WHAT DOES A CUSTOMER SUPPORT REPRESENTATIVE DO?
Published: September 17, 2024 - The Customer Support Representative ensures swift response to customer inquiries, meticulously recording all interactions, transactions, comments, and complaints. Skilled in coordinating with various teams and employing tools like E-Support and Support Portals, they provide precise solutions and software integrations. Actively involved in delivering training, liaising on technical issues, and enhancing product development through customer feedback, they also bolster sales efforts through proactive pre-sales support.
A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Customer Support Representative
1. Customer Support Representative Duties
- Inquiry Response: Respond to customer inquiries regarding billing, product features, and account access via support ticket, live chat, and telephone
- Team Collaboration: Collaborate with other aspects of the Customer Support Team to address sensitive customer issues
- Issue Escalation: Serve as point of escalation for complex or unusual issues
- Customer Satisfaction: Drive ongoing improvements to customer satisfaction
- Ticket Triage: Triage new tickets within targeted time frame, ensuring urgent/important issues are flagged with the appropriate channels and routed to the correct team
- Call Handling: Answer customer phone calls and participate in internal escalation calls
- Technical Troubleshooting: Basic technical troubleshooting
- Information Provision: Answer questions and provide relevant links to knowledge base articles
- Support Request Management: Action/manage routine support change requests (e.g., making minor configuration changes or working with dev teams to implement code changes)
- User Management: Access requests - user management and troubleshooting
- Capacity Planning: Manage capacity planning requests for sales and load testing
2. Customer Support Representative Details
- Relationship Building: Building relationships with new and existing customers.
- Customer Communication: First point of contact, answering emails and phone calls related to accounts (refunds, pricing questions, tech support, receiving feedback for product team and more).
- Live Chat Support: Responding to users with live chat help desk (Beacon) tool.
- Help Material Creation: Creating help materials to guide users around the site (videos or step-by-step documents).
- Webinar Participation: Taking part in webinars (answering questions and participating in the chat room).
- Feedback Gathering: Gathering and tracking customer feedback.
- Feedback Hosting: Hosting customer feedback meetings to bring the company up to speed on what customers are asking for and what types of improvements can be made.
- Cross-Department Collaboration: Working with the Product and Marketing team to stay up to date on changes, improvements, and communication, making suggestions.
- Onboarding Assistance: Assist with customer onboarding process and participate in customer go-lives.
- Offboarding Administration: Customer off-boarding administration and systems housekeeping.
- Knowledge Base Management: Write, edit, and revise knowledge base articles.
3. Customer Support Representative Responsibilities
- Customer Service: First in line to serve customers and ensure they receive a solution to their request or question
- Multi-Channel Communication: Communicate with customers through CRM (Salesforce), Online Chat (Intercom), and Phone
- Order Assistance: Assist customers through the order process online for a frictionless customer experience
- Logistic Coordination: Daily communication with the warehouse to ensure logistic excellence for orders to ship out in time and returns being received
- Claims Management: Take care of any claims and returns from customers, ensuring the process is smooth and easy
- Material Handling: Pick, pack, and ship Material Samples for an easier purchase experience for customers
- Customer Journey Improvement: Perform administrative tasks and actions to enhance the Customer Journey on Hem.com
- Showroom Support: Assist customers visiting the Showroom
- Brand Ambassadorship: Speak as an ambassador for the company and walk the extra mile for customers
- Internal Collaboration: Collaborate with internal colleagues and management to resolve issues
- Customer Education: Present to customers during live onboarding calls to educate them on how to get the best support
4. Customer Support Representative Job Summary
- Customer Communication: Communicating with customers via email and phone calls
- Data Analysis: General data analysis and collection - documentation of data from a customer support perspective
- Package Tracking: Tracking of packages and assisting with sorting out returns
- Program Launching: Help launch new programs introduced by the company, monitoring process and searching for improvements
- Report Creation: Creating reports and summaries on data that is collected
- Customer Interaction: Maintaining a positive, empathetic, and professional attitude towards customers at all times
- Record Keeping: Keeping records of customer interactions, transactions, comments, and complaints
- Industry Regulation: Continuously keeping up to date on regulations within the industry
- Service Feedback: Providing feedback on the efficiency of the customer service process
- Operations Assistance: Assisting with any management and operations tasks
- Market Research: Performing market research, collecting customer feedback, and presenting information in a clear and concise manner
5. Customer Support Representative Accountabilities
- Issue Resolution: Answer incoming customer calls and emails to solve problems and educate users.
- Professionalism Maintenance: Maintain a high level of professionalism with users and work to establish a positive rapport with every caller.
- Data Management: Update customer information in help desk software during and after each call.
- Product Knowledge: Work with the Customer Support & IT team to stay updated on product knowledge and releases, staying informed of any changes in processes.
- User Retention: Positively impact the company’s bottom line by problem-solving and turning frustrated users into repeat users.
- Enterprise Support: Provide exceptional customer support to enterprise customers.
- Multi-Channel Response: Respond to inbound telephone calls, cases, and emails from customers.
- Query Resolution: Resolve process-related queries for customers and direct customers to self-help.
- Service Level Management: Ensure Support cases meet service level objectives through Work Flow Management.
- Administrative Tasks: Responsible for distributing mail, filing, faxing, copying, and processing forms, typing, preparing reports, and auditing documents.
6. Customer Support Representative Functions
- Customer Satisfaction: Make sure customers are satisfied by providing amazing, personal customer support.
- Query Resolution: Support customers, ensuring queries are resolved quickly and efficiently.
- Multichannel Support: Answer all questions customers might have either via Intercom, phone, or email.
- Progress Communication: Consistently ensure customers are kept informed of progress at each stage.
- Feedback Collection: Provide the product team with customer feedback to continue building the best payroll product.
- Technical Support: Provide technical support resolution via email and phone.
- Ticket Management: Create, track, and resolve support tickets for clients.
- Exceptional Service: Provide exceptional customer service in every situation.
- Issue Troubleshooting: Investigate and troubleshoot issues.
- Relationship Building: Build a relationship with the customer and proactively follow up through issue resolution.
- Associate Support: Support Associate Technical Support Engineers in both training and troubleshooting.
7. Customer Support Representative Job Description
- Global Support Response: Respond to support requests from users all over the world via chat and email to help users look like stars on stage.
- Feedback Tagging: Tag tickets that will be shared as user insights and feedback with product, sales, and marketing.
- Administrative Assistance: Assist Stockholm team with administrative tasks such as managing payments and invoicing.
- Resource Localization: Work on translating help articles and other support resources to other languages to better support users across the globe.
- Order Monitoring: Work with internal departments to track and monitor the status of customer orders to meet commitments.
- Sales Administration: Perform general sales administration, including filing, invoicing, status reports.
- Production Meeting Participation: Participate in daily production meetings, report out concerns, and work with the team and other departments to resolve actions.
- Customer Portal Maintenance: Maintain customer portals, including uploading/downloading of documents.
- Logistics Coordination: Work with the dispatch team, freight forwarders, and customers to arrange the import and export of shipments.
- Support Query Handling: Deal with customer support calls & emails, investigating, logging, and responding to queries and ensuring progression to the support consultant.
- Customer Advocacy: Work with internal departments to resolve customer concerns and promote customer requirements.
8. Customer Support Representative Overview
- Inquiry Response: Respond to customer inquiries in a timely manner (24h) relating to spares pricing, availability, order status, and credit requests.
- Account Management: Actively support a predefined customer allocation.
- Data Analysis: Analyze CSC master data in support of CSC tools and operations.
- Order Management: Manage customer purchase orders from order intake to shipment.
- Negotiation: Negotiate delivery schedules with customers for spares requirements.
- Interdepartmental Liaison: Liaise with different back offices (Logistics, Commercial, Credit Control, Warehouses) to ensure customer requests are processed/answered, and orders are dispatched.
- Meeting Participation: Participate in reviews/meetings.
- Cross-Functional Support: Support other functions or areas within customer services as requested by the supervisor of the area.
- Documentation: Document details of conversations and interactions in a timely manner.
- Brand Representation: Speak positively and enthusiastically about the Company and its products and services to ensure that a professional company and brand image is provided at all times to customers and colleagues.
- Proposal Development: Assist in studies to determine customer incentives and develop and prepare proposals for customer leads.
9. Customer Support Representative Details and Accountabilities
- Customer Attitude: Maintain a positive, empathetic, and professional attitude toward customers at all times.
- Inquiry Response: Respond promptly to customer inquiries.
- Interaction Tracking: Keep a tight record of customer interactions, transactions, comments, and complaints.
- Team Communication: Communicate with different team members to provide the most accurate answer to clients' demands.
- Software Installation: Install and integrate software remotely for the customer.
- Issue Resolution: Provide acceptable resolutions to customer queries and incidents via Helpdesk environment, E-Support, and Support Portal.
- Training Delivery: Deliver training sessions to customers, end-users, and staff, both remotely and at dedicated training facilities.
- Technical Liaison: Liaise with internal departments regarding any technical issue or enhancement request that may impact the saleability of products.
- Feedback Registration: Register customer feedback and technical input that may be used to develop the product to meet future customer requirements.
- Problem-Solving Support: Support team members in problem-solving issues, sharing knowledge and experience within the team.
- Pre-Sales Support: Support the sales organization through pre-sales, e.g., taking note of sales leads or visits.
10. Customer Support Representative Tasks
- Multichannel Support: Provide exceptional, personalized customer support via live chat, email, social media, and other mediums as they become available (e.g., phone support).
- Support Analysis: Report on the nature, frequency, and pattern of customer support inquiries, and recommend improvements that could be made.
- Product Support: Offer support and information to customers regarding product-related questions, seeking to find the perfect resolution for them.
- Content Review: Provide proactive support in the form of continually reviewing and updating support articles.
- Feedback Collaboration: Work with the Customer Experience Specialists and the Product teams to ensure a continual flow of feedback.
- Trend Awareness: Keep up to date with emerging trends and industry best practices inside and outside of the industry.
- Support Innovation: Contribute to improving the efficiency and success of Trint's customer support through innovative ideas and continual improvement.
- Team Collaboration: Add to an inspiring team environment which thrives on open communication and collaboration by working together to reach team goals.
- Excellence Promotion: Contribute to positioning the Customer Experience team as a center of excellence both internally and externally.
- Issue Escalation: Escalate issues as needed to the Sr. Customer Support Technician.
- Relationship Management: Maintain ongoing relationships, providing support, and resolving problems for customers.