Working with customers from far away poses a few questions for support agents: will the channel they’re working leave the customer better than they were before? If it’s an email correspondence, will the text make sense? If they’re giving instructions over the phone, will the customer be able to follow along?

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.

Ephemeral messaging (the ability to set self-destructing messages that automatically disappear from recipients’ conversation histories), is a common feature across many consumer messaging apps. But what about its place in the enterprise? Wire has offered ephemeral messages (or timed messages as we like to call them) as a feature in its secure end-to-end encrypted service since 2016.

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.

Helping your employees to understand the role that security plays in their daily working lives will help you to manage risk more than a 100-page security policy ever could. No amount of technology will ever remove the reality that employees often pose your greatest security risk.

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.

Compromising client confidential information can result in the sort of reputational damage that’s hard to come back from. It’s the end of the month and you’ve been hustling to secure those big client orders before the quarter closes. Then your email pings and you see a new client contract ready to be passed to legal and signed! Great. It looks like you’ll hit your quota!

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.