The Ultimate Career Guide to Customer Service, Support, and Growth
Everything you need to know to start a career in customer service.
Whether you’re new to customer service or have been doing it for five years, you’re probably wondering, “What’s next?”
This is a reasonable question to ask yourself as you develop in your job, but it may be especially relevant if you work with customers. Because customer support, customer service, and customer success are new and fast-growing areas, you may feel uncertain about your next career move.
Luckily, our detailed guide is here to help. Read on to discover about career pathways and how to establish a customer-facing team if you already manage or expand one.
In this overview, we’ll call this field “customer service.” (Read this tutorial for a detailed description of customer assistance, service, and success.) In each part, we’ll differentiate between the three disciplines.
Customer Service Careers
A profession in customer service can take many forms. Here are some fundamental career opportunities in customer service, customer support, and customer success.
Positions in customer service work with customers on behalf of a corporation. They often support consumers with product or service questions, onboarding new customers, and upgrades or extensions.
Customer Service Jobs
Client support agents strive to reply to customer requests and issues as promptly as possible.
Customers should be able to contact customer service via a variety of methods and receive prompt responses.
Customer support agents are on the front lines of client-facing enterprises, responding to customer queries and assisting them with using the product or service.
Customer Support Jobs
Here is a list of possible jobs in customer service.
Customer Support Representative – A customer service representative is an entry-level position in a firm. They field consumer phone calls, live chats, emails, web tickets, and social media messages.
Customer Support Engineer – Customer support engineers can help customers troubleshoot and improve specific technology concerns.
Multilingual Customer Support Specialist – Multilingual customer support professionals work for firms that provide products or services globally.
Remote Customer Support Representative – Remote customer service representatives may work from home or a workplace on distributed or entirely remote support teams.
Technical Support Specialist – Technical support personnel help customers who have technical issues with software or hardware, such as connection issues, slow performance, or data loss.
CS Manager – Management of customer care representatives and engineers. They are in charge of reducing client wait times and increasing customer case resolutions.
Customer Support Pay
The average base customer support pay in the US is $35,938, according to Glassdoor.
Customer Service Careers
Customer service is comparable to customer support, but more proactive. Customer service is proactive rather than reactive, proactively reaching out to customers to provide them with useful suggestions and recommendations and create a pleasant customer experience.
Customer Service Jobs
Here is a list of possible jobs in customer service.
Customer Service Representative – Customer service reps, like customer support reps, are entry-level professionals that communicate with customers about corporate news, new products, and proactive troubleshooting.
Customer Service Engineer – Customer service engineers are technical experts that can help customers fix products and provide proactive solutions.
Customer Service Manager – Managers of customer service teams are accountable for team goals.
Customer Service Pay
The average base customer service wage in the US is $24,310, according to Glassdoor. It is $38,694 for a customer service manager.
Customer Success Careers
The goal of customer success is to engage with customers to achieve goals and see value in a product or service.
Customer success includes onboarding new products and services, proactive counselling, and upselling and cross-selling. It also means gaining satisfied consumers who will suggest friends and colleagues to you.
Customer Success Jobs
Here is a list of possible positions in customer success.
Customer Success Manager – Customer success managers help clients with product setup, account administration, and campaign management. Customer success management entails continuous proactive communication to ensure customers value the product or service.
Implementation Specialist – Implementation professionals ensure customers are properly onboarded with products and software to avoid technical issues.
Customer Success Team Lead – To reduce churn, boost lifetime value, and generate new customer referrals, Customer Success Team Leads lead teams of Customer Success Managers.
Customer Success Pay
The average base salary for a customer success manager in the US is $81,414.
Customer Service Career Paths
Working with customers may be incredibly rewarding and give you many transferable skills. Here are some possible career pathways inside customer success or on another team. What you can do with your customer service skills:
Customer Service
A profession in customer service can take many forms.
- Become a people manager and lead a customer service staff.
- Become a technical customer care specialist by specialising in a product or service.
- Write help articles for your company’s knowledge base.
- Work in customer service operations, aligning and cooperating with other company leaders.
- Ascend to the executive level and become your company’s chief customer officer, responsible for representing the customer’s voice and metrics of the customer-facing teams.
Sales
Your customer service skills can also help you create a career in sales.
Working with customers will show you how customers can utilise your company’s product or service to achieve their goals, which you can apply in sales.
If you can show prospects how your product or service has helped other customers, they may be more inclined to buy from you.
Product
After obtaining experience and skills with your product or service, you could join your product team. You might be able to construct it if you know the product inside out.
It’s possible to use your expertise in product development to help build the product you’re educating clients on how to use.
Marketing
Your marketing staff needs product understanding. If you want to work in marketing, you need to know your stuff.
To design efficient customer communications and advocacy initiatives, you could use your understanding of customer habits and trends.
Building a Customer Service Team
If you’re running or scaling a customer-facing team, you might be asking which element of customer service to prioritise first: support, service, or success.
Service Hub General Manager Michael Redbord advocates initially focusing on developing a strong customer support team. (Read this blog post for his technique for hiring customer service personnel.)
Providing excellent customer service is a competitive essential in 2018. In a new industry, I bet at least one of your competitors already has a great customer service team.
Develop a solid customer care staff with enough representatives to first fulfill client needs. After your staff can handle incoming tickets at a fair rate, you can consider the next steps.
Redbord discovered a few crucial events that indicate it’s time to develop a proactive customer success team alongside reactive customer support:
- Building a customer success team is ideal after establishing a trained customer support function. It keeps you ahead of your clients’ expectations, which is ideal.
- The purpose of “churn reduction” is to reduce churn by providing onboarding and “goal-based” aid.
- If you don’t manage or reduce complexity, you’ll see a jump in cancellations and a major mess as you grow. Creating a team to manage current accounts is critical now.
- Upselling and cross-selling are possible after your offers expand. A customer success team can now deliver an upgrade number and potentially a good ROI for the company.
- After your upgrade rate stabilises and you want to keep more customers, customer success teams reappear.
Staffing for CSR
Customer Service Hiring
When creating or reading resumes and cover letters, even for entry-level positions, look for these crucial talents and attributes.
1.Soft Skills
You want someone who can interact with others and support your consumers efficiently. Ideal applicants have credentials that show they can create relationships, engage well with others, and problem solve when needed.
2. Expertise
Candidates do not need to be experts at utilising your product or service, but they must have technical knowledge. A) understand how to utilise your product, and B) explain it to confused or unhappy clients.
3. Problem Solving
Customer-facing employees must be able to communicate effectively across media and settings. Candidates must also be able to communicate effectively via short-form social media.
These are only a few of the most critical customer service abilities. For more, see this interview advice on customer service abilities.
