What is customer service?

Customer service is the engagement and support of customers before and after the purchase of your business’s products or services.

To understand customer service, it's good to first understand the customer’s journey. A customer journey describes the path a person takes from the initial adoption of your brand as a new customer to the ongoing engagement with your business afterward.

Customer service involves the guidance, engagement, and support of your customers throughout their customer journey. Customer service is more than just communication around the initial sale of a product or service, good customer service is a continuous process.

Why is customer service important to your business?

Customer service is important to your business because it establishes the relationship between your business and your customers, and ultimately determines the success of your business. Customer service is an opportunity for your business to uphold its values, mission, and claims around product or service quality.

Offering good customer service encourages customers to stay loyal to your business. In fact, businesses often form teams of customer success managers, to help keep customers coming back––this process is called customer retention. Since customer retention is typically less costly than acquiring new customers, it usually has a positive impact on your business costs. As your business properly nurtures customers, they feel more valued and are more likely to report good customer experiences and recommend your business to potential customers.

What is good customer service?

Good customer service is ongoing and prioritizes the customer, with the goal of solving their needs. Customer service impacts the perception of your business, beyond marketing and advertising alone. And great customer service involves skills and activities that can be organized into these eight core principles:

1. Empathetic customer service

   Great customer service can’t exist without empathy. Your business can use empathetic customer service to engage customers with warmth, understanding, and a sense of familiarity regarding their feelings. Empathetic customer service demonstrates to customers that they are valued and not merely monetary transactions for your business. Increase empathy in your customer service by finding employees who possess empathetic qualities, like sensitivity and compassion.

   Employee training that uses customer scenarios and standardized empathetic communication, are also effective ways to foster empathy in customer service––phrases like, “I understand,” “I’m here to help,” and “I hear you” are great empathetic phrases.

2. Active listening

   Active listening involves paying close attention to your customers throughout their communication to best address their needs. Listening attentively for details such as dates, times, pain points, anecdotes, and customer preferences for example, ensures that your business can accurately assess, solve, or resolve the needs of your customers.

   Offering multiple channels of communication to your customers is a smart way to improve your ability to actively listen to their needs. Using an omnichannel strategy, your business can develop communication guidelines for active listening, tailored to each channel.

3. Service and product knowledge

   To provide the best service to your customers, your customer service managers must be knowledgeable about your business products and services. Educate your employees on your products and services and provide them with regular product insights and training. Being knowledgeable about product capabilities and service offerings communicates to customers that they are well cared for, and that your business can address and solve their needs.

4. Technical expertise

   Technical expertise involves the knowledge of more complex service and product features, relevant use cases, and business scenarios. Customers regularly have needs, questions, and challenges that can’t be addressed with basic product knowledge, that’s why technical expertise is so important––think of product developers, product managers, industry experts, and specialists.

   To increase expertise within your business, hire or consult relevant technical experts. In addition, provide your technical experts with insights and workshops that help them learn, and stay current with industry innovations and advancements.

5. Good interpersonal skills

   Interpersonal skills describe the ability to interact, engage and communicate well with customers, and they are a necessity for great customer service. Interpersonal skills bring a human element to your business interactions with people, and help determine if they’ll become your customers, and then remain your customers. Good interpersonal skills help differentiate your business from similar businesses in your industry, because they are difficult to duplicate.

   The best ways to improve interpersonal communication are through training and feedback, understanding the goal of the customer interaction, maintaining a positive and controlled tone of voice, and the use of conversational guides. But when using conversational guides, employees should be sure to modify them a bit to fit their own speech patterns, tone of voice, and personality.

6. Clear communication

   Communicate clearly to help your customers understand the parameters of your business, products, and services. Helping customers understand exactly how you can be of service benefits them and your business. Clear communication can help you save time spent on troubleshooting and has a positive impact on your customers’ experiences. Enhance your communication by offering more channels of communication for your customers to interact with your business. Whether through live chat, online video calls, text messages, social media, email, or other channels, providing multiple avenues for communication helps you provide better service to your customers.

7. Multitasking

   Multitasking skills are needed to serve multiple clients and perform activities while addressing customer needs. Your customer service representatives should be comfortable with managing different tasks, and clients in sequence and often, simultaneously. However, multitasking should never hinder your employees from performing business tasks correctly. To better improve multitasking efforts, and avoid losses in productivity, your business and employees should be aware of workload capacities, and set thoughtful, attainable goals.

8. Follow up

   Following up with your customers can be a proactive way to nurture customer relationships. Follow up is important because it allows your business to keep an accurate understanding of your customers’ interests, plans, and challenges.

   A great way to improve follow up is to use personalized outreach. Personalized follow up entails using customized emails, promotions, and other communications tailored to your customer’s profile. Personalized outreach shows your customers that they are unique and valuable to your business.

Elevate your service with these five ingredients

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