About ❓
An entry level position in customer support would be a Customer Support Representative (CSR) or Customer Support Specialist (CSS).
The job of an CSR/CSS is to answer any support queries existing customers may face. This is normally done over phone, email, live chat and social media. Working in support means you are on the front line, customer facing and representing the brand of your company.
Many technology companies pride themselves on providing best in class customer support and often boast of their Customer Satisfaction Rating or CSAT as it is often referred too.
Qualifications Needed 🎓
There are no specific qualifications needed. CS reps come from all sorts of different degree backgrounds from Business, to Arts, to Sciences, you name it.
The most common college course include:
Bachelor in Business Studies (BBS)
Bachelor of Science (Marketing)
Management Information Studies
Bachelors of Science
No Degree at all
Skills Needed 🔨
Working in support requires a wide range of skills and being customer facing and metrics driven, requires a particular mindset. Some important skills include the following:
Strong communication skills
Organisation and time management
Collaborative and coachable
Highly motivated and self-driven
Responsibilities 🙌
As mentioned the main job of an CSR/CSS is to be the voice of a brand and answer any questions, issues, bugs customers may face. Customer retention is a key metric for tech businesses and CS teams play a pivotal roles in maintaining and increasing this metric.
You will also have the opportunity to work cross functionally with numerous teams. These include sales & product teams in particular.
Highlighting account expansion and passing it to a sales rep as a potential up-sell opportunity. The same goes for notifying if somebody is a churn risk to try and work with sales to keep them as a paying customer.
Providing product feedback and feature gaps with the product team (engineering teams) to add to the product roadmap.
Salary Expectations 💰
Average salary as found from Glassdoor is as follows:
Salary: €25,000-€35,000
Working Hours ⏰
Most tech support operate 24/7 365. Working hours will vary but you can expect to be online for your business hours of 9-6. You will then probably hand over to somebody else in another timezone
Career Prospects 📈
There are many options available to people who join as an entry level support rep. Your initial move will be into a Senior CS role where you will handle bigger customers or more complex issues. You then may move into a project management role or even a customer support manager role.
You may even want to move cross org to another function such as engineering or sales based on your areas of interests, be that a customer support engineer or sales development rep.