Customer support and customer success are often seen as two separate groups within an organization that compete for results, like sales and marketing. But that couldn’t (and shouldn’t) be further from the truth. Customer support is key to satisfying customer problems and producing great experiences. For freeing up jams in the system and continually improving the product and user experience. But customer support without success (and vice versa) is only half of the job.

In business, sometimes making the wrong decision is worse than making no decision at all. This is especially true when it comes to the customer service industry. With customers being the foundation of so many businesses, going against their needs can be a make or break decision. And, in the fast-paced technology age we live in, making the wrong call is costlier than ever before.

I recently had a rough customer service interaction. There was an issue in compensation on a returned order, and when I interacted with the support team across email and live chat (a few back-and-forths) it was clear that they were missing information from prior interactions. I ended up having exchanges with multiple agents, and it seemed like a new ticket was being opened each time we talked—could it be? As a consumer, it was incredibly frustrating.

The concept of a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) is common in the business world, yet for some customer support teams it may be new terminology. A KPI is a measurement of your operations that you can compare over time to see how your business has changed. With more companies realizing that customer support is a profit center and not a cost center, measuring KPIs in the industry has been a hot topic.

If you have a large support team, it can be difficult to maintain complex workflows. In an ideal world, your team would be able to streamline tickets to the people who know how to handle them best—that way there’s no time wasted juggling different types of tickets.

We’ve all seen or heard about a customer success team that’s just “missing something”. Maybe the agents are a little slow to follow up, or they just can’t seem to get your issue requests in the hands of the right person. Mistakes like this happen for even the best teams, but when it’s a recurring issue it’s time to take some action.