Customer Support

When customers have questions they turn to support for help. While the main function of customer support is to answer these questions and provide support to customers (hence the name), as front line representatives for the company they can also be a primary source of valuable customer information for the product, sales and marketing teams.

The level of support a customer support representative (CSR) is expected to provide will depend on a number of factors, like the type of product or service being offered, the price of the product/service, the technical difficulty associated with the product, and the type of customer.

As an example, the level of support required for a simple consumer-focused smartphone application will be less than what is needed for the business customers of a fully customized and integrated customer relationship management software tool like Salesforce – but then again, so will the price.

A common work day for a CSR will be based around answering customer support cases, often in the form of “tickets”. The goal is to efficiently solve the issue or answer the question that caused the customer to get in contact.

Depending on the complexity of the product and the size of the support team, a CSR may be expected to handle any queries that come in or they may be split into teams who answer queries around specific areas of the product. While a large amount of support queries come in through email, support reps increasingly respond to queries that arrive from other support channels like the chat box in a web app, or a company’s social media accounts.

A high-performing customer service representative will be a great communicator, capable of writing quickly, clearly and concisely. As most of their day is spent trying to solve customer’s problems, the role is particularly well suited to people who are empathetic and enjoy helping others.

A good CSR should be able to operate well under some pressure as support queries can often come in large “waves”, such as when a product unexpectedly goes offline or a bug breaks a popular feature.

Support roles can be a good entry into tech for people with lower levels of technical knowledge, if they are willing to put in time to learn about the products they will be supporting. Some specialized support roles, especially for products aimed at business customers in technical industries, will require a higher level of technical proficiency, for example the ability to understand technical documentation or work with APIs.

Customer support salaries

The salary of a support representative will usually be in line with the level of technical knowledge and customer involvement required for the job. A role that responds to basic customer enquiries will earn much less than a support engineer role, handling complex technical enquiries from large corporate customers.

Customer support roles can be a good match for people who have worked in similar people and support-oriented environments, like front of house hospitality staff and teachers. Many support roles can be done remotely, making them a great choice for people who are looking to break into tech but not located in one of the more “traditional” tech cities.