Jason Lemkin, a VC and founder of SaaStr, published the blog post “Great Support Really Can Make Up For a Lot of Things” last week, highlighting how a competitor to the product he co-founded and sold to Adobe does better by providing an excellent customer support experience.

Go where the customers are, right? In today’s digital age, companies need to move with the evolving customer communications landscape or be replaced by more progressive companies. Some innovative and profitable business models have arisen to take advantage of the new possibilities of live video chat technologies.

Here are 3 industries that have embraced consumer-to-business video technology as not just a trend but a differentiator and competitive advantage.

Customer Experience (CX) refers to customers’ overall perception of your brand throughout the buyer’s journey. When done well, the customers can feel it. For example, think about when you enjoyed a shopping trip. The first thing you may have noticed is how people treated you. The customer experience is being delivered by the greeter at the door, the sales representative on the shop floor, to the customer support agent at the service counter. The other main touchpoint is the product. How the product is displayed, packaged, designed, and used are all part of your customer experience.

Customer experience is not organic; it is designed. There is a team of professionals at many companies whose full-time job is to analyze customer feedback and share this insight with the rest of the organization. The global customer experience management market size in 2021 alone was worth over 8 billion USD and is expected to grow 18% annually from 2022 to 2030.

But in case you don’t have a customer experience team, there are things you can do to start upgrading your customer experience strategy today. It is better to start now as 86% of a survey found respondents engaged in or leading customer experience expected to compete based on it by 2021. And, 74% of consumers in another survey said they were at least somewhat likely to buy based on customer experience alone.

If you found this blog, you were probably researching why you are losing customers in your pipeline. What could be the cause, and where are you losing people? To figure this out, you must first understand everything a customer goes through when interacting with your business. Next, you are looking to grasp your customer journey, and eventually, you are looking to use it to improve your customer’s experience with your business.

The constant journey to improve your customer service offering matters. Here are the undeniable numbers:

Fact #1: A survey found that 79% of customers have made a purchase decision based on the quality of customer service. 

Customers have come to expect great customer support from companies. Those who get high marks are rewarded with customer loyalty and a brand that attracts new customers without spending huge marketing dollars. But great customer support is not a given nor easy to achieve in a short amount of time. The responsibility falls on the companies vying for their customer’s attention to provide the tools that nature their customer support practices and ingrain customer-centric thinking into their culture. Although Viewabo cannot help with changing a company’s culture, we can provide the tools needed for great customer support services. Viewabo has defined 7 key areas of customer support that apply to all companies and used our product offerings to illustrate how remote customer support can enhance both the customer and customer support agent’s success.

We trade our best products and services to lure in customers to do business with us. They get great products and in exchange, we get their hard-earn cash. But when should we consider a customer, a customer? And when should we start managing their perception of our business?

Traditionally, we would consider someone who has purchased our products as a customer. If someone is browsing or still considering a purchase, that would fall under the realm of marketing and sales. In terms of customer relationship management, we would provide customer support. Customer support is for people who brought our products and found a problem which needs additional services. As a business, we provide a set of practices and procedures that assist customers after a sale.

Call center agents exist in most companies. They are the agents who handle incoming or outgoing customer calls within a business. They are the ones helping customers deal with locked bank accounts, setting up a speaker system, or finding that reset button on a device. Call center agents manage customer relationships by identifying needs, answering questions, solving problems, and building trust. They also up-sell products, get feedback, and gain insight directly from the customer.

Each instance a customer calls in is a critical interpersonal communication touchpoint between a customer and a business. One lousy customer call support experience might be the difference between a loyal customer for years to come or losing one.

We can all agree that call center agents are essential to keeping customers happy and vital to the success of any business. A small communication breakdown during a call is not just a one-star review. In the long-term, bad customer call support may hurt a business’ brand and bottom line.

What is currently in your company’s remote customer support toolbox? Perhaps you have invested in a software solution like Zendesk but have yet to explore beyond its basic features. Or, you have a Facebook page but no dedicated team members monitoring inquiries on the platform. Expensive resources are being wasted and support requests are going unseen. In response, your customer satisfaction scores are starting to drop and returns are piling up. To meet customers’ expectations for speed, efficiency, and quality, service teams need to have more than just phone and email.

In this article, we will discuss the four must-have remote customer support tools businesses need to satisfy customers in 2022.