10 customer support skills modern B2B teams need

When your customer support team reliably helps customers meet their needs, those accounts become more satisfied with your company over time. Any time they need a problem solved, they know they can count on your support team to fix it quickly. Over time, this trust builds a stronger relationship between the account and your company — and leads to more contract renewals.

Whether you’re building a new customer support team or looking for growth areas, these 10 customer support skills will help your team provide the best services possible.

Understanding customer support skills

Support teams help customers after they’ve signed a contract with your company, guiding them through product usage and answering questions or problem-solving as issues come up. Their necessary support skills center around communication with customers, but also involve collaboration, problem-solving, and time management.

Why is customer support important?

Good customer support can be the deciding factor between your company and your competitor. It’s very important to customers: Research suggests that 3 in 4 B2B customers will switch to a company that offers great customer support and spends more with them. About the same number of customers will also switch to a competitor after multiple bad experiences.

A few benefits of strong customer support include: 

• Higher customer satisfaction scores
• Stronger customer retention
• More consistent recurring revenue
• A better reputation
• Operational growth

Core principles of effective customer support

Great customer support should be:

• Efficient. The first rule of customer support is to resolve issues quickly. When they contact you, customers expect fast, accurate answers, and your team has to deliver.
• Personalized. Even if you’re operating at scale and handling large ticket volumes, each interaction should feel individual. Automated communication should also be personalized and tailored to the customer’s needs.
• Convenient. Meet customers where they are, using the tools and channels they prefer. Communicating with you should be convenient and easy for them.
• Proactive. Good customer support is about resolving issues, but the very best goes beyond that. Use customer success tools to understand each customer, anticipate their needs, and offer proactive solutions.

10 essential customer support skills for B2B teams

To put the principles of effective customer support into action, your team needs to learn customer interaction skills and get detailed training on how to use them. 

Here are the 10 best skills for customer service.

1. Effective communication

When your team talks to customers — no matter the format or channel — they need to express their ideas clearly and logically, actively listen to the customer, and stay engaged. They can show their communication skills through little things like repeating back relevant information to make sure both people are on the same page and speaking with a friendly and understanding (but professional) tone.

2. Positive framing

When your team has to deliver bad news, they should know how to do it with positive or supportive language. Offer alternative solutions, highlighting what the customer can do instead of what they can’t.

3. Emotional intelligence

Customers may be upset or frustrated when they contact you, especially if they’re reaching out with a problem, and your customer support team has to empathize and understand the source of that frustration. No matter how customers reach out, they’ll need to regulate their own emotions and stay focused on solving the problem.

4. Patience and resilience

Your team needs patience and resilience to deal with difficult situations. They may need to repeatedly answer the same questions from the same customer, or take the time to explain a simple solution in several different ways until the customer understands. When those solutions don’t work and customers get frustrated, your team has to continue coming up with new ideas to offer the best experience possible.

5. Persuasive skills

In some cases, your team will need to advocate for the customer internally. They’ll need to persuade people on other post-sales teams to follow through on the customer’s request or fix their problem. Then, when your team has collaborated with others and found a solution, they’ll need to persuade the customer to adopt that solution, even if it’s not what the customer initially wanted to hear.

6. Problem-solving abilities

Once your team has communicated clearly with the customer and understood their needs, they have to actually fix the customer’s problem. For issues beyond simple help requests and technical difficulties, they’ll need to think outside the box. Listening for small clues from the customer’s report, comparing the situation with past experiences, and being willing to take suggestions from others can guide them to a solution faster.

7. Company and product understanding

Customers expect the person handling their question to know the company and product inside out. Your team won’t be able to solve problems or give accurate answers if they don’t fully understand the offering themselves. Hire people who are knowledgeable about your industry and train them on the specifics of your product or service. A solid internal knowledge base is helpful, too.

8. Proactive follow-through

When problems can’t be solved immediately, your team should follow up regularly — both internally and with the customer. The best customer support teams reach out even after a ticket is closed, just to make sure everything is running smoothly. That kind of extra attention will impress customers and build trust that their needs will be taken care of with your company.

9. Time management

B2B support teams often deal with high ticket volumes and communication with multiple customers across just as many channels. They have to manage their time well and know how to prioritize their tasks so nothing important gets left behind. Productivity training helps, and a good customer support platform takes some of the mental load off your team.

10. Coachability

If you hire people who are keen to learn customer support skills and willing to listen to feedback, you’ll see constant improvement in your team’s performance. Tools and techniques in B2B industries are always evolving, so your team needs to be willing to keep developing their skills to stay on top of expectations and competition.

Improving customer support skills

Here’s how you can help your team improve their customer support skills:

• Offer training. Most customer support skills can be taught. Find skill gaps among your team members, then give them access to hands-on training and online learning materials to close those gaps.
• Give private feedback. Monitor customer interactions and give regular feedback to help your team improve. Direct it to the relevant person on a private channel so that they don’t feel publicly shamed and are more likely to grow from the experience.
• Share public recognition. When a team member provides a great customer experience or does something that exemplifies the customer support skills you’re looking for, give them public shoutouts and explain what they did well. The person who did good work will feel valued, and the rest of the team can learn from it.
• Make a knowledge base. Document key skills and best practices, and make them available to your team to refer to whenever they need it.
• Learn from the best. Identify high-performing team members and assign new colleagues to work with and learn from them. Or pair people based on complementary skills: If someone has good emotional intelligence and their colleague is a good problem-solver, pair them up so they can learn from each other.
• Use modern tools. Encourage your team to use the latest technology to help them. Modern B2B support platforms often include AI-powered tools to help your team communicate, organize, and work more efficiently.

Give your customer support team everything they need to succeed

Every interaction is an opportunity to build trust, so train your team members to make the most of them. With all-in customer support software, customer support teams can focus on these relationships instead of fielding simple requests and manually tracking interactions. 

Pylon is the modern B2B support platform that offers true omnichannel support across Slack, Teams, email, chat, ticket forms, and more. Our AI Agents and Assistants automate busywork and reduce response times. Plus, with Account Intelligence that unifies scattered customer signals to calculate health scores and identify churn risk, we're built for customer success at scale.

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FAQ

What are the most important aspects of customer support? 

Success in customer support centers on speed, empathy, and accuracy. Customers expect immediate interaction when contacting a company, and 3 in 4 will spend more with companies that provide a great experience.

What are the key aspects of customer support?

Key elements include omnichannel accessibility and personalization. Most customers expect anyone they interact with to have the full context of their situation, regardless of the channel.

What skills are required for customer support?

Essential skills blend emotional intelligence with technical proficiency. Modern support teams also need AI literacy, because many teams believe AI copilots improve their ability to deliver better service.

What are the top three responsibilities of customer support? 

The primary duties are problem resolution, clear communication, and advocating for the customer. Teams should also prioritize speed, as customers want their issues resolved during the very first interaction.

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