The Ultimate Guide to Customer Support

Learn Everything About Customer Support

Explaining the same things over and over again is annoying at best. Yet it's an important thing to do—something that's critical to your business' success. As long as you have customers, you'll always have someone with a question to answer, a problem to solve, a bug they need fixed.

That's why you need to learn how to do customer support well.

Customer Support doesn't have to be a terrible, repetitive job. It can be the best way for your team to learn about your customers' needs, a crash course into every feature and problem in your tools, and one of the few ways to guarantee your customers are happy.

These benefits and more have kept customer support one of our most important focuses as Zapier has grown. In this eBook, you'll learn what we've discovered about customer support—along with ideas from the support teams at Intercom, Trello, HubSpot, and more—with tips to help you offer the customer support possible.

With roundups of the best apps and tools for customer support, ideas on how to automate tedious parts of support, tips on documenting your products well, and guides for getting out of the stickiest customer support situations, it's the guide you need to ace customer support from day one.

Who Is This Guide For?

Everyone does support, whether they want to or not. If you've ever answered anyone's question about anything relating to your job, you've done support. And at Zapier, we think everyone should do real customer support, to learn from the issues that come up and use that knowledge to do better work.

So whether you're starting a new company, have never answered a support ticket in your life, or are a customer support industry veteran, we think there's something in this guide for you.

What Others Said About This Book

Wistia Customer Champion Jordan Munson:

”No matter how good you are at providing support for your customers and running your support organization, there’s almost certainly things you could improve on. Zapier’s guide is a nearly exhaustive list of ideas you can think through and adapt to your support organization to make sure your ship is running smoothly."

Typeform Director of Customer Success David Apple:

“If you have any dilemmas about your customer support department from the scope of your support team, which metrics to focus on, how to setup your Help Center, or how to respond in tough situations, this book provides practical solutions weighing the pro’s and con’s of each one. I have asked my whole team to read it, and you should too."

Customer.io Senior Technical Support Manager Hoon Park:

"Whether you do customer support for a living, manage a customer support team or run a company that values customer support, this is a must read. There are so many awesome practical ideas and workflows that I have already implemented with my team."

CoSupport founder and author of Customer Support Handbook Sarah Hatter:

“A great read for anyone building their customer support team from the ground up, full of inspiring tips and insight into how Zapier runs their amazing support!”

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Table of Contents

1. How to Support Your Customers
2. All Hands Support: Why Everyone–Even Executives–Should Spend Time in Customer Service
3. The 9 Help Desk Metrics that Should Guide Your Customer Support
4. 4 Rules of Improv and How They Relate to Customer Support
5. How to Handle the 7 Toughest Customer Support Challenges
6. The 20 Best Help Desk Apps and Knowledge Base Tools for Customer Support
7. The Best Live Chat Apps for Customer Support
8. Support Your Customers Better and Faster: Lessons from the Pros at Trello, HubSpot and Disqus
9. How to Build an Effective Support Knowledge Base: Everything You Need to Know about Documentation
10. How to Collect Customer Feedback That’s Actually Valuable
11. Start Preventing Fires: How to Implement Proactive Customer Support
12. More Resources from Zapier