The 8 Key Elements You Need for Good Customer Service

For most people, good customer service is one of those “I know it when I see it” kind of things. You can probably find a few examples just by reflecting on both negative and positive customer service experiences you’ve had in the past. You could imagine a world in which smart contracts enable customer success managers (CSMs) to spend less time bickering overpayments and hunting down money, and more time focusing on delivering value. Just like video, customers expect you to be always on — and most of them prefer to interact using chat than phone or email.

Often, it’s up to the support rep to take the initiative to reproduce the trouble at hand before navigating a solution. That means they need to intuit not just what went wrong, but also what action the customer was ultimately after. No particular checklist of job experiences and college diplomas adds up to the perfect candidate. To stay at the top of your game, you need to make sure you provide a great shopping experience to them. Sephora’s customer loyalty program encourages their customers to buy more products. You can later use these points to get rewards from Sephora’s online store.

examples of good customer service—from our own customers

Don’t be afraid to wow your customers as you seek to problem-solve for them. You could just fix the issue and be on your way, but by creatively meeting their needs in ways that go above and beyond, you’ll create customers that are committed to you and your product. Attitude is everything, and a positive attitude goes a long way in providing excellent customer service.

Three, and this one may be the most important, it means they’ll regularly follow up. There’s nothing more impressive than getting a note from a customer service rep saying, “Hey! Well, we fixed it.” That’s a loyal, lifetime customer you’ve just earned. Hiring deliberate, detail-oriented people will go a long way in meeting the needs of your customers. Every great customer service professional needs basic acting skills to maintain their usual cheery persona in spite of dealing with people who are just plain grumpy. Language is a crucial part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create perceptions about you and your company based on the language that you use.

Prioritize high-quality customer support.

McKinsey defines the comprehensive approach to omnichannel customer engagement as service to solutions—in effect going from reactive, siloed customer care to a proactive, consultative approach to customer engagement. At its core, this approach involves identifying customers’ needs and offering solutions to provide better customer experiences. Collectively, service to solutions enables companies to improve customer satisfaction via tailored solutions, hence boosting customer lifetime value and increasing consumption of existing and new services.

By offering personalized support across multiple channels, you’ll create the most effective experience possible that, in turn, will drive customer loyalty. Implement social media, live chat and mobile apps to establish a presence that allows customers to choose how, when and where they want to interact. In-person customer service desks and helplines have their place and are still an incredibly effective tool for businesses to provide support. But customers today often want a quicker, easier way to get in touch with a company. Offering a variety of customer service options, including email, live chat, mobile apps and social media interactions, businesses are able to connect with their customers where and when they are most comfortable.

Nike created a self-service option within its mobile app to supplement the in-store shopping experience. Customers inside any Nike store can browse within the app, scan bar codes to get product availability within that same store, and also receive access to exclusive perks like location-specific rewards or discounts. If you’ve ever set up a cable subscription, you know it can involve a lot of back and forth with your provider’s support team. First, you need to buy the subscription, then you need to set up the router, and finally, you need to activate your devices, so it’s linked to your provider.

• If you’ve ever set up a cable subscription, you know it can involve a lot of back and forth with your provider’s support team.
• It’s a great example of using unified communications to power up your customer service teams.
• How a sentence is phrased can make the difference between sounding kind of like a jerk (“You have to log out first”) and sounding like you care (“Logging out should help solve that problem quickly!”).

This was pretty unusual activity for a small burger stand in the 1950s, so the salesman from Prince Castle went to the restaurant to check it out. Having a culture of honesty and integrity means more than just putting it on a poster around the solutions to improve customer service office. It means promoting it in each meeting, email, and call that you and your team have with each other and the customer. 81% of decision makers say they’re making significant investments in training — up from 79% in 2020 and 77% in 2018.

This reduces friction in the service experience because customers don’t have to log off one interface just to log into another one to continue working on the same problem. Eye contact is powerful, and customers, more and more, will look at non-video, real-time voice conversation as a thing of the past. Companies using video — asynchronously, as “video voicemail” (e.g. Loom) or synchronously, as “video conference” (e.g. Zoom with video) — are a generation ahead. It’s essential that you keep any promises your business makes to its customers. Failure to follow through can damage both your relationship with your customers and your company’s reputation. Using technology to make the experience positive and productive enhances your reputation.

There is no single answer to the question, ‘ what is the key to great customer service? ’, but combining these strategies will empower your team to work together and help each other which can drastically improve your bottom line. Creating a strategy, setting customer service goals, and involving your team in the process helps encourage the teamwork necessary to succeed. By using gamification, providing productive feedback, and maintaining great relationships and communication with your team, you can ensure your employees are engaged.

Encourage honest customer feedback

For example, if you promise an SLA uptime of 99%, make sure you keep to that standard. If you promise to develop a certain feature in your software in a particular time frame, make sure you deliver on that. Active listening also means you are mindful of your customer’s unique personality and current emotional state so you can tailor your response to fit the situation.

Customer engagement is a metric that is becoming increasingly popular and important to customer support organizations and their teams. Customer engagement is the emotional relationship formed between a customer and a brand. Some business leaders might be of the mindset that customer engagement ends after the point of sale but that is not the case. When customer success becomes table stakes like customer support is today, it will be an exciting time in the industry of customer success to see the takeover.

Case studies have demonstrated that skillfully managing queues can result in an impressive up to 20% increase in overall satisfaction levels. This article will explore the strategies and techniques that empower businesses to elevate their customer service standards, fostering loyalty and propelling growth. It serves as the vital bridge between a company and its clientele, leaving a permanent mark on brand perception. Excellent customer service excels in mere transactional exchanges; it represents a commitment to meeting and exceeding customer expectations at every turn. Innovating the customer experience is different from improving the customer experience because it is forward-thinking and exploring new experiences to add rather than updating and changing your existing ones. It makes you unique and it lets you offer something that your competitors can’t.

This ensures that each customer is treated personally and their needs are met effectively. It doesn’t matter if the item is an extra-large burrito or just a side of guac — the customer can choose their reward from the full menu. Oftentimes leaders spend more time focusing on the speed of resolution than actually solving the problem. This ultimately leads to a much higher reopen rate, thus negating all of your efforts.

All customer service platforms have specific functionality to help manage multiple channels. It’s done with the help of omni-channel features that bring all customer inquiries into the system and ensure automatic case creation and assignment based on employee expertise. You can also automate how often your team contacts customers while resolving cases.