Updated on June 4, 2025
Back before the internet made everything available, all the time, customers had lower expectations about your response time. All you had to do was give them a support facility that was open during office hours. Now things are different. Customers expect more, and if you can’t provide it, they’ll look elsewhere.
Luckily, it’s easier than ever to provide 24/7 customer service. We’ll look at the benefits, as well as how to get started. But first, let’s go back to the basics.
What is 24/7 Customer Support?
24/7 customer support is exactly what the name suggests: support for customers, available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. In other words, a customer in need of support will be able to access it, no matter what time of day or night or what day of the week they get in touch.
This is particularly important for companies that transcend time zones and have international customers in their contacts database. Think of a customer having lunch in New York wanting an answer to their query. Easy for an Eastern Seaboard contact center to deal with this. But if you have another customer calling on their lunch, over in Shanghai? That’s going to mean a call in the early hours of the morning for you to deal with.
There’s not one single answer to this — you could have staff in New York who can deal with a multitude of languages and are happy to work night shifts, or spread your support team across the globe, with each territory served by its own contact center.
Another factor that features in most 24/7 customer support is omnichannel capability. This means that you’re geared up for whatever channel of communication a customer might use. As before, it’s about making the operation as customer-friendly as possible.
Image from Statista
Overall, this kind of service places big demands on a company. Think of the staffing required, for one thing. Or, if the service is primarily automated, think of the tech level needed.
If you want a customer support process that can handle any kind of query, from any part of the globe, on any channel, it requires investment and design. It’s worth it though, as 75% of customers leave a business if bad service is encountered.
Key Benefits of Offering 24/7 Customer Support
As well as preventing customer churn from lack of available support, there are plenty of advantages to 24/7 customer support. Some of the main ones include:
Boosts Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty
When a customer needs support, they usually want it quickly. So, a support center that can give the answer to a customer’s problems right away, no matter what time the call, is going to keep them happy. It might seem obvious, but you’ll find that satisfaction scores on your CX KPIs will increase when customers’ needs get attended to quickly and efficiently.
They’re also more likely to remain loyal if they know you’re there for them. For instance, imagine you’re a business based in the US, UK, and China. You’re buying a new SaaS sales solution. Would you choose the option where you can only call in US business hours, or the one who guarantees support around the clock?
Increases Sales and Revenue Opportunities
A lot of customer support scenarios can engender revenue possibilities. It might be the case that what the customer is trying to do with a particular piece of software is never going to work out, because that software isn’t designed for this job. You could then offer an alternative (or upgrade) that incorporates an element of trade-in for the other software.
Another crucial aspect of 24/7 customer support in terms of revenue boost is apparent when it comes to online shopping. Sometimes, a midnight shopping trip just doesn’t work out. Imagine there’s a hold-up with the payment. The customer can opt to abandon their cart, and it will become just another missed opportunity.
Or the customer can just get in touch with customer support. The payment gets sorted out, and everybody’s happy.
Expands Global Reach and Market Presence
The world’s a big place. But it’s growing smaller everyday. Businesses have to think globally or they doom themselves to a life of small-scale sufficiency.
24/7 customer support will give you the tools to reach right around the world, so that there’s nobody out there that you can’t support or, hopefully, do business with.
And the more extensive your reach, the more visible your company. Market presence is about being recognizable, and being recognizable is about getting your brand into people’s homes, devices, and lives, no matter where they are and what they do.
Drives Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings
Nobody’s here to tell you that a 247 customer support service is going to be available at totally rock-bottom prices. It’s going to cost at least a little to have an effective, round-the-clock service.
In contrast, you need to consider the costs of running a substandard operation. Firstly, customers aren’t going to stick around. Secondly, we’re talking about an omnichannel solution that’s all under one roof. A customer support center that can handle any channel thrown at it. Think of the savings this represents. No need for separate facilities for emails, SMS, calls, etc, all with their own running costs.
Finally, with current technology, it’s possible to provide support without necessarily needing staff available all the time. We’ll look at this in more detail later, but automation and self-service options can reduce costs while maintaining high levels of customer service.
Enhances Brand Reputation for Reliability
Your reputation is key to your success. Unfortunately, it’s constructed not by you, but by your customers. While that means it isn’t completely in your control, you can certainly influence it by showing customers how much you value them, your products, and the service you offer.
When customers experience great service, like 24/7 support, they come away feeling impressed, and you’d better believe they talk. To each other, sure, but, even more importantly, they leave reviews. How widely read are these reviews? Check out the situation when it comes to local businesses.
Image from Statista
Give customers reason to praise you and they’ll see to it that your reputation blossoms.
Gathers Continuous Customer Insights for Improvement
When a customer gets in touch about something that’s important to them, they give you some handy data. Let’s say a particular aspect of some newly launched sales automation software is causing upset. No less than 80% of the calls you’re getting are about it. That’s some pretty handy information that’s telling you what to fix so that your product can really soar.
You can gain these insights just by recording what people are getting in touch about. Or you can go down the survey route, asking people up-front what it is that’s bugging them. Combine this with tools like sentiment analysis or AI-powered analysis, and you’ll soon have actionable insights that will help your business thrive.
Strategies for Implementing 24/7 Customer Support
So now you know what’s so great about 24/7 customer support, here’s how you get started.
Hire a Global Team to Cover All Time Zones
We’ve already mentioned how there’s a whole world of customers out there, and, if you want to appeal to them, you need to run a service at a time that suits them. That means you need to recruit a planet-spanning workforce, able to deal with customer queries wherever they’re coming at you from.
At this point, you need to make a decision. Are you going to have the whole thing run as an internal operation, with your own staff being recruited and trained by you, or are you going to contract out? There are advantages and disadvantages to each, so take the time to explore both options.
Provide Support Through Multiple Contact Channels
You can’t ignore this one. The range of communication channels is vast and if you concentrate on one to the exclusion of any others, you run the risk of alienating a whole bunch of your customers.
Thankfully, support center solutions that simply bristle with communication channels are readily available, such as the AI-powered support offered by Kommunicate. Using one of these, you’ll be able to stay on top of everything, all in one dashboard.
Track Issues with A Reliable Ticketing System
Ticketing system errors are a big headache. They can leave the support office in chaos if something goes wrong, with incidents going astray and case continuity lost. The impact on customers can be truly disastrous, with some choosing simply to look elsewhere.
So, you need to make sure that your ticketing system is error-free, correctly allocating and storing customer interactions so that prioritizing is properly applied.
Combine Automation With Live Agents for Complex Queries
Most efficient support centers utilize at least some automation to speed things up. You can’t beat an AI agent for basic question answering, such as ‘how do I reset my password’ or ‘what is your return policy’. However, there are times when even the most obliging chatbot will simply not be able to come up with the goods.
Complex queries can be those that consist of many components, so that a customer needs more than the simple service provided by chatbots. There may be nuances that a chatbot can’t cover, or perhaps it’s such an unusual issue that the bot designers didn’t factor it in. For all these times, you’re going to need a living breathing real person.
It’s best to have a blend of the two if you can. This way, you get the efficiency and cost savings that automation provides, but you also get the more detailed assistance that a live agent can deliver when nothing else will do.
Maintain a Knowledge Base for Self‑service Troubleshooting
The most efficient service that a customer support center can provide is self-service driven. This way, the customer can find their way to the solution they need, without having to wait in a queue or hang on while the answer is sought by the agent.
The crucial element here is to have a knowledge base that consists of accurate, detailed and up-to-date information. It should be clearly organized so that those coming to you for the first time will be able to navigate their way through to what they need to know.
Visit it regularly, to make sure that it continues to be fit for purpose. This is especially important when product updates are thick on the ground. The best self-service is updated based on common customer questions — so, if you notice an uptick in calls about a particular feature, it might be time to build a tutorial page for it to add to your knowledge base.
Final Thoughts
24/7 customer support probably seems a little more daunting than it should. It’s true that it’s a game changer, and most game changers are a big deal to implement.
The great news is that it’s really not that tricky to set in place. Using the steps we’ve outlined here, together with selecting the right software to take you on your journey, you’ll get there with ease. And your customers? They’ll love you for it.
Manab leads the Product Marketing efforts at Kommunicate. He is intrigued by the developments in the space of AI and envisions a world where AI & human works together.
