Why Is Technical Customer Support Crucial For product-based companies?

As the name clearly implies, product-based business deals with physical things, like clothing or boxes. Users will require support no matter what. Even the best product with the most impressive documentation & tutorials can require technical support to increase its longevity. Thus, technical customer support is a key selling point for product-based companies and can be a good reason for someone to opt for your product over the competition.

Why Support Fails

To a majority of people, product support implies parts, service, and warranty. In the early stages, the customers are concerned with only a few aspects of support like spare parts and service. As the market starts maturing, customer requirements become sophisticated. Product support has to encompass everything that can aid in maximizing customer after-sales satisfaction. Not only does it include spare parts, warrant, and service but also operator training, parts delivery, maintenance training, serviceability engineering, reliability engineering, and much more. Many companies fail to come out of the limited view of technical customer support. This results in a lack of synergy between the marketing strategy and product support. 

Where do product-based companies need to focus to improve product tech support?

Methods Of Providing Technical Support

When a product is launched, you must decide on how you want to support it. Based on the product and the people utilizing it, some or all of these supports can be offered:

• Ticketing system
• Phone
• Social media
• Email
• Real-time chat.

Localized Support

When consumers are looking for service, they often try to differentiate the services of a product in their locality. Thus, businesses need to target their product as well as service to the appropriate markets. Globally, consumers can purchase a product online but the product services must be delivered locally. It will earn the loyalty of the customers.

Bots (and AI) Can Improve Tech Support

Do you know that most “bots” are not any form of AI? They are just a well-scripted & branched logic chain presented in a conversational UI(such as Facebook messenger). The bots just leverage the existing knowledge and engage the customers swiftly. A Conversational UI is a great way for businesses to provide tech support.

Product-Service Hybrids

It is often possible for companies to adopt a product to a service business model as they develop and expand. In this case, a business sells a product but it is also sold to the customer as a service. This is most often seen in service-based software in the technology world. For instance, Microsoft offers many software programs that fulfill the immediate need of a customer while continuing services like frequent upgrades to the program, customer support, or discounts for add-ons, etc. 

Segmentation Of Market

Consumer preferences for product services add an additional dimension to the segmentation of the market. In most cases, the bundle of support services varies dramatically from one location to the next. While several businesses are segregating market-based product performance and features, only a few are doing so by focusing on the needs of customer service. As a consequence, certain areas of assistance are overloaded, and others are ignored.

Tech Support Is As Important As Sales

No business can completely work in silos. One should assess the impact of different sections of the business on each other. Every time a new client is acquired by the marketing and sales teams, they are counting on great tech support & service for retention. And if you are selling tech products, the first point of contact is tech assistance. However, tech support is not meant for handling customer requests only. It can also be used to cross-sell and upsell products.

End Note:

Tech support is a vital factor for product-based companies to improve overall user experience. The fact that it specifically deals with technical problems relevant to a product and not the transactional or account-based queries sets it apart from “customer service”. The fact that it specifically deals with technical problems relevant to a product and not the transactional or account-based queries sets it apart from “customer service”. It’s important that you get the right tech support as the customers increasingly become more tech-savvy. 

Contact Us for any Query

Email : sales@ksolves.com

Call : +91 8130704295