It doesn’t matter how outstanding your product is; if your customer service falls short, complaints will arise, and you’ll inevitably lose customers.
The positive aspect is that improvement is within reach. Transforming customer service from mediocre to exceptional is a journey, not an overnight fix. It demands a genuine dedication to significant change, a team of exceptional support professionals, and a company-wide commitment.
This article delves into the critical aspects of customer service, expanding on the insights from the Ultimate Guide to Running a Customer Service Team.
Understanding Customer Service
Customer service is fundamentally about providing assistance and support to both potential and current customers. Customer service experts are typically engaged in addressing customer inquiries through various channels, including in-person interactions, phone calls, emails, chats, and social media platforms. They may also be tasked with developing documentation to facilitate self-service support.
Organizations often tailor their definitions of customer service to align with their core values and the specific type of support they aim to deliver. For instance, at Help Scout, customer service is defined as offering prompt, empathetic assistance that prioritizes customer needs in every interaction.
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The Paramount Importance of Customer Service
Considering that 86% of customers abandon a business relationship due to a negative experience, it’s clear that every customer interaction is a critical opportunity to secure, retain, or upsell.
Excellent customer service is a revenue driver. It provides customers with a cohesive and comprehensive experience that resonates with an organization’s mission.
Research indicates that U.S. companies lose over $62 billion annually due to inadequate customer service management, and a significant majority of consumers are willing to spend more to engage with companies known for superior service.
Recognizing customer service as the bedrock of your customer experience allows you to leverage it to not only satisfy but also genuinely delight customers, engaging them in innovative and exciting ways.
Core Principles of Exceptional Customer Service
Four fundamental principles underpin outstanding customer service: personalization, competence, convenience, and proactivity. These elements significantly shape the customer experience.
- Personalized: Exceptional customer service begins with a human touch. Personalized interactions significantly enhance customer service, demonstrating that your company values each customer and their unique concerns. View service not as a cost center, but as an opportunity to continually earn customer loyalty.
- Competent: Customers consistently rank competence as the most critical factor in a positive customer experience. A competent customer support professional must possess in-depth knowledge of the company and its offerings, along with the authority to resolve customer issues effectively. Greater knowledge translates directly to greater competence.
- Convenient: Customers expect to reach customer service through their preferred communication channels. Offer support across the channels your customers utilize most frequently, and ensure it’s straightforward for them to find and use these contact methods.
- Proactive: Customers appreciate companies that take a proactive approach to communication. If a product is backordered or your website is scheduled for downtime, proactively inform your customers about the situation. While they may not be pleased with the issue, they will value being kept informed.
By centering your customer service strategy on these four key principles, you cultivate a positive, seamless customer experience for everyone interacting with your company.
Customer Service Strategies by Business Type and Industry
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21 Essential Customer Care Skills: Your Tool List for Success
While delivering consistently excellent customer service requires organization-wide effort and alignment, focusing on your customer service team is an excellent starting point. It’s crucial to recruit individuals who genuinely want to help customers succeed and offer competitive compensation to attract skilled professionals.
Identifying the ideal support team member can be challenging. No specific combination of past job roles or academic degrees guarantees the perfect candidate. Instead, you should look for inherent qualities that are not easily taught.
These individuals thrive in direct interactions within their community. They are passionate about problem-solving, approachable, empathetic, and skilled at explaining complex topics simply.
Here are 21 essential customer service skills, forming your Essential Customer Care Tool List, that every support professional should aim to develop and every leader should prioritize when building their team.
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1. Problem-Solving Prowess
Customers often don’t accurately diagnose their own issues. It frequently falls to the support representative to proactively identify the root cause before guiding them to a solution. This requires understanding not just what went wrong, but also the customer’s ultimate objective.
For example, if a customer reports trouble resetting their password, their real goal is to access their account. Effective customer service anticipates this underlying need and might proactively reset the password manually and provide new login details, while also educating the customer on how to do it themselves in the future.
In other scenarios, a skilled problem-solver can offer preemptive advice or solutions that the customer may not even realize are available.
2. Patience: The Cornerstone of Customer Interaction
Patience is indispensable for customer service professionals. Customers reaching out for support are often confused and frustrated. Being treated with patience and understanding significantly reassures customers that their concerns will be addressed.
It’s not about rushing through interactions. Your team must be willing to invest the time to genuinely listen to and fully grasp each customer’s problems and needs.
3. Attentiveness: Listening Beyond Words
The ability to truly listen to customers is vital for providing exceptional service for many reasons. It’s crucial to pay attention not only to individual customer experiences but also to the collective feedback you receive.
For instance, customers might not explicitly state it, but there might be a widespread sentiment that your software’s dashboard is poorly designed. They are unlikely to say, “Please improve your UX,” but they might express frustrations like, “I can never find the search feature” or “Where is (specific function) again?”
Attentiveness allows you to discern what customers are implying, even when they don’t directly state it.
4. Emotional Intelligence: Connecting with Customers
An emotionally intelligent customer support representative excels at relating to diverse personalities, especially those who are frustrated. Instead of taking things personally, they intuitively understand the customer’s perspective and prioritize communicating empathy swiftly and sincerely.
Consider how often you’ve felt better about a potential issue simply because you felt genuinely heard by the other person involved.
When a support representative demonstrates genuine empathy for a frustrated customer, even by simply acknowledging the problem, it can both placate (the customer feels heard) and actively satisfy (the customer feels their frustration is valid).
5. Clear Communication: Bridging Understanding
Your customer support team is at the forefront of resolving product-related issues, acting as a critical communication bridge.
On one side, they are the voice of your company to your customers. This necessitates a practiced ability to simplify complex ideas into easily digestible and understandable terms.
On the other side, they represent customer needs and perspectives within your company. For example, a lengthy, technical explanation of a bug fix is rarely helpful to a customer.
Clear communication is a crucial skill in customer interactions because misunderstandings can lead to disappointment and frustration. The most effective customer service professionals communicate simply and leave no room for ambiguity.
6. Writing Proficiency: Words that Build Trust
Effective writing conveys reality with precision. Without exaggeration, strong writing skills are often undervalued yet absolutely essential in customer support roles.
Unlike face-to-face or even phone conversations, written communication requires a unique ability to convey nuance. The phrasing of a sentence can drastically alter perception, distinguishing between sounding dismissive (“You have to log out first”) and helpful (“Logging out should quickly resolve that issue!”).
Proficient writers typically use complete sentences and correct grammar—qualities that subtly signal your company’s reliability and trustworthiness.
Even if your company primarily offers phone support, writing skills remain important. They enable your team to create coherent internal documentation and signify clear thinking and communication abilities.
7. Creativity and Resourcefulness: Going Beyond Expected
Solving the immediate problem is good, but finding inventive and delightful ways to exceed expectations—and having the intrinsic motivation to do so—is even better.
It takes flair to inject a typical customer service exchange with memorable warmth and personality. Finding a customer service representative with this natural enthusiasm will elevate your customer service from simply “adequate” to “remarkable and worth sharing.”
Chase Clemons from Basecamp advises:
“You want someone who doesn’t need a rigid set of rules and regulations. You want someone who, when interacting with a customer, understands, ‘This person’s boss is putting them under pressure today. They’re having a terrible day. You know what? I’m going to send them some flowers to brighten their day.’ That kind of initiative is not something you can easily teach. They have to naturally go the extra mile.”
8. Persuasion Skills: Guiding Potential Customers
Support teams often receive inquiries from individuals who are not yet customers but are considering purchasing your product.
In these situations, having team members with persuasive abilities is beneficial. They can effectively convince interested prospects that your product is the right solution for them, if it genuinely is.
This isn’t about turning every interaction into a sales pitch, but about ensuring potential customers don’t slip away simply because you failed to articulate a compelling message about the value of your product.
9. Positive Language: Shaping Perceptions
Effective customer service involves consciously using positive language in your communication patterns. Minor adjustments in word choice can significantly impact customer satisfaction.
Language is a powerful tool in persuasion, and customers form perceptions of you and your company based on the language you use.
For example, imagine a customer contacts your team inquiring about a specific product that is currently back-ordered until next month.
Responding with positive language can dramatically influence how the customer receives the information:
- Without positive language: “That product is not available until next month due to back-order.”
- With positive language: “That product will be available next month! I can place an order for you right now to ensure it ships as soon as it arrives in our warehouse.”
The first example, while not explicitly negative, can sound abrupt and impersonal, potentially leading to misinterpretations, especially in written communication where perceptions can lean towards negativity.
Conversely, the second example conveys the same information (the item is unavailable currently) but focuses on the resolution timeframe and action, emphasizing the positive outcome.
10. In-depth Product Knowledge: The Foundation of Support
The most effective customer service professionals possess a comprehensive understanding of their company’s products. Without thorough product knowledge, they cannot effectively assist customers experiencing issues.
At Help Scout, for example, all new employees undergo customer support training within their first two weeks. This is a critical component of our employee onboarding process.
According to Help Scout’s Elyse Roach, “Having a solid product foundation not only equips you with the best strategies to navigate even the most complex customer situations, but it also helps you understand 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 help mitigate these knowledge gaps.
For example, Help Scout offers features that can assist in this area.
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 Professionalism Under Pressure
Occasionally, your team will encounter customers who are simply impossible to please.
Situations beyond your control, such as a customer having a particularly bad day, will sometimes intrude on your team’s typical support interactions.
Every effective customer service professional needs basic acting skills to maintain their usual positive demeanor, even when dealing with persistently grumpy individuals.
12. Time Management: Balancing Efficiency and Thoroughness
While patience and dedicating sufficient time to understand customer issues are crucial, there are limits to the time you can allocate to each customer. Your team must strive for efficiency in providing solutions.
The most effective customer service professionals quickly recognize when they cannot personally assist a customer and promptly direct them to someone who can.
13. Customer Acuity: Reading Between the Lines
Understanding basic principles of behavioral psychology is important for your team to accurately gauge customers’ current emotional states. As Emily Triplett Lentz observes:
“I rarely use a smiley face in a support email when the customer’s signature includes ‘PhD,’ for example. It’s not that academics lack humor, but
<span>:</span><span>)</span>is unlikely to be taken seriously by someone who has spent years analyzing complex literary themes.”
The best support professionals are adept at observing subtle cues about a customer’s mood, patience level, and personality, which significantly contributes to positive customer interactions.
14. Unflappability: Staying Calm Under Fire
This quality, described by terms like “keeping cool under pressure,” represents the ability to remain calm and even influence others when situations become stressful.
The best customer service representatives understand that they cannot allow a frustrated customer to cause them to lose their composure. In fact, their role is to be a source of stability for customers who feel overwhelmed by their current issues.
15. Goal-Oriented Approach: Balancing Service and Business Objectives
Customer service experts have highlighted that granting employees unlimited autonomy to “wow” customers doesn’t always yield the anticipated business returns. This is because a lack of clear goals can be detrimental. However, business objectives and customer satisfaction can be mutually reinforcing without compromising service quality.
Frameworks like the Net Promoter Score can help businesses establish guidelines for their employees, providing ample freedom to handle individual customer cases while also offering priority solutions and readily available fixes for common problems.
16. Adaptability to Surprises: Thinking on Your Feet
Customers will occasionally present your team with unexpected situations. They might make requests that are not covered in your company’s standard procedures or react in unforeseen ways.
In these instances, it’s valuable to have a team that can think creatively and quickly. Even better is to cultivate a team that proactively develops guidelines for handling such situations for future reference.
17. Tenacity: The Drive to Go the Extra Mile
Whether you call it strong work ethic or determination, a willingness to do what’s necessary (without taking shortcuts) is a crucial skill for providing service that generates positive word-of-mouth.
The most memorable customer service stories, many of which have significantly impacted businesses, often originate from a single employee who went beyond standard procedures to assist a customer.
18. Closing Proficiency: Ensuring Resolution and Satisfaction
Closing effectively in customer service means ending the interaction with confirmed customer satisfaction (or as close to it as achievable) and ensuring the customer feels that their issue has been fully resolved (or will be).
Customers want to be assured that all their concerns have been addressed before the interaction concludes. Ensure your team takes the time to confirm with customers that every issue has been completely resolved.
19. Empathy: Understanding and Sharing Customer Feelings
Empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another, might be considered a character trait more than a skill. However, since empathy can be cultivated and improved, it’s essential to include it here.
In fact, if your organization assesses job applicants for customer service aptitude, empathy should be considered a critical skill.
Even when you cannot give a customer exactly what they want to hear, demonstrating care, concern, and understanding goes a long way. A support representative’s ability to empathize and guide the conversation towards a positive outcome can often make all the difference.
20. Methodical Approach: Precision and Detail Orientation
In customer service, haste leads to mistakes. Hiring individuals who are deliberate and detail-oriented is crucial for effectively meeting customer needs.
Firstly, they will thoroughly understand the core of a problem before offering a solution. There’s nothing more frustrating than receiving a “solution” that completely misses the mark.
Secondly, they will proofread their communications. A well-crafted response can lose its impact if it’s riddled with errors.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, they will consistently follow up. Receiving a proactive update from a customer service representative like, “Remember that bug you reported? We’ve fixed it!” earns customer loyalty for life.
A key attribute is the ability to maintain methodical precision even under pressure.
Since support teams often handle challenging situations and resolve issues created by others, it’s particularly important they understand how to manage the urgency—and potential frustration—of customers without internalizing it. They maintain composure and provide steady, guiding assistance.
21. Willingness to Learn: Continuous Improvement
While seemingly broad, willingness to learn is one of the most vital skills. It is the foundation for growth as a customer service professional.
Your team members must be committed to learning your product inside and out, improving their communication skills (and recognizing when they are communicating poorly), and discerning when to follow established processes and when to adapt and innovate.
Individuals who are not committed to self-improvement—whether in product development, marketing, or customer service—will be surpassed by those who invest in their skills.
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Addressing Skill Gaps Within Your Team
What if you lead a team where some members seem resistant to improving their customer service approach or lack essential skills and show no interest in developing them? Help Scout’s Mathew Patterson offers a valuable perspective:
Often, what appears to be a skill deficit or unwillingness to learn stems from a work environment (past or present) that didn’t reward exceeding expectations in service.
Try providing your team with clear guidelines on your expectations and concrete examples of excellent customer service within your company. As you implement these, actively acknowledge and celebrate small victories when you see team members applying these skills.
Once your team recognizes that their efforts are valued and rewarded, engagement will likely increase, providing a clearer picture of any genuine skill gaps that need to be addressed.
The Evolving Landscape of Customer Service
As Seth Godin noted, customer service holds different meanings for different organizations. However, companies that view customer service merely as a “cost-cutting race to the bottom” are unlikely to succeed in the long run.
The fundamental truth is: Exceptional customer service is a growth engine, not a cost center. It’s that simple.
