It’s a common saying in business: your product can be groundbreaking, but subpar customer service can quickly tarnish your reputation and drive customers away. Turning around a struggling customer service department isn’t a quick fix. It demands a real commitment to change, a dedicated team, and a company-wide focus.
This discussion is part of a broader exploration into building exceptional customer service teams, and here, we’re focusing on a critical aspect: the tools that empower your team to excel.
Understanding Customer Service
Customer service is fundamentally about support – assisting both potential and current customers. Customer service professionals are the frontline, addressing queries via various channels like in-person interactions, phone, email, chat, and social media. They also often create resources that empower customers to find solutions themselves through self-service support.
Organizations often tailor their customer service definition to align with their core values and desired support style. For example, at Help Scout, customer service is defined as providing prompt, empathetic, and customer-centric assistance in every interaction.
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The Indispensable Nature of Customer Service
Consider that 86% of customers will stop doing business with a company after a negative experience. This statistic underscores that every customer interaction is a pivotal moment – an opportunity to gain a new customer, retain an existing one, or even encourage an upgrade or additional purchase.
Effective customer service is a revenue driver. It cultivates a holistic and positive customer experience that resonates with the company’s mission and values.
Studies reveal that poor customer service management costs U.S. businesses over $62 billion annually. Furthermore, 70% of consumers are willing to spend more with companies known for providing excellent service.
Recognizing that customer service is foundational to the customer experience allows businesses to leverage it as a powerful tool for customer satisfaction and engagement.
Core Principles of Excellent Customer Service
Four key principles underpin exceptional customer service: personalization, competence, convenience, and proactivity. These elements are crucial in shaping a positive customer journey.
- Personalized: Customer service excellence begins with a human touch. Personalized interactions significantly enhance the customer experience, showing customers they are valued and their concerns are understood. Instead of viewing service as a cost, see it as an opportunity to reaffirm the customer’s choice in doing business with you.
- Competent: Customers consistently rank competency as the most vital aspect of good customer service. A competent support professional possesses comprehensive knowledge of the company and its products, and importantly, has the ability to resolve customer issues effectively. Deeper knowledge directly translates to greater competency.
- Convenient: Customers expect to reach customer service through their preferred communication channels. Offering support across the channels your customers use most frequently and ensuring easy access to contact information are crucial for convenience.
- Proactive: Customers appreciate companies that take a proactive approach. Whether it’s a product backorder or planned website maintenance, informing customers in advance demonstrates consideration and builds trust. While they might not be thrilled with the issue, they’ll appreciate being kept informed.
Building your customer service strategy around these four principles will pave the way for a seamless and positive experience for every customer interacting with your company.
Customer service tips by business type and industry
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21 Essential Customer Service Skills
While consistent, high-quality customer service requires company-wide alignment, your customer service team is the natural starting point. Recruiting individuals who are genuinely motivated to help customers succeed and offering competitive compensation to attract skilled professionals are vital first steps.
Finding the ideal support team member goes beyond specific job history or academic credentials. It’s about identifying innate qualities that are difficult to teach. These individuals thrive in customer interactions, enjoy problem-solving, are approachable and empathetic, and excel at explaining complex topics simply.
Here are 21 key customer service skills that every support professional should cultivate and every leader should seek when building their team.
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1. Problem Solving Skills
Customers often misdiagnose their own issues. Support representatives must be able to independently identify the root cause of the problem before offering a solution. This means understanding not just the stated issue, but the customer’s underlying goal.
For example, if a customer reports password reset problems, the real need is account access. Excellent customer service anticipates this, potentially manually resetting the password and providing login details, while also guiding the customer on future self-resets.
Skilled problem-solvers can also proactively offer advice or solutions that customers might not even realize are available.
2. Patience
Patience is fundamental for customer service. Customers contacting support are often confused and frustrated. Being treated with patience and understanding significantly contributes to a customer’s confidence in your ability to resolve their issue.
Rushing through interactions is counterproductive. Your team must be willing to invest the time to truly listen to and fully grasp each customer’s specific problems and needs.
3. Attentiveness
Actively listening to customers is crucial for providing excellent service. This includes paying attention to individual customer experiences and being receptive to broader feedback trends.
For instance, customers might not directly criticize your software’s dashboard layout, but they might express difficulty finding features or specific functions. Attentive support professionals can discern these underlying issues even when not explicitly stated.
4. Emotional Intelligence
Exceptional support representatives connect with all types of people, especially those who are frustrated. They avoid taking complaints personally, intuitively understand the customer’s perspective, and effectively communicate empathy.
Feeling heard is often the first step in resolving a customer grievance. When a support representative expresses genuine empathy, even by simply acknowledging the problem, it can de-escalate frustration and validate the customer’s feelings.
5. Clear Communication Skills
Your customer support team is at the forefront of product issue resolution and acts as a vital communication bridge.
They represent your company to customers, requiring them to simplify complex information into easily digestible terms. Conversely, they also represent customer needs and feedback within your company. Customers don’t need lengthy technical explanations; they need clear, concise solutions.
Clear communication prevents misunderstandings, which can lead to further disappointment and frustration. Top customer service professionals prioritize simplicity and clarity in all customer interactions.
6. Writing Skills
Effective writing conveys reality through words. Strong writing is an often-overlooked but essential skill in customer support.
Unlike face-to-face or phone conversations, written communication relies solely on words to convey nuance. Sentence phrasing can dramatically alter perception, distinguishing between sounding dismissive (“You must log out first”) and helpful (“Logging out should quickly resolve the issue!”).
Good writing also includes proper grammar and complete sentences, projecting professionalism and company trustworthiness. Even in phone-centric support, writing skills are valuable for internal documentation and indicate clear thinking and communication abilities.
7. Creativity and Resourcefulness
Solving problems is good; finding innovative and personalized ways to exceed expectations is exceptional.
Injecting warmth and personality into customer interactions elevates service from satisfactory to memorable and shareable. Seeking representatives with natural enthusiasm for going the extra mile can transform customer service into a key differentiator.
Chase Clemons from Basecamp advises hiring individuals who require minimal rigid rules and regulations, those who intuitively understand customer needs and are empowered to find unique solutions, even something as unexpected as sending flowers to brighten a customer’s day. These gestures of goodwill are often innate and difficult to mandate.
8. Persuasion Skills
Support teams frequently encounter inquiries from potential customers considering your product.
In these instances, persuasion skills become valuable. Representatives can effectively guide interested prospects and demonstrate if your product is the right fit for their needs.
This isn’t about aggressive sales tactics in every interaction, but about ensuring potential customers don’t slip away due to a failure to communicate the value proposition of your product compellingly.
9. Ability to Use Positive Language
Subtle shifts in conversational patterns can significantly enhance customer satisfaction. Positive language is a powerful tool in persuasion, shaping customer perceptions of you and your company.
For example, consider a customer inquiring about a product that is currently back-ordered.
Positive language can transform the customer’s reception of the information:
- Without positive language: “That product is back-ordered and unavailable until next month.”
- With positive language: “That product will be available next month! I can place your order now to ensure it ships as soon as it arrives in our warehouse.”
The first example, while factually accurate, can sound abrupt and impersonal, potentially creating a negative impression, especially in written communication where written language perception can be skewed negatively.
The second example conveys the same information (unavailability) but focuses on the solution and timeline, emphasizing a positive resolution.
10. Product Knowledge
Exceptional customer service professionals possess deep product knowledge. Without a thorough understanding of your products, effectively assisting customers with issues becomes impossible.
At Help Scout, new employees undergo customer support training in their initial weeks, highlighting its critical role in employee onboarding.
According to Help Scout’s Elyse Roach, “Solid product knowledge not only equips you with the best solutions for complex situations, but also fosters understanding of the customer experience, making you their strongest advocate.”
Mitigating Gaps in Product Knowledge with Essential Customer Care Tools
Building comprehensive product knowledge takes time, especially for complex products. It can take years for team members to master every detail. However, the right customer support tools can significantly bridge these knowledge gaps.
For example, Help Scout, provides features that act as essential customer care tools:
Whether you utilize Help Scout or alternatives, exploring available features is crucial for empowering teams to deliver outstanding customer service. These tools are essential for efficient and effective customer care.
11. Acting Skills
Occasionally, your team will encounter customers who are simply impossible to satisfy.
External factors, like a customer having a particularly bad day, can impact support interactions.
Every effective customer service professional needs basic “acting skills” to maintain a positive and helpful demeanor, even when dealing with difficult or grumpy individuals.
12. Time Management Skills
While patience and thoroughness are crucial, there are practical time constraints in customer service. Your team needs to balance attentive support with efficient resolution.
Effective customer service professionals quickly recognize when they cannot personally assist a customer and efficiently direct them to someone who can.
13. Ability to Read Customers
Understanding basic behavioral psychology principles helps your team gauge customers’ emotional states. As Emily Triplett Lentz notes:
“I rarely use a smiley face in a support email when the customer’s signature includes ‘PhD,’ for example. Not that academics are humorless, it’s just that
<span>:</span><span>)</span>isn’t likely to get you taken seriously by someone who spent five years deconstructing utopian undertones in nineteenth-century autobiographical fiction.”
Top support professionals observe subtle cues about a customer’s mood, patience level, and personality, tailoring their approach for positive interactions.
14. Unflappability
This describes the ability to remain calm and composed, even in stressful situations. Synonyms include “keeping cool under pressure” or “level-headed.”
The best customer service representatives understand they cannot let a frustrated customer cause them to lose their composure. Their role is to be a source of stability and reassurance for customers who feel overwhelmed by their issues.
15. Goal-Oriented Focus
Customer service experts have shown that granting employees unlimited autonomy to “wow” customers doesn’t always yield expected business returns. Lack of defined goals can be detrimental. Business objectives and customer satisfaction can, and should, be mutually supportive.
Frameworks like Net Promoter Score provide guidelines, offering employees flexibility in handling individual customer cases while also establishing priority solutions and standard fixes for common problems.
16. Ability to Handle Surprises
Customers will sometimes present unexpected situations – requests outside company guidelines or unforeseen reactions.
In these moments, a team that can think on its feet is invaluable. Even better are individuals who proactively develop guidelines to handle similar situations in the future, benefiting the entire team.
17. Tenacity
Call it work ethic, perseverance, or dedication, but a willingness to go the extra mile and avoid shortcuts is essential for delivering service that generates positive word-of-mouth.
Many memorable customer service stories, those that significantly impacted businesses positively, originate from an employee’s refusal to simply follow standard procedures when assisting a customer.
18. Closing Ability
In customer service, “closing” means ending the interaction with confirmed customer satisfaction (or as close to it as possible) and ensuring the customer feels their issue is resolved.
Being prematurely dismissed before issue resolution is a major customer frustration. Your team must be trained to confirm with customers that all concerns have been fully addressed.
19. Empathy
Empathy, the ability to understand and share another’s feelings, is arguably more of a character trait than a skill. However, empathy can be cultivated and improved, making it crucial in customer service.
Empathy is a critical skill to assess when recruiting for customer service roles.
Even when you can’t provide the exact answer a customer wants, demonstrating care, concern, and understanding goes a long way. A support representative’s empathetic approach can significantly influence the interaction’s outcome.
20. A Methodical Approach
In customer service, rushing leads to mistakes. Hiring detail-oriented individuals who value a methodical approach greatly benefits customer interactions.
Firstly, they ensure a thorough understanding of the problem before offering a solution, avoiding ineffective fixes.
Secondly, they proofread communications, maintaining professionalism and clarity. Errors in written responses detract from the problem-solving impact.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, they consistently follow up. Proactive follow-up, such as notifying a customer about a resolved bug they reported, builds lasting loyalty.
Crucially, top performers maintain this methodical approach even under pressure.
Support teams often handle complex issues and frustrated customers. It’s vital they remain calm, avoid internalizing customer urgency or anger, and maintain a steady, guiding hand throughout the interaction.
21. Willingness to Learn
While broadly applicable, willingness to learn is fundamental. It’s the basis for growth as a customer service professional.
Team members must be committed to continuously learning – mastering product knowledge, improving communication skills (and recognizing areas for improvement), and discerning when to follow established processes and when to adapt.
Those who don’t actively seek self-improvement, whether in product development, marketing, or customer support, risk being overtaken by those who do.
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Addressing Skill Gaps in Your Team
What if some team members are resistant to improving their customer service approach or lack key skills without showing interest in development? Help Scout’s Mathew Patterson offers a perspective:
Often, perceived skill deficits or unwillingness to learn stem from work environments (past or present) that didn’t recognize or reward exceptional customer service.
Implement clear guidelines outlining expectations and demonstrating examples of excellent customer service within your company. Actively acknowledge and celebrate small improvements as team members begin applying these skills.
Recognizing and rewarding effort fosters engagement and clarifies whether true skill gaps exist that require targeted training and development.
The Evolving Landscape of Customer Service
As Seth Godin noted, customer service interpretations vary across organizations, but companies viewing it solely as a “cost-cutting race to the bottom” are heading for trouble.
The core message is clear: Excellent customer service is a growth engine, not a cost center. This fundamental shift in perspective is essential for long-term business success.
