Taking Pride in Proactive Customer Support

Customer support can completely change the way how people perceive your business. Customers today want more than just a viable product, they want a completely seamless user experience, and excellent customer support service makes that possible. Word of mouth is more powerful than any of your sales pitches or leads and when people have good things to say about you, it draws more traction to your business.

What is Customer Support?

Success is not defined by the ability to have no complaints, it is defined by the ability to deal with them — Mikkel Svane, Founder & CEO - Zendesk

Customer support means efficiently and empathetically assisting a customer when he may possibly be facing any kind of issues using your product. It is the role of customer support to either eliminate the problem completely or to provide enough relevant resources to the customer to help him resolve his issue without much time and effort.

Customer support plays a vital role in building a company that people love. Various channels available these days for this purpose e.g. documentation, email, phone, chat, social media, etc. helps ensure that the customer’s journey remains unobstructed.

Why should you care?

When I think about great service, it’s about how you take every interaction you have with the customer and use that as a way to improve their perception of your organization — Jon Herstein, SVP Customer Service - Box

An excellent customer support service is a very critical component for enabling good sales and helps diminish negative word-of-mouth. It is essential for building trust and increasing customer satisfaction. Increasing customer satisfaction will increase the probability of the customer using your product again. It will also make it more likely for the customer to gladly agree to pay for what is being offered to him. Customer support helps identify problems and new features which in turn lets you improve your product. You get valuable feedback regarding what should be and what should not be.

Proactive versus Reactive Customer Support

Going above and beyond involves making customers “feel special” and helping them out even when it may not make sense — Neil Patel, Kissmetrics

Want to ensure your customers are more than happy with your service? Go with proactive support. Offer them help before they ask for it. Do not waste time waiting for them to reach out to you. Get in touch with them and resolve their issues beforehand. It will greatly save the customer’s time and effort, and at the end, it will make their experience with your product extraordinary.

A survey conducted by InContact found out that 87% of adults are happy to be contacted proactively by companies regarding customer service issues. It shows they are willing to go an extra mile to help them, a kind of help that gains customer loyalty and trust.

Customer Support at APIMatic

Get closer than ever to your customers. So close, in fact, that you tell them what they need well before they realize it themselves — Steve Jobs

We at APIMatic greatly value our customers and want to ensure that their journey is as smooth and seamless as possible. We offer them proactive support to ensure their issues are timely resolved before they even ask for any assistance. We aim to provide solutions without the need for any customer input.

To make all this possible, we keep a keen eye on any customer who appears to be facing any issues on our Transformer/API Dashboard. For example, he may be facing conversion problems on the Transformer when converting his API description file to another format.

We try to identify the exact cause and then accordingly, reach out to the customer. If the cause is a bug, we prefer transparency and notify the user immediately. A follow-up is made as soon as the bug is fixed. Keeping customers in the loop in such a case helps them understand that the company is working on the issue which in turn increases their trust.

If however, the cause is an error in the user’s file we reach out with details of the cause along with a patched file. They can utilize this file to make their conversions and not let the failures hinder their workflow. The renowned API Evangelist, Kin Lane appreciates this in his blog, mentioning how he once ran into some trouble converting his Blueprint file to an Open API file. But was surprised to get an email from our team with a patched file that made it possible for him to continue his work from where he left it.

Additionally, like any traditional support, we also try to efficiently resolve any other issues pointed out by the customers themselves via tickets/contact us forms, etc.

Conclusion

It is always great to hear back from our customers to whom we reach out. Their feedback greatly helps us in not only improving our product but also in making our support better. The appreciation we get is highly motivating to keep us going. We strongly believe that there is always room for improvement. We are, therefore, ever working towards ensuring better support for our customers that aligns with their needs and gives them a delightful and satisfying experience.