It doesn’t matter how great your product is: If your customer service is poor, people will complain about it, and you’ll lose customers.
The good news: It’s not impossible to turn things around. Transforming your customer service from mediocre to great won’t happen overnight, though. It requires a serious commitment to meaningful change, a team of rockstar support professionals, and work across the entire organization.
What is customer service?
Customer service is the act ion casino of providing support to both prospective and existing customers. Customer service professionals commonly answer customer questions through in-person, phone, email, chat, and social media interactions and may also be responsible for creating documentation for self-service support.
Organizations can also create their own definitions of customer service depending on their vaues and the type of support they want to provide. For example, at Help Scout, we define customer service as the act of providing timely, empathetic help that keeps customers’ needs at the forefront of every interaction.
Why is customer service important?
When 86% of customers quit doing business with a company due to a bad experience, it means that businesses must approach every support interaction as an opportunity to acquire, retain, or up-sell.
Good customer service is a revenue generator. It gives customers a complete, cohesive experience that aligns with an organization’s purpose.
According to a variety of studies, U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service management, and seven out of 10 consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service.
Understanding that customer service is the cornerstone of your customer experience helps you leverage it as an opportunity to delight customers and engage them in new, exciting ways.
What are the principles of good customer service?
There are four key principles of good customer service: It’s personalized, competent, convenient, and proactive. These factors have the biggest influence on the customer experience.
- Personalized: Good customer service always starts with a human touch. Personalized interactions greatly improve customer service and let customers know that your company cares about them and their problems. Instead of thinking of service as a cost, consider it an opportunity to earn your customer’s business all over again.
- Competent: Consumers have identified competency as the element that plays the biggest role in a good customer experience. To be competent, a customer support professional must have a strong knowledge of the company and its products, as well as the power to fix the customer’s problems. The more knowledge they have, the more competent they become.
- Convenient: Customers want to be able to get in touch with a customer service representative through whichever channel is the most convenient for them. Offer support through the channels of communication your customers rely on most, and make it easy for customers to figure out how to contact you.
- Proactive: Customers want companies to be proactive in reaching out to them. If one of your products is backordered or your website is going to experience downtime, proactively reach out to your customers and explain the problem. They may not be happy about the situation, but they will be thankful that you kept them in the loop.
By building your customer service strategy around these four main principles, you’ll create a positive, hassle-free customer experience for everyone who deals with your company.
While delivering consistently good customer service requires work and alignment across your entire organization, a good place to start is your customer service team. It’s important to hire people who genuinely want to help your customers succeed — and to pay rates that are attractive to skilled professionals.
Finding the perfect hire for a support team can be challenging. No particular checklist of job experiences and college diplomas adds up to the perfect candidate. Instead, you’re looking for qualities that can’t necessarily be taught.
These folks thrive on one-on-one interactions within their community. They love problem solving. They’re warm, approachable, and great at teaching other people how things work.
Here are the 21 customer service skills that every support professional should seek to develop and every leader should look for when hiring new team members.
1. Problem solving skills
Customers do not always self-diagnose their issues correctly. 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.
A great example? If somebody writes in because they’re having trouble resetting their password, that’s ultimately because they want to log into their account.
A good customer service interaction will anticipate that need and might even go the extra mile to manually perform the reset and provide new login details, all while educating the customer on how they can do it for themselves in the future.
In other situations, a problem-solving pro may simply understand how to offer preemptive advice or a solution that the customer doesn’t even realize is an option.
2. Patience
Patience is crucial for customer service professionals. After all, customers who reach out to support are often confused and frustrated. Being listened to and handled with patience goes a long way in helping customers feel like you’re going to alleviate their current frustrations.
It’s not enough to close out interactions with customers as quickly as possible. Your team has to be willing to take the time to listen to and fully understand each customer’s problems and needs.
3. Attentiveness
The ability to truly listen to customers is crucial to providing great service for a number of reasons. Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customers’ experiences, but it’s also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive at large.
For instance, customers may not be saying it outright, but perhaps there is a pervasive feeling that your software’s dashboard isn’t laid out correctly. Customers aren’t likely to say, “Please improve your UX,” but they may say things like, “I can never find the search feature” or “Where is (specific function), again?”
You have to be attentive to pick up on what customers are telling you without directly saying it.
4. Emotional intelligence
A great customer support representative knows how to relate to anybody, but they’re especially good with frustrated people. Instead of taking things personally, they intuitively understand where the other person is coming from and they know to both prioritize and swiftly communicate that empathy.
Think about it: How often have you felt better about a potential grievance simply because you felt immediately heard by the other person involved?
When a support rep is able to demonstrate sincere empathy for a frustrated customer, even just by reiterating the problem at hand, it can help to both placate (the customer feels heard) and actively please (the customer feel validated in their frustration).
5. Clear communication skills
Your customer support team is on the front lines of problem solving for the product itself, and serves as a kind of two-pronged bullhorn.
On one side, they’ll be the voice of your company to your customers. That means they have to have a practiced grasp on how to reduce complex concepts into highly digestible, easily understood terms.
On the other, they’ll represent the needs and thoughts of customers to your company. For example, it doesn’t behoove the customer to receive a long- winded explanation on the ins-and-outs of solving a particular bug.
The ability to communicate clearly when working with customers is a key skill because miscommunications can result in disappointment and frustration. The best customer service professionals know how to keep their communications with customers simple and leave nothing to doubt.
6. Writing skills
Good writing means getting as close to reality as words will allow. Without an ounce of exaggeration, being a good writer is the most overlooked, yet most necessary, skill to look for when it comes to hiring for customer support.
Unlike face-to-face (or even voice-to-voice) interactions, writing requires a unique ability to convey nuance. 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!”).
Good writers also tend to use complete sentences and proper grammar — qualities that subtly gesture toward the security and trustworthiness of your company.
Even if your company offers support primarily over the phone, writing skills are still important. Not only will they enable your team to craft coherent internal documentation, they signify a person who thinks and communicates clearly.
7. Creativity and resourcefulness
Solving the problem is good, but finding clever and fun ways to go the extra mile — and wanting to do so in the first place — is even better.
It takes panache to infuse a typical customer service exchange with memorable warmth and personality, and finding a customer service rep who possesses that natural zeal will take your customer service out of “good enough” territory and straight into “tell all your friends about it” land.
Chase Clemons at Basecamp advises the following: