It’s a common saying in business: no matter how outstanding your product is, subpar customer service can tarnish your reputation and drive customers away. In today’s market, customer experience is paramount, and service missteps can quickly lead to customer attrition.
The positive aspect is that poor customer service isn’t a permanent condition. Transformation is possible. However, elevating your customer service from mediocre to exceptional is a journey, not a destination. It demands a genuine commitment to significant changes, a dedicated team of skilled support professionals, and a company-wide approach.
This article delves into the essential aspects of customer care and provides actionable insights on how to improve it. We will explore key principles, vital skills, and consider the tools that can empower your team to deliver outstanding customer experiences.
Understanding Customer Service Excellence
Customer service, at its core, is about providing assistance and support to both potential and existing customers. Customer service representatives are the front line, addressing inquiries via various channels such as face-to-face interactions, phone calls, emails, live chat, and social media. Their responsibilities often extend to creating helpful resources and documentation that enable customers to find solutions independently.
Organizations often tailor their definition of customer service to align with their core values and the specific type of support they aim to offer. For instance, at Help Scout, customer service is defined by delivering prompt, empathetic, and customer-centric assistance in every interaction. This customer-first approach is what sets apart good service from truly exceptional customer care.
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The Critical Importance of Superior Customer Care
The impact of customer service on business success cannot be overstated. When a staggering 86% of customers abandon a company due to negative experiences, it underscores the critical role of each customer interaction. Every support engagement becomes an opportunity to build loyalty, secure repeat business, and even encourage upselling.
Excellent customer service is not merely a cost center; it’s a revenue driver. It cultivates a holistic and positive customer experience that resonates with an organization’s core values and mission.
Research indicates that poor customer service inflicts significant financial losses. U.S. companies lose over $62 billion annually due to inadequate customer service management, and a significant majority of consumers (seven out of ten) are willing to spend more with companies known for exceptional service.
Recognizing that customer service is the bedrock of the customer experience allows businesses to leverage it as a powerful tool to delight customers and foster deeper, more meaningful engagement.
Core Principles of Exceptional Customer Service: Your Foundational Tools
There are four fundamental principles that underpin outstanding customer service: Personalization, Competence, Convenience, and Proactivity. These principles act as essential tools in shaping a positive and effective customer experience.
- Personalized Service: The Human Touch Tool: Great customer service always begins with a human connection. Personalized interactions significantly enhance the customer experience, demonstrating that your company genuinely values each customer and their unique concerns. Instead of viewing service as a mere expense, consider it an investment—an opportunity to reaffirm your commitment to the customer and earn their loyalty repeatedly.
- Competent Support: The Expertise Tool: Customers consistently rank competence as the most crucial element of a positive service experience. A competent customer support professional possesses deep product and company knowledge, coupled with the authority and resources to effectively resolve customer issues. The more comprehensive their knowledge base, the more effectively they can serve as a valuable tool for customer satisfaction.
- Convenient Access: The Accessibility Tool: Customers expect to reach customer service through their preferred communication channels. Offering support across the communication platforms your customers use most frequently and ensuring easy access to contact information are vital aspects of convenient customer service. This accessibility acts as a key tool in reducing customer friction.
- Proactive Engagement: The Anticipation Tool: Customers appreciate companies that take a proactive approach to communication. Whether it’s a product backorder or planned website maintenance, proactively informing customers demonstrates respect for their time and needs. While they may not be thrilled with the news itself, they will appreciate being kept in the loop. This proactive communication is a powerful tool in building trust and managing expectations.
By building your customer service strategy around these four core principles, you’ll cultivate a positive, seamless, and customer-centric experience for everyone interacting with your company.
Enhance Your Customer Service Emails: Tools for Effective Communication
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21 Essential Customer Service Skills: Building Your Team’s Toolkit
While consistently delivering exceptional customer service requires a company-wide commitment, a strong foundation begins with your customer service team. Recruiting individuals who are genuinely passionate about customer success and offering competitive compensation to attract top-tier professionals are crucial first steps.
Identifying the ideal candidates for a support team can be challenging. There’s no magic formula of specific job history or academic degrees. Instead, focus on innate qualities that are difficult to teach.
Look for individuals who thrive in interpersonal interactions, enjoy problem-solving, and possess warmth, approachability, and a knack for explaining complex topics simply.
Here are 21 key customer service skills that every support professional should strive to develop and every leader should seek when building their teams. These skills serve as the fundamental tools in a customer service representative’s toolkit.
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1. Problem-Solving Skills: The Resolution Tool
Customers often don’t accurately diagnose their own issues. It’s the support representative’s role to take initiative, replicate the problem if necessary, and then navigate towards a solution. This requires understanding not just the symptom, but the customer’s underlying goal.
For example, a customer contacting support about password reset difficulties ultimately wants to access their account. Exceptional customer service anticipates this need and might proactively reset the password and provide new login details, while also guiding the customer on self-reset procedures for future use.
In other cases, a skilled problem-solver can offer preemptive advice or solutions the customer hasn’t even considered.
2. Patience: The Understanding Tool
Patience is indispensable for customer service professionals. Customers reaching out for support are often confused and frustrated. Being met with patience and understanding significantly contributes to a customer’s feeling that their concerns will be addressed.
Rushing through customer interactions is counterproductive. Your team must be willing to invest the time to fully listen to and grasp each customer’s specific problems and needs.
3. Attentiveness: The Listening Tool
The ability to truly listen to customers is paramount for providing exceptional service for several reasons. It’s crucial to pay attention to individual customer experiences and to be receptive to broader feedback trends.
For instance, while customers may not explicitly say it, they might consistently struggle with your software’s dashboard layout. Instead of stating, “Improve your UX,” they might say, “I can never find the search feature” or “Where is (specific function) again?”.
Attentiveness allows you to discern unspoken needs and identify recurring issues from indirect customer feedback.
4. Emotional Intelligence: The Connection Tool
An emotionally intelligent customer support representative excels at connecting with diverse personalities, especially those who are frustrated. Instead of taking customer frustration personally, they intuitively understand the customer’s perspective and prioritize communicating empathy effectively and promptly.
Reflect on your own experiences: How often has simply feeling heard by someone diffused a potentially negative situation?
When a support representative demonstrates genuine empathy, even by simply acknowledging and restating the customer’s problem, it can both appease (the customer feels heard) and actively please (the customer feels their frustration is validated).
5. Clear Communication Skills: The Clarity Tool
Your customer support team is at the forefront of product problem-solving and acts as a vital communication bridge.
On one side, they are your company’s voice to customers. This necessitates the ability to translate complex concepts into easily digestible, understandable terms.
On the other side, they represent customer needs and feedback to your company. Lengthy, technical explanations of bug fixes are often unhelpful to customers.
Clear communication is crucial in customer interactions because miscommunications can lead to disappointment and frustration. The best customer service professionals prioritize simplicity and clarity in their communication, leaving no room for ambiguity.
6. Writing Skills: The Precision Tool
Effective writing conveys reality as accurately as possible through words. Good writing is an often-overlooked yet essential skill in customer support.
Unlike face-to-face or voice interactions, writing demands a unique ability to convey nuance. Sentence phrasing can drastically alter perception, differentiating between sounding curt (“You have to log out first”) and helpful (“Logging out should help solve that problem quickly!”).
Good writers also tend to use proper grammar and complete sentences, subtly projecting competence and trustworthiness for your company.
Even in phone-centric support, writing skills remain important for creating clear internal documentation and indicate a person who thinks and communicates logically.
7. Creativity and Resourcefulness: The Innovation Tool
Solving problems is good, but finding innovative and delightful ways to exceed expectations – and proactively seeking to do so – is even better.
Infusing a typical customer service interaction with memorable warmth and personality requires creativity. Finding representatives with this natural enthusiasm elevates customer service from “adequate” to “remarkable”—the kind that customers rave about.
Chase Clemons at Basecamp advises:
“You want to have somebody who you don’t have to give a lot of rules and regulations to. You want to have somebody who is talking to a customer and understands ‘Their boss is really yelling at them today. This person is having a really bad day. You know what? I’m going to send them some flowers to brighten things up.’ That’s not really something you can teach. They have to go the extra mile naturally.”
8. Persuasion Skills: The Influence Tool
Support teams often receive inquiries from prospective customers considering your product.
In these situations, persuasion skills are valuable. Representatives can effectively communicate the value proposition and guide interested prospects towards understanding if your product is the right fit for their needs.
This isn’t about aggressive sales pitches, but about ensuring potential customers don’t slip away due to a failure to convey the compelling reasons to choose your product.
9. Positive Language Skills: The Framing Tool
Effective customer service involves consciously using positive language patterns. Subtle shifts in wording can significantly impact customer satisfaction.
Language is a key element of persuasion, and customers form perceptions of you and your company based on your language.
Consider a customer inquiring about a product that is currently back-ordered until next month.
Positive language can dramatically change the customer’s perception of the response:
- Without positive language: “I can’t get you that product until next month; it is back-ordered and unavailable at this time.”
- With positive language: “That product will be available next month. I can place the order for you right now and ensure it is shipped to you as soon as it arrives at our warehouse.”
The first example, while not overtly negative, sounds abrupt and impersonal, potentially causing negative interpretation, especially in written communication where perception of language can lean negative.
Conversely, the second example conveys the same information (product unavailability) but focuses on the resolution timeline and action, emphasizing the positive outcome instead of the negative situation.
10. Product Knowledge: The Expertise Tool
Top-performing customer service professionals possess deep knowledge of their company’s products. Without comprehensive product understanding, effectively assisting customers with problems becomes impossible.
At Help Scout, for example, all new employees undergo customer support training within their first two weeks. It’s a fundamental component of their onboarding.
According to Help Scout’s Elyse Roach, “Having that solid product foundation not only ensures you’ve got the best tricks up your sleeve to help customers navigate even the most complex situations, it also helps you build an understanding of their experience so that you can become their strongest advocate.”
Bridging Product Knowledge Gaps: Customer Service Software as a Tool
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 mitigate these knowledge gaps.
For instance, Help Scout and similar platforms offer features that act as valuable tools:
Whether you use Help Scout or alternatives, exploring features designed to empower teams to deliver exceptional customer service is crucial.
11. Acting Skills: The Professionalism Tool
Occasionally, your team will encounter customers who are 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 professional demeanor, even when dealing with challenging or grumpy customers.
12. Time Management Skills: The Efficiency Tool
While patience and thoroughness are important, there are practical time constraints in customer service. Teams need to be efficient in resolving customer issues within reasonable timeframes.
The best customer service professionals quickly recognize when they are unable to assist a customer and promptly escalate the issue to someone who can provide the necessary support.
13. Ability to Read Customers: The Perception Tool
Understanding basic behavioral psychology principles is beneficial for customer service teams to 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.”
Skilled support professionals observe subtle cues about a customer’s mood, patience level, and personality to tailor their communication and maintain positive interactions.
14. Unflappability: The Composure Tool
This skill, also known as “keeping cool under pressure,” is the ability to remain calm and collected even in stressful situations.
Exceptional customer service representatives understand that they cannot allow a frustrated customer to provoke them into losing their composure. Their role is to be a steady presence and a source of reassurance for customers who may feel overwhelmed by their problems.
15. Goal-Oriented Focus: The Direction Tool
Customer service experts have highlighted that simply giving employees unlimited freedom to “wow” customers doesn’t always yield the desired business results. This is because lacking clear goals can lead to inefficiencies. Business goals and customer happiness can, and should, be aligned to enhance service without compromising business objectives.
Frameworks like the Net Promoter Score (NPS) can help businesses establish guidelines that give employees flexibility in handling individual customer cases while also providing priority solutions and standard fixes for common issues, creating a goal-oriented approach to customer service.
16. Ability to Handle Surprises: The Adaptability Tool
Customers will sometimes present unexpected situations or requests that fall outside standard guidelines or typical interactions.
In these instances, having a team that can think on their feet and adapt to unexpected situations is crucial. Even better is a team that proactively identifies these situations and develops guidelines to address them consistently in the future.
17. Tenacity: The Persistence Tool
A strong work ethic and a commitment to doing what’s necessary, without taking shortcuts, is a key skill for providing service that generates positive word-of-mouth.
Many memorable customer service stories, which have significantly impacted businesses positively, originate from individual employees who went above and beyond standard procedures to assist a customer.
18. Closing Ability: The Resolution Tool
In customer service, “closing” means ending the interaction with confirmed customer satisfaction (or as close to it as possible) and ensuring the customer feels that their issues have been fully addressed or will be resolved.
Customers want assurance that all their concerns have been heard and addressed before an interaction concludes. Your team should always confirm with customers that each of their issues has been completely resolved to their satisfaction.
19. Empathy: The Understanding Tool
Empathy, the capacity to understand and share another person’s feelings, is perhaps more of a character trait than a skill. However, empathy can be cultivated and improved, making it a vital component of customer service excellence.
In fact, when evaluating job applicants for customer service roles, empathy should be considered a critical skill.
Even when you can’t provide the customer with their ideal outcome, demonstrating care, concern, and understanding can significantly improve the interaction. A support representative’s ability to empathize and steer the conversation towards a constructive resolution can be transformative.
20. A Methodical Approach: The Precision Tool
In customer service, rushing leads to mistakes. Hiring detail-oriented individuals who take a methodical approach is crucial for meeting customer needs effectively.
Firstly, they will ensure they fully understand the root cause of a problem before offering a solution. Nothing is more frustrating than a “solution” that completely misses the mark.
Secondly, they will proofread their communications. A well-crafted response loses its impact if riddled with errors.
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, they will consistently follow up. Receiving a proactive update from a customer service representative, such as, “Remember that bug you reported? We’ve fixed it,” builds exceptional customer loyalty and earns lifelong customers.
Importantly, the best hires maintain their methodical approach even under pressure. Since support teams often handle challenging situations and resolve issues created by others, they must remain calm and avoid internalizing the urgency or frustration of customers. Maintaining composure and a steady hand is crucial.
21. Willingness to Learn: The Growth Tool
While seemingly general, a willingness to learn is one of the most crucial skills. It’s the foundation for continuous improvement as a customer service professional.
Team members must be committed to deepening their product knowledge, improving communication skills (and recognizing areas for improvement), and discerning when to follow established processes versus when to adapt and innovate.
Those who don’t actively seek to improve—whether in product development, marketing, or customer support—will be outpaced by those who invest in their skills and growth.
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Addressing Skill Gaps in Your Team: Tools for Development
What if you lead a team where some members seem resistant to improving their customer service approach or lack some of these essential skills? Help Scout’s Mathew Patterson offers a valuable perspective:
Often, perceived skill deficits or unwillingness to learn stem from work environments (past or present) that didn’t reward exceptional customer service.
Try establishing clear guidelines for expected customer service standards and showcasing examples of outstanding service within your company. As you implement these, actively recognize and celebrate small wins as team members begin to apply these skills.
When your team sees their efforts acknowledged and rewarded, engagement will increase. This will also provide a clearer picture of whether genuine skill gaps exist that require focused training and development. Investing in training tools and resources can further empower your team to bridge these gaps.
The Evolution of Customer Service: From Cost Center to Growth Engine
As Seth Godin aptly wrote, 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 thrive in the long run.
The fundamental truth is: exceptional customer service is not a cost center; it’s a growth engine. This simple shift in perspective can transform how businesses approach customer care and unlock its full potential. By viewing customer service as an investment in customer relationships and loyalty, companies can harness its power to drive sustainable growth and success.
