What do you think?
Rate this book
The Customer Support Handbook: How to Create the Ultimate Customer Experience for Your Brand
How do you hire the best support team? What’s the best use of social media for support and service? Should we apologize for the inconvenience? The web’s leading experts are ready to share our answers and experience with everyone, plus share stories and radical advice for building your own exceptional customer experience. In The Customer Support Handbook, leaders in customer support bring their stories of brand failures, triumphs and best practices for support on the web. Finally, all you need to create your own amazing support team in one handy-dandy manual.
If you’re a CEO Or This book is your primer on the future of customer support - not just offering transactional service but intentionally striving to make your company’s customer service the new gold standard. Learn about the importance of engaging your customer support team with your product development, how to really measure customer happiness, and why you should be investing in your support staff as your top rung employees.
If you’re a customer support This book is your validation, your reminder that what you do for a living is an important part of product development and the future of the web. Learn tips and tricks for offering the best customer support possible, including example replies for tough questions, recommendations on better language and tone to use in social media, and advice on handling difficult customers.
"Customer service is no longer just a job but a bonafide career path, and this book is your undergraduate degree.” - Richard White, Founder and CEO of UserVoice
If you’re a CEO Or This book is your primer on the future of customer support - not just offering transactional service but intentionally striving to make your company’s customer service the new gold standard. Learn about the importance of engaging your customer support team with your product development, how to really measure customer happiness, and why you should be investing in your support staff as your top rung employees.
If you’re a customer support This book is your validation, your reminder that what you do for a living is an important part of product development and the future of the web. Learn tips and tricks for offering the best customer support possible, including example replies for tough questions, recommendations on better language and tone to use in social media, and advice on handling difficult customers.
"Customer service is no longer just a job but a bonafide career path, and this book is your undergraduate degree.” - Richard White, Founder and CEO of UserVoice
- GenresBusiness
202 pages, Paperback
First published February 4, 2014
32 people are currently reading
110 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
September 12, 2024
Very short book that gives advice on how to handle customer support. This book was probably a blog first and a lot of the advice feels somewhat obvious, but it's still a useful book to review for organizations thinking about setting up their first support efforts/operations.
August 11, 2020
Some good advice but hard to get past the typos and grammatical errors.
February 6, 2024
Meh, applicable mostly only to the American market, keep that in mind
September 30, 2014
If you're in the tech industry doing customer support, this is a must-read book.
Most of the times we hear the words "customer service," we think of huge cubicle farm call centers where help is the last thing you will receive by the end of a phone call. This book is different, ushering in a new area of customer service that is laser focused on the happiness of the customer and delivering them the best overall experience.
Having worked in support for 3 years, I take for granted a lot of what I have learned, but Sarah spells it out clearly in The Customer Support Handbook. Simple things like learning what kind of words and phrases to use in emails are thoroughly explained with copious examples provided.
The book covers most everything you can think of when it comes to support. You don't just learn how to respond to emails; you also learn how and scale out your documentation, build and motivate a support team, how to respond during a crisis, and much much more. The book should make you think of things to implement before you thought you needed to implement them.
One thing I struggled with a bit in the book was that it wasn't always clear what types of business models mapped to various types of support. For example, a high touch, high price tag product would likely put a lot of emphasis on concierge level support, whereas a low touch, mostly-free-but-has-some-paying-customers product is going to put a lot more emphasis on scalable solutions such as documentation. In all business models you of course want to provide excellent customer service, but where you focus your energy and resources may change depending on the context, and I wish that had been fleshed out more in the various chapters.
A notable example was the chapter on providing phone support. It provided a lot of generic statistics about why customers wanted phone support, but provided very little in terms of what kinds of businesses these customers were engaging with. With they high touch sales or free products? Without that context, the decision about what level of phone support to provide is impossible to make.
Sarah and CoSupport have provided an excellent reference for support professionals. I'm glad I read it, happy to recommend it to others, and look forward to what they produce in the future.
Most of the times we hear the words "customer service," we think of huge cubicle farm call centers where help is the last thing you will receive by the end of a phone call. This book is different, ushering in a new area of customer service that is laser focused on the happiness of the customer and delivering them the best overall experience.
Having worked in support for 3 years, I take for granted a lot of what I have learned, but Sarah spells it out clearly in The Customer Support Handbook. Simple things like learning what kind of words and phrases to use in emails are thoroughly explained with copious examples provided.
The book covers most everything you can think of when it comes to support. You don't just learn how to respond to emails; you also learn how and scale out your documentation, build and motivate a support team, how to respond during a crisis, and much much more. The book should make you think of things to implement before you thought you needed to implement them.
One thing I struggled with a bit in the book was that it wasn't always clear what types of business models mapped to various types of support. For example, a high touch, high price tag product would likely put a lot of emphasis on concierge level support, whereas a low touch, mostly-free-but-has-some-paying-customers product is going to put a lot more emphasis on scalable solutions such as documentation. In all business models you of course want to provide excellent customer service, but where you focus your energy and resources may change depending on the context, and I wish that had been fleshed out more in the various chapters.
A notable example was the chapter on providing phone support. It provided a lot of generic statistics about why customers wanted phone support, but provided very little in terms of what kinds of businesses these customers were engaging with. With they high touch sales or free products? Without that context, the decision about what level of phone support to provide is impossible to make.
Sarah and CoSupport have provided an excellent reference for support professionals. I'm glad I read it, happy to recommend it to others, and look forward to what they produce in the future.
April 21, 2015
Pretty good read. Already incorporated some of the language into my customer service responses. Great book to add to the shelves of a startup or small company trying to change the way they do customer service.
April 7, 2014
Terrific book. Geared toward web businesses, but anyone can glean valuable customer service information from reading this book.
January 21, 2016
Super practical for teams who offer apps or online services.
January 4, 2020
I found a bit of precious advice in this book but... I expected more from it.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews