalty at the same time.

We don’t need to point out the obvious that makes for a great customer support experience – and we won’t elaborate on those too but here is a quick take on it - personalize your communication with your customers, respond to their email and phone calls promptly and never miss an opportunity to add value wherever you can and as much as possible. Pursue their valuable feedback, ask for suggestions – it will not only give you a chance to fix a problem you may have not realized, but would also help you improvise your product or service with their valuable feedback and suggestions.

Now with all those efforts, you have fueled your customer with euphoria! A delightful customer is more than likely to talk about your products with friends, family, on social media and across their networks. So there you go - here is our case in point of delighting your customers with an exceptional customer support and our reason is simple – a delighted customer will always choose you over your competitor and in turn will bring in more new customers by spreading the delight in their communities.