Customer Service Trends | 4 min read | Published September 30, 2020

Part 2: Helping Companies Build Stronger Customer Relationships

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The future is in engaging with the customer at a macro level while having visibility at a micro level. And the future is actually now.

In November of this year, CIO Review will feature TeamSupport as a Top 20 CRM Solution. They sat down with TeamSupport co-founder and COO Eric Harrington to talk about customer support in the time of COVID and building strong customer relationship in Part 1 of this series. CIO Review continues its Q&A with Eric in Part 2 where they discuss current trends and the future of B2B customer support.

CIO Review: What are some of the trends that you expect to have an impact in the CRM space this year and how is TeamSupport​ planning to leverage these trends and evolve?

Eric: The future is in engaging with the customer at a macro level while having visibility at a micro level. And the future is actually now.

CIO Review: Elaborate!

Eric: Organizing everything around individual tickets—as traditional B2C support solutions have offered—doesn’t give a complete picture when the customer is a company rather than an individual. In B2B, you are supporting multiple individuals across different departments who work for the same company. Sometimes there will be multiple individuals reporting different issues; sometimes all talking about the same issue. At TeamSupport, we’ve built our solution to understand the relationship at the macro company level. It’s vital for a business to understand how their customers are feeling about the support they provide and how it is impacting their workflow and operations. We continue to bring passion and awareness to the market about B2B support.

Cloud solutions and advanced technologies such as machine learning and AI will continue to power current and new products. At TeamSupport we’ve integrated sophisticated AI-assisted sentiment analysis. We can tell if a customer is frustrated or happy, as well as the agent’s tone with the customer, and that plays back into the primary tool we’ve built into our solution, the Customer Distress Index™ (CDI). The CDI looks at all the interactions throughout the multiple contact points of a single corporate customer and compares those to all of that client’s other customers to determine if they are having a higher level of distress comparably. With that, we are helping businesses become more proactive about the health of their customer relationships, and better positioning them for account renewals and expansion.

The future is also about Customer Success. Unlike customer support or traditional sales models, customer success management aims to deliver long-term strategic value for customers. Success proactively monitors overall customer health while Support reacts to ad-hoc issues, often in fire-fighting mode. Additionally, Success actively manages the customer lifecycle to add ongoing value and drives strategic initiatives to maximize product adoption and advocacy. While Success and Support are growth drivers, Support is usually seen more as a cost center. We are helping businesses understand how Support and Success complement one another so they can increase their enterprise value.

We conclude this series with Part 3, where Eric offers insight into strategies employed by TeamSupport​ to thwart the market competition and what are the distinct features of our solution.

 

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About Eric Harrington

Co-founding TeamSupport in 2008, Eric helped build what is now a global mission-critical business solution for managing customer support. TeamSupport increases enterprise value by strengthening customer relationships that result in reduced churn, consistent renewals, account expansion, and advocacy. Learn more about Eric.

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