Introduction

Keeping customers happy is one of the most important things any company or organization can do. Not only is maintaining high customer satisfaction key to preserving healthy customer relationships, it’s also a key component of creating and maintaining your organization’s reputation. After all, word spreads, whether on the internet or offline! Of course, keeping your level of customer satisfaction high is essential for maximizing your revenue—and at a deeper level, it’s simply a decent thing to do.

Customer service and customer support are both essential aspects of maintaining customer happiness. While “support” and “service” might sound basically identical at first glance, they are actually quite distinct sets of practices and norms that tackle different aspects of the business-client relationship and the overall CX (customer experience).

Customer service, often referred to CS, has been around for decades as an essential component of industries across the board, but customer support has developed more recently as a response to customer needs within the IT niche. In this article, we’ll look at the differences between customer service and support, and how both of these are situated in the contemporary business environment.

Hard vs. soft skills

In this article, we mention “hard” and “soft” skills frequently and how they tie into and define customer service and support. But just what are they?

Simply put, you can think of hard skills as those technical skills you can learn: they require education and training. They can also be quantified—for example, you can obtain certifications at different levels in data management or in a foreign language. 

Meanwhile, soft skills are “people” skills and are gained through interpersonal interactions and intuition. They can’t really be measured, only perceived. 

Examples of hard skills

• Technical focus: Programming, software tools, use of machinery
• Analytical focus: Data analysis, financial modeling, statistical analysis
• Language focus: Fluency and certification in foreign languages

Examples of soft skills

• Effective verbal and written communication
• Teamwork: The ability to collaborate and work well with others
• Problem-solving: Creative thinking and the ability to find solutions
• Adaptability: Flexibility and the ability to handle change
• Leadership: Being able to guide and motivate others
• Emotional intelligence: Often referred to as “EQ,” the ability to understand and manage your emotions and those of others.

Customer Service

The most important thing to bear in mind about customer service is that it’s an umbrella term that encompasses all help-oriented customer interactions. Customer support is therefore a type of customer service, although it deals with a very specific subset of customer assistance. 

Customer service occurs across channels, including phone, email, live chat, social media, and other self-service platforms. These channels facilitate fast and easy transactions between customer and company, where “quick fixes”—for example, a refund request, or addressing a credit card error—are needed more than ongoing guidance about complex problems.

All industries—from fine dining to retail, from auto service to telecom—provide services to their customers to give them the best experience possible. But not all of these industries require extensive technical expertise for their customer service to be effective. Why is this?

Soft skills predominate over hard skills in customer service for two reasons:

• First, because of the simple nature of generic customer service requests, CS agents don’t need to possess extensive technical knowledge. They’re not handling complex software-related complaints, so training them to fulfill basic customer requirements is easy to do. For this reason, the CS field tends to be an entry-level position with limited opportunities for advancement.
• Second, because consistently good customer service is an important selling point for your company, being able to utilize soft skills becomes particularly relevant. A quick response time with polite, empathetic, and responsible agents goes just as far in selling your product as having a reputation for technical know-how.

Customer service is ultimately about building long-term relationships with your clients—establishing positive rapport with them to ensure your company maintains a good reputation. The aggregate of multiple small positive transactions and interactions, even if only about the simplest of issues, will add up into an overall positive feeling about your company.

Scope and focus

Broad: encompasses all customer interactions and services

Type of queries

General inquiries, billing, returns, complaints

Timing

Throughout customer journey: pre-sales to post-purchase

Skills required

Strong communication, patience, and a customer-centric attitude

Goals

Ensure overall customer satisfaction and build long-term relationships

Relevant KPIs

CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), AHT (Average Handle Time), FRT (First Response Time)

Customer Support

Unlike the very broad scope of customer service, customer support is based on providing know-how applicable to a narrower range of tech-related issues and queries. While customer support utilizes the same channels as customer service to answer queries—phone, email, chat, and so on—customer support tends to focus on troubleshooting problems and providing assistance in an IT- or software-related context. 

Because SaaS can be highly complex, users often require a great deal of guidance and assistance to make the most of their software solution experience. Customers frequently have questions about implementation and use of the solution at hand, rather than simple requests for refunds, for example. This is where hard skills come into play.

That said, because SaaS customers need to be guided on their journey, customer support has a more “nurturing” aspect than the purely transactional (though polite!) nature of customer service. 

For this reason, building strong customer relationships should be a special area of focus for SaaS companies. Despite the technical locus of customer support, it’s still vital that support agents cultivate a strong set of soft skills to use in their ongoing interactions with clients.

Scope and focus

Specific: focuses on technical issues and product usage

Nature of queries

Technical or specialized questions and issues

Timing

Typically post-purchase, when customers encounter problems

Skills required

Technical knowledge, problem-solving skills specific to the product or service

Goals

Resolve specific issues and ensure effective use of the product or service

Relevant KPIs

NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (Customer Effort Score), Churn Rate

Conclusion

Customer service and customer support are both incredibly important aspects of the contemporary business model and customer experience. However, they each cover different aspects of the customer journey and require different skillsets.

While customer service is broad and is used across the whole gamut of industries, customer support typically occurs only in an IT-based context. While soft skills predominate in customer service, hard skills assume primary importance in customer support (though soft skills remain valuable here too).

Regardless of whether you are tracking service or support metrics, Plecto dashboards are here to help. With their capabilities to accurately and efficiently monitor your progress on meeting KPIs, optimizing your customer experience across both service and support channels becomes a breeze.

Sign up here for a free 14-day Plecto trial, and see the results of your CX strategy firsthand!