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Customer support is an important and all too neglected part of the customer experience. According to a white paper from TeamSupport, customer support functions as a “three-legged stool” along with marketing, sales and customer support.

While marketing brings new customers to a company and sales converts prospects into customers, it’s the customer service department that actually manages the long term relationships with customers.

Many companies fail to see the big problem when bad customer service drives away customers to competitors.

“If you lose a sale, you never really had the customer anyway. But if you lose a customer, you’ve lost not only today’s business, but also future sales and even possibly reputation,” the white paper said.

For many customers, customer service is a death of a thousand cuts, or rather, a death of a thousand tickets. The biggest problem with the ticket-based model is that all the events are isolated. There’s nothing more frustrating for customers than having to repeat the same information for the same problem over and over again. It gets even worse when customers are “escalated” to supervisors.

Fortunately, it’s possible for customer service departments to salvage customer relationships. One way to is to look beyond the ticket model to get a better overview of what’s causing customer service issues. For example, if a lot of customers are calling about the same problem, it’s obvious that a company needs to make changes to the product.

TeamSupport also suggests automating customer service operations. Given that the company offers customer support software, it’s not exactly unbiased in that regard. One kind of automation is to build a database of frequently encountered issues and put them on the company’s website and make it available to agents. This will save a lot of time and make the customer service department much more flexible.

The company also advocates a collaborative approach rather than a hierarchical one where customers are escalated. Customers don’t want to talk to a supervisor. They just want their problem solved.

A good customer service department is far from a cost center but is necessary to keep customers loyal to a company.