Customer support
Customer support is a range of services to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance in planning, installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading, and disposal of a product.[1] Regarding technology products such as mobile phones, televisions, computers, software products or other electronic or mechanical goods, it is termed technical support.[1] Customer support uses various channels, including telephone, email, live chat, self-service knowledge bases, and social media. Research indicates that most customers attempt to resolve issues through self-service before contacting a representative.[2] For products sold across multiple regions, support may be provided in several languages, as consumers tend to prefer assistance in their native language.[3][4] Requirements for customer contact centres are defined in international standards such as ISO 18295.[5]
Customer support requests are frequently managed through ticketing systems, which log each customer issue as a discrete record that can be categorized, assigned, and tracked to resolution.[6] These systems are often governed by service-level agreements (SLAs) that define target response and resolution times, with unresolved or high-priority tickets subject to escalation to more senior or specialized staff when defined thresholds are met.[6] Research on enterprise support operations has examined how ticket categorization and escalation prediction can improve response times and resource allocation, drawing on field studies of large-scale support environments such as IBM's.[7]
See also
- Customer success
- Automation
- Customer service
- Help desk software
- Web chat
- Professional services automation
- Run Book Automation (RBA)
- Technical support
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 "What is customer support? definition and meaning". BusinessDictionary.com. http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/customer-support.html.
- ↑ Dixon, Matthew (July 2010). "Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers". Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2010/07/stop-trying-to-delight-your-customers.
- ↑ DePalma, Donald A. (2020). Can't Read, Won't Buy – B2C (Report). CSA Research. https://insights.csa-research.com/aim/en/reports/305013126.
- ↑ "Multilingual customer support". SupportYourApp. https://supportyourapp.com/multilingual-customer-support/.
- ↑ "ISO 18295-1:2017 Customer contact centres - Part 1: Requirements for customer contact centres". International Organization for Standardization. 2017. https://www.iso.org/standard/64739.html.
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 "ISO/IEC 20000-1:2018 Information technology — Service management". International Organization for Standardization. https://www.iso.org/obp/ui/#iso:std:iso-iec:20000:-1:ed-2:v1:en.
- ↑ Montgomery, Lloyd; Damian, Daniela; Bulmer, Tyson; Quader, Shaikh (2021). "Customer Support Ticket Escalation Prediction Using Feature Engineering". Requirements Engineering (Springer). https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06145. Retrieved 2026-08-17.
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