It’s irrelevant how outstanding your product might be: if your customer service falls short, dissatisfaction will spread, and customer attrition will inevitably follow.
The upside? Improvement is always within reach. Transforming your customer service from average to exceptional is a journey, not an instant fix. It demands a genuine dedication to meaningful changes, a team of stellar support professionals, and a company-wide commitment.
This article is part of our Ultimate Guide to Running a Customer Service Team. Explore other chapters when you’re ready to delve deeper.
Defining Customer Service: Your Essential Customer Care Definition Tool
What exactly is customer service? In essence, customer service is the act of providing assistance and support to both potential and current customers. Professionals in customer service typically address customer inquiries through various channels, including face-to-face interactions, phone calls, emails, live chat, and social media platforms. Their responsibilities may also extend to creating documentation that empowers customers with self-service support options.
Organizations often tailor their customer service definitions to align with their core values and desired level of support. For instance, at Help Scout, a leader in customer communication, they define customer service as delivering prompt, empathetic assistance that prioritizes customer needs in every interaction. This definition serves as an Essential Customer Care Definition Tool for their team, guiding their approach to every customer interaction.
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The Paramount Importance of Customer Service
Considering that a staggering 86% of customers abandon a business after a negative experience, it’s clear that every customer interaction is a critical opportunity. Businesses must view each support instance as a chance to acquire new customers, retain existing ones, and even encourage upselling.
Excellent customer service is not just a cost center; it’s a revenue engine. It cultivates a holistic and positive customer experience that resonates with an organization’s core mission and values.
Numerous studies underscore this point. According to various research reports, poor customer service management costs U.S. companies over $62 billion annually. Furthermore, a significant majority, seven out of ten consumers, are willing to spend more to engage with companies known for delivering exceptional service.
Recognizing that customer service is the cornerstone of your customer experience empowers you to leverage it as a powerful tool. It’s an opportunity to not only satisfy but also delight customers, fostering deeper engagement and loyalty in innovative and exciting ways. Understanding this fundamental truth is the first step in utilizing an essential customer care definition tool effectively.
Core Principles of Exceptional Customer Service
Four key principles form the bedrock of outstanding customer service: personalization, competence, convenience, and proactivity. These elements exert the most significant influence on the overall customer experience. These principles act as a framework, an essential customer care definition tool in practice, helping businesses structure their support strategies.
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Personalized Service: Exceptional customer service always begins with a human touch. Personalized interactions significantly enhance the customer service experience, demonstrating to customers that your company genuinely values them and their specific concerns. Instead of perceiving service as a mere expense, view it as a continuous opportunity to re-earn your customer’s loyalty and business.
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Competent Assistance: Customers consistently cite competency as the most crucial factor in a positive customer experience. To be competent, a customer support professional must possess in-depth knowledge of the company and its products. Crucially, they must also be empowered to effectively resolve customer issues. The depth of their knowledge directly correlates with their perceived and actual competence.
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Convenient Access: Customers expect to be able to connect with customer service representatives through their preferred communication channels. Offer support across the channels your customers utilize most frequently. Furthermore, ensure it’s straightforward and intuitive for customers to find and initiate contact with your support team.
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Proactive Engagement: Today’s customers appreciate companies that take a proactive approach to communication. If a product is temporarily out of stock or your website is scheduled for maintenance downtime, proactively inform your customers and clearly explain the situation. While they might not be thrilled about the inconvenience, they will undoubtedly appreciate being kept informed and in the loop.
By centering your customer service strategy around these four fundamental principles, you will cultivate a positive, seamless, and hassle-free customer experience for everyone who interacts with your organization. These principles are not just guidelines; they are the practical application of an essential customer care definition tool.
Customer Service Strategies by Business Type and Industry
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21 Essential Customer Service Skills
While consistently delivering exceptional customer service necessitates company-wide effort and alignment, a strategic starting point is your customer service team. Prioritize hiring individuals who are genuinely passionate about helping customers succeed. Furthermore, offer competitive compensation packages to attract and retain highly skilled professionals.
Identifying the ideal candidate for a support team can be complex. There’s no definitive checklist of specific job experiences or academic degrees that guarantees the perfect hire. Instead, focus on identifying innate qualities that are often difficult to teach.
These individuals thrive on direct, personal interactions. They are natural problem solvers. They are approachable, warm, and excel at explaining complex concepts in an easily understandable manner. These skills are the tools in your essential customer care definition tool kit – the practical application of customer service excellence.
Here are 21 crucial customer service skills that every support professional should strive to develop and every leader should prioritize when building their team.
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1. Problem-Solving Prowess
Customers don’t always accurately diagnose the root cause of their issues. Often, it falls to the support representative to proactively investigate and replicate the problem before guiding the customer to a solution. This requires not just identifying what went wrong, but also understanding the customer’s ultimate goal.
For instance, if a customer contacts support because they are struggling to reset their password, their underlying need is to gain access to their account. Exceptional customer service anticipates this need and might proactively reset the password manually and provide new login credentials, while also educating the customer on how to perform a reset themselves in the future.
In other scenarios, a skilled problem-solver might offer preemptive advice or suggest a solution that the customer wasn’t even aware was possible.
2. Unwavering Patience
Patience is a cornerstone skill for customer service professionals. Customers reaching out to support are frequently experiencing frustration and confusion. Being met with patience and attentive listening significantly contributes to customers feeling understood and confident that their concerns will be addressed.
It’s not enough to simply resolve customer interactions as quickly as possible. Your team must be willing to invest the necessary time to genuinely listen to, fully comprehend, and address each customer’s unique problems and needs.
3. Keen Attentiveness
The ability to truly listen to customers is paramount for delivering exceptional service for numerous reasons. It’s not only vital to pay close attention to individual customer experiences but also to be mindful and attentive to the broader feedback trends you receive.
For example, customers might not explicitly state it, but there might be an underlying sentiment that your software’s user interface is not intuitive. Customers are unlikely to directly say, “Please improve your UX,” but they might express frustrations like, “I can never locate the search function” or “Where is (specific feature) again?”.
You must cultivate attentiveness to discern what customers are communicating implicitly, even when they don’t directly articulate their needs or pain points.
4. High Emotional Intelligence
An exceptional customer support representative possesses the ability to connect with a wide range of personalities, but they particularly excel at interacting with frustrated individuals. Instead of reacting defensively, they intuitively understand the customer’s perspective and prioritize communicating empathy swiftly and sincerely.
Consider this: how often have you felt more at ease about a potential issue simply because you felt genuinely heard and understood by the other person involved?
When a support representative effectively demonstrates sincere empathy for a frustrated customer, even through simple actions like reiterating the problem to confirm understanding, it can both placate the customer (making them feel heard) and actively improve their experience (making them feel their frustration is validated).
5. Clear Communication Skills
Your customer support team operates on the front lines of problem resolution for your product and serves as a vital communication bridge.
On one hand, they are the voice of your company to your customers. This necessitates a practiced ability to translate complex concepts into easily digestible and readily understandable terms.
On the other hand, they represent customer needs and perspectives to your company. For instance, a lengthy, technical explanation of the intricacies of resolving a specific bug is unlikely to be helpful or appreciated by a customer.
Clear communication skills are paramount in customer interactions because miscommunication can lead to disappointment and heightened frustration. The most effective customer service professionals prioritize clear, concise communication, leaving no room for ambiguity in their interactions with customers.
6. Strong Writing Skills
Effective writing is about conveying reality as accurately as possible through words. Without exaggeration, proficient writing is an often-overlooked yet indispensable skill for customer support roles.
Unlike face-to-face or even voice-based interactions, written communication requires a unique ability to convey nuance. The phrasing of a sentence can be the difference between sounding dismissive (“You have to log out first”) and helpful (“Logging out should quickly resolve that issue!”).
Strong writers also tend to use grammatically correct and complete sentences – qualities that subtly project an image of security and trustworthiness for your company.
Even if your company primarily offers phone-based support, writing skills remain crucial. They enable your team to create coherent internal documentation and are indicative of an individual who thinks and communicates with clarity.
7. Creativity and Resourcefulness
Simply resolving a problem is good service, but proactively seeking creative and delightful ways to exceed customer expectations – and genuinely wanting to do so – elevates service to the next level.
It takes flair to infuse a routine customer service exchange with memorable warmth and personality. Finding customer service representatives with this inherent enthusiasm will transform your customer service from merely “adequate” to “remarkable and worth sharing.”
Chase Clemons at Basecamp advises:
“You want to hire someone who doesn’t require a rigid set of rules and regulations. You want someone who can engage with a customer and intuitively understand, ‘This person’s boss is putting immense pressure on them today. They’re having a really bad day. You know what? I’m going to send them some flowers to brighten their day.’ This level of initiative is often innate and difficult to teach. It’s about naturally going the extra mile.”
8. Persuasion Skills
Support teams often receive inquiries from individuals who are not yet customers but are considering purchasing your company’s product or service.
In these situations, having team members with a degree of persuasive ability is highly beneficial. They can effectively communicate the value proposition of your product and guide interested prospects towards a purchase decision, if it genuinely aligns with their needs.
This isn’t about employing aggressive sales tactics in every interaction. Rather, it’s about ensuring that potential customers don’t slip away simply because you failed to articulate a compelling message about why your company’s offering is worth their investment.
9. Mastery of Positive Language
Effective customer service involves consciously adjusting your conversational patterns. Subtle shifts in language can have a profound impact on customer satisfaction.
Language is a critical component of persuasion, and customers form perceptions about you and your company based on the language you employ.
Consider a scenario where a customer contacts your team expressing interest in a specific product, only to learn that it is currently back-ordered until the following month.
Responding with positive language can significantly alter how the customer perceives this information:
- Without positive language: “That product is unavailable until next month due to a backorder.”
- With positive language: “That product will be available next month! I can place an order for you right now to ensure it ships to you as soon as it arrives at our warehouse.”
The first example, while not overtly negative, conveys a somewhat abrupt and impersonal tone that could be misinterpreted by customers, especially in email communication where written language perceptions can lean towards negativity.
Conversely, the second example conveys the same information (the item is currently unavailable) but shifts the focus to the resolution – when and how the issue will be resolved – rather than dwelling on the negative aspect of unavailability.
10. In-depth Product Knowledge
The most effective customer service professionals possess comprehensive knowledge of their company’s products and how they function. Without a thorough understanding of your product inside and out, they cannot effectively assist customers when they encounter challenges.
At Help Scout, for example, all new employees undergo customer support training during their initial weeks. It’s a core element of their employee onboarding process.
According to Help Scout’s Elyse Roach, “Having a solid product foundation not only equips you with the most effective strategies to navigate even the most complex customer situations, but it also fosters a deeper understanding of their experience, enabling you to become their strongest advocate.”
Bridging Product Knowledge Gaps
Building comprehensive product knowledge takes time. For complex products, it may take team members years to master every detail. However, the right customer support tools can effectively mitigate these knowledge gaps.
For instance, with Help Scout, you can leverage features such as:
Whether you utilize Help Scout or one of its alternatives, explore the features available to empower your teams to deliver exceptional customer service.
11. Acting Skills (Maintaining Composure)
Occasionally, your team will encounter individuals who are simply impossible to satisfy.
Situations beyond your control, such as a customer having an exceptionally bad day, will inevitably intrude on your team’s typical support interactions.
Every effective customer service professional needs basic acting skills to maintain their usual positive and helpful demeanor, even when interacting with genuinely difficult or grumpy customers.
12. Effective Time Management
On one hand, patience and dedicating extra time to fully understand customer issues are valuable assets. On the other hand, there are practical limits to the time you can allocate to each individual customer. Your team must strive to provide customers with the assistance they need efficiently.
The most effective customer service professionals are adept at recognizing when they may not be the best resource to assist a particular customer. In such cases, they promptly redirect the customer to someone who can provide the necessary support.
13. Ability to “Read” Customers
It’s beneficial for your team to grasp basic principles of behavioral psychology to better interpret customers’ current emotional states. As Emily Triplett Lentz observes:
“I rarely use emojis in support emails when a customer’s signature includes ‘PhD,’ for example. It’s not that academics lack humor, but
:‑)is unlikely to be perceived as professional by someone who has dedicated years to in-depth academic study.”
The most skilled support professionals learn to observe and listen for subtle cues about a customer’s mood, patience level, personality, and so on. This nuanced understanding significantly contributes to maintaining positive customer interactions.
14. Unflappability (Remaining Calm Under Pressure)
Various terms describe this personality trait – “keeping cool,” “staying calm under pressure,” etc. – but they all refer to the same essential quality: the ability to remain composed and even influence others positively when situations become stressful or chaotic.
The best customer service representatives understand that they cannot allow a heated customer to provoke them into losing their composure. In fact, their role is to be a “rock” for customers who feel overwhelmed by their current problems.
15. Goal-Oriented Focus
Numerous customer service experts have demonstrated that granting employees unlimited autonomy to “wow” customers doesn’t always yield the desired business outcomes. This is often because a lack of clear goals can lead to inefficiencies. However, business objectives and customer satisfaction can and should coexist harmoniously without compromising service quality.
Utilizing frameworks like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help businesses establish guidelines for their employees. These frameworks can allow ample flexibility for handling customers on a case-by-case basis while also providing prioritized solutions and readily available “go-to” fixes for common issues.
16. Adaptability to Surprises
Occasionally, customers will present your team with unexpected situations – “curveballs.” They might make requests that fall outside your company’s established guidelines or react in unforeseen ways.
In these instances, it’s advantageous to have a team of individuals who can think on their feet and adapt quickly. Even better, seek out team members who will take the initiative to develop new guidelines for everyone to use in similar situations moving forward, promoting continuous improvement.
17. Tenacity and Strong Work Ethic
Whether you call it tenacity, grit, or simply a strong work ethic, a willingness to persevere and do what is necessary (without taking shortcuts) is a crucial skill for delivering the kind of service that generates positive word-of-mouth and customer loyalty.
Many of the most memorable customer service stories – those that have had a significant positive impact on businesses – originated from a single employee who refused to simply follow standard procedures when it came to assisting a customer in need.
18. Closing Ability (Ensuring Resolution)
In customer service, “closing” with a customer means ending the interaction with confirmed customer satisfaction (or as close to it as possible) and with the customer feeling confident that their issue has been fully addressed (or will be).
Being abruptly dismissed before all concerns are addressed is a major customer frustration. Ensure your team is trained to take the time to confirm with customers that each and every issue they initially raised has been completely resolved to their satisfaction.
19. Empathy: Understanding and Sharing Feelings
Empathy – the capacity to understand and share the feelings of another – might be considered more of a character trait than a skill. However, since empathy can be cultivated and strengthened, it is essential to include it here.
In fact, if your organization utilizes aptitude tests for customer service roles, empathy should be considered a paramount skill to assess.
Even when you cannot provide a customer with exactly what they initially hoped for, a genuine dose of care, concern, and understanding can significantly improve the interaction. A support representative’s ability to empathize with a customer and frame communication in a way that guides the situation towards a more positive outcome is often transformative.
20. Methodical Approach and Attention to Detail
In customer service, rushing often leads to mistakes. Hiring individuals who are detail-oriented and methodical in their approach will significantly enhance your ability to meet customer needs effectively.
Firstly, they will ensure they fully grasp the core of a problem before rushing to provide a solution. There is nothing more frustrating than receiving a “solution” that completely misses the mark and fails to address the actual issue.
Secondly, they will prioritize proofreading. A thoughtfully crafted response can lose its problem-solving impact if it is riddled with typos and grammatical errors.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, a methodical approach means they will consistently follow up. Receiving a proactive note from a customer service representative saying, “Remember that bug you reported that we were investigating? Well, we’ve just fixed it!” is incredibly impressive and fosters lasting customer loyalty.
An important consideration: the best hires are able to maintain their methodical approach even under pressure.
Given that support teams are often tasked with resolving issues created by others, it’s particularly vital that they understand how to avoid internalizing the urgency – and potential frustration – of upset customers. Instead, they maintain a calm demeanor and a steady, guiding hand.
21. A Continuous Willingness to Learn
While this is arguably the most general skill on this list, it is also one of the most fundamental. A willingness to learn is the bedrock for continuous growth as a customer service professional.
Your team members must be committed to learning your product inside and out, to continuously improving their communication skills (and recognizing areas for improvement), and to discerning when adhering to established processes is appropriate versus when taking initiative and adapting is more effective.
Those who are not committed to continuous self-improvement – whether in product development, marketing, or customer support – will be outpaced by those who actively invest in their own skills and development.
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Addressing Skill Gaps Within Your Team
What if you lead a team of support professionals who seem resistant to improving their customer service approach? What if they lack some of the essential skills outlined above and don’t appear motivated to develop them? Help Scout’s Mathew Patterson offers a valuable perspective:
Often, what might be perceived as a lack of skill or unwillingness to learn stems from a work environment (current or past) that did not adequately recognize or reward going above and beyond to deliver exceptional service.
Try providing your team with clear guidelines outlining your expectations and showcasing examples of what outstanding customer service looks like within your company. Emphasize all the skills discussed above. As you implement these guidelines, be sure to acknowledge and celebrate small wins as you observe team members beginning to incorporate these skills into their interactions.
Once your team experiences that their efforts are being recognized and appreciated, you will likely see increased engagement. This will also provide a clearer picture of whether there are genuine skill gaps within your team that require focused development and training.
The Evolving Landscape of Customer Service
As Seth Godin aptly wrote, the definition of customer service is not monolithic; it varies across organizations. However, companies that view customer service solely as a “cost-cutting race to the bottom” are unlikely to achieve long-term success.
The fundamental truth is this: exceptional customer service is a growth driver, not a cost center. This simple shift in perspective can transform your approach to customer care and ultimately, your bottom line. Understanding this evolution and embracing a customer-centric philosophy is the ultimate application of your essential customer care definition tool.
