What is customer service?

A good company understands the importance of a focus on customer service, or the means through which a company provides assistance to its customers. Common methods include conversations over chat or through messaging apps, responses to emails, self-service features and addressing the customer over the phone.

Customer service is also a process through which a company serves its prospective customers with a focus on customer satisfaction and good experiences, even before the customer has purchased the product or service. It is a means of continually working toward good customer relations to attract and retain customers, and to boost customer loyalty.

Customer service is more than just going through the motions to answer questions and help customers. It is a matter of going beyond expectations to provide a great experience that makes the customer want to come back.

• Timeliness is crucial. Ensure that a customer does not wait for an answer or service, whether they are on chat, on the phone or communicating over email.
  
• Representatives should always follow up to ensure that the customer had their issue resolved and provide answers to any additional questions.
• A resolution should be provided in a single step if at all possible. Provide help on the phone call the first time, provide a specific solution over email, and ensure that a customer doesn’t have to leave a chat during the process.
• Low customer effort can create an all-around better experience. If a customer were to call in, there would ideally be a system that could help identify them right away and gather necessary information. This information would then be passed to the agent, and subsequent agents if necessary, to ensure that customers do not have to repeat themselves.
• Good customer service anticipates the needs of a client and provides resolutions that are available immediately and without the need for contact whenever possible. Examples include knowledge bases or automated chatbots. There should also be resolutions presented to customer service agents based on the type of issue being addressed.

Customer service should ensure that each customer feels like their experience was personalised, swift, easy and helpful.

Customer support is the practice of facilitating customer service, which leads to customer success.

1. Customer support is how customer service is strategised and executed—troubleshooting, anticipating, fulfilling customer requests and fixing technical issues on the back end for short-term service.
2. Customer service is why customer support is important to establish—good relationships and strong service are built on a foundation of a supportive and anticipatory environment that set up customer service teams and experiences for success.
3. A customer experiences success when customer support and customer service are well-executed. Additionally, some companies may offer customer success programmes that work with customers to understand their goals and help them achieve them using the company’s products and services.

Customer experience is how the customer feels about and perceives the company as time passes. Customer service is integral to ensuring a positive customer experience by making the customer journey memorable every step of the way. One bad customer service interaction is enough to sour customers to a company, thus throwing a spanner in their customer experience and making them exponentially less likely to interact with a brand again and exponentially more likely to spread negative reviews.

1. Self-service: Many customers prefer the anywhere/anytime option that self-service provides. Ideally, self-service provides service channels that the customer wants, updates them with relevant information and provides an easy route to a friendly agent if they can’t find an answer.
2. Friendly service: Many customers still prefer the personal touch of a customer service agent. Add personality and customisation to each interaction, and ensure that each agent understands the customer’s feelings matter the most.
3. Empathy: A customer wants to feel heard and understood. Step into a customer’s shoes and think about what they need, why they feel a certain way and their expected resolution.
4. Every second counts: Customers become frustrated when they’re put on hold, have to repeat themselves or are forced to wait in a queue. Talking at length with a customer or taking an excessive amount of time to serve them can lead to further frustration and a poor customer service experience, which is damaging to a company’s reputation and bottom line.
5. Form a strong, connected team: A team that serves together succeeds together. Teams should be streamlined, connected and communicative as each customer’s concern or issue is resolved. There should be a connected and effective web between customer service teams and other teams who can assist customers with their issues.

1. Active listening: Displaying empathy is crucial, as it helps the customer immediately feel heard and understood—especially when they are escalating or stressed.
2. Interpersonal: Customer service involves a degree of personalisation and personability to navigate through an issue and better understand a customer’s concern in order to navigate to an amicable solution.
3. Attention to detail: Customers can become flustered or not seem specific enough in their complaint. Excellent customer service involves careful examination of a written or verbal complaint to ensure every part of the complaint is understood and communicated before proceeding.
   
4. Collaboration: Other teams are often involved in the customer support process, and the ability to work seamlessly with other teams is crucial. Create workflows that help teams communicate well and understand each other so any handoffs or communication between teams can create a smooth customer experience.
5. Multitasking: An agent answering emails, running multiple chats or fielding different types of phone calls needs to be able to do so without becoming flustered or overwhelmed.
   
6. Communication: Agents should be able to adequately understand a customer and make sure the customer adequately understands the agent. There also needs to be a clear indication of when a call is being handed over or when a customer is being put on hold, and why those are occurring.
   
7. Patience: Customers may come from a place of anger. An agent needs the patience to de-escalate the customer, understand their concern through the anger and de-escalate them to a comfortable place for a resolution.
   
8. Knowledge and troubleshooting: An agent who doesn’t understand a product or service can’t be helpful to a customer, and that can lead to customer frustration—when agents need to research a product or service, they need contextually relevant knowledge at their fingertips to minimise lag time.

Software can be at the crux of an excellent customer service team. The right workflow system has the necessary capabilities for customer service teams to find the right solutions for customers, collaborate across departments and follow proper workflows to eliminate silos and roadblocks.

Self-service allows customers to help themselves or find resolutions without direct contact with a customer service agent. A few examples include chatbots that knowledge bases, communities or automation systems that can solve common issues.

The digital era creates a great deal of demand for self-service, especially as self-service technologies become more and more available and accessible.