Good customer service: 10 ways to deliver great customer service
In this comprehensive guide, we share with you important qualities and examples of good customer service — and great customer service
Courtney Gupta
客戶服務熱愛者
最後更新 2023年9月22日
若請您回想您體驗過的最佳客戶服務，您會想到什麼？
Maybe it was the barista who knew your name and just how you like your latte. Or that time you called customer support, and the agent sympathized with you, then went out of their way to fix the issue.
An excellent customer experience can change the way customers think about a company. It can also build loyalty.
Great customer service means meeting customer expectations—from interacting with customers over messaging channels because they expect convenience to investing in your knowledge base because they expect to find answers on their own.
“Many businesses talk about great CX using terms like ‘wow,’ ‘amaze,’ and ‘delight’ when it comes to the impact they need have on customers. But there’s so much bad CX out there, that to stand out, all you need to do is meet customer expectations,” said Ben Motteram, CX expert and founder, CXpert.
“There’s so much bad CX — to stand out, all you need to do is meet customer expectations.” Ben Motteram, CX expert and founder, CXpert
Customer expectations have been rising for years, so meeting their expectations isn’t an easy task. A good place to start is by understanding what customers expect, and in 2021, that’s speed, convenience, and friendliness.
The 3 important qualities of customer service
What are 3 important qualities of customer service? We surveyed 3,000 people worldwide to pinpoint this answer, and found that the 3 important qualities of customer service center around speed, convenience, and empathy.
排名最高的答案可能不會令您意外：
幫我快速解決問題
如果速度是最佳客戶服務的首要特性，那麼很明顯，幫助客戶達成目標一定是排列第二的要素，對吧？
錯了。排名第二的是……
24/7 全年無休的客戶支援
……緊接在後的是……
態度友善的代理
Skills for good customer service
Here are the top customer service skills representatives need to provide good customer service.
Empathy, our Trends Report revealed that 49 percent of customers want agents to be empathetic
The ability to identify customer needs
Listening and effective questioning
Clearly and concisely presenting options and solutions
Anticipating customer needs
Listening to customer feedback and acting on what they tell you
Resolving issues with speed and efficiency
Relationship building, something as simple as addressing a customer by their name or following up on a previous issue can go a long way
Being a cross-functional collaborator, resolving customers’ issues often requires working with other agents or departments
Customer appreciation, customers want to feel valued when they reach support
An expert reveals: What makes customer service great
Terms like good customer service and great customer service get thrown around, but what do they mean? What’s the difference? Ben Motteram of CXpert weighs in.
Good customer service encompasses the seven qualities that I’ve mentioned in this post. Customers expect service these days to be things like friendly, empathetic, fair, and respectful of their time. For service to transcend good and become great, organizations need to exceed customer expectations. And even though these expectations are constantly rising, here’s three ways you can do it that will apply to any industry.
Number one, create an emotional connection. This can be done by using the information you have about customers. Use their first name or ask them how they found a previous purchase. Personally, I received a pleasant surprise the other day when I went into my local bank branch to withdraw some money and was wished a happy birthday by the teller when she noticed on her screen that my birthday had been just a few days before. Companies need to look at what they know about customers and then think about how that information could be used to create an emotional connection. Just be aware though that it’s a fine line between creating that connection and coming off as creepy if customers feel that you’ve overstepped the mark and invaded their privacy.
Number two, make it easier than the customer expects. This could be as simple as offering queue callback in your IVR so customers don’t have to wait on hold, or by pre-filling out application forms with data that you already know about customers so they don’t have to do it. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and look for ways that dealing with you could be easier.
Number three, anticipate customer needs. Use what you know about customers to anticipate their future needs with you. Amazon does this really well with the algorithm that tells you that customers that bought this also bought this. But you don’t have to have a fancy algorithm to look at your data and pick out what your most commonly purchased together items are and then train your frontline staff to offer both items when one is purchased, or to be aware of specific customer scenarios and then offering products or services that other customers have needed when in those scenarios. Now these will, of course, differ between industries, but some might include moving house or buying a new car, a birth or death in the family, or a stay in hospital.
The 7 qualities of good customer service
Most customers have a set of seven basic needs when they interact with an organization, according to Motteram.
Friendliness: The most basic customer need that’s associated with things like courtesy and politeness.
Empathy: Customers need to know the organization understands and appreciates their needs and circumstances.
Fairness: Customers must feel like they’re getting adequate attention and fair and reasonable answers.
Control: Customers want to feel like they have an influence on the outcome.
Alternatives: Customers want choice and flexibility from customer service; they want to know there is a range of options available to satisfy them.
Information: Customers want to know about products and services in a pertinent and time-sensitive manner; too much information and selling can be off-putting for them.
Time: Customers’ time is valuable, and organizations need to treat it as such. For example, putting customer context at agents’ fingertips, so customers don’t have to wait on hold while the agent looks up the details.
Excellent customer service and reply time
Customers want fast responses. Our 2020 CX Trends report shows how fast resolutions and replies continue to be most important to customers.
We asked, “What matters most to you when you want to resolve a customer service issue with a company?”
72.5% of respondents said “they resolve my issue quickly”
“Many organizations raised the bar in terms of their empathy for customers during 2020—from bank loans getting frozen for customers undergoing financial hardship to insurance premiums being drastically reduced because people were in the middle of lockdown and not driving their cars enough, said Motteram. “In 2021, we will see customers expecting companies to continue to be more empathic and flexible than they’ve been in the past. Organizations need to invest in empathy training and empower agents with well-defined delegations that allow them to go outside of policies to deliver satisfactory solutions.”
“In 2021, we will see customers expecting companies to continue to be more empathic and flexible than they’ve been in the past.”Ben Motteram, Principal and CX Expert
8. Equip agents with tools to work more efficiently
A good customer experience and a good employee experience are like peanut butter and jelly: they’re inextricably linked. So much so, companies with the most engaged employees enjoy 81 percent higher customer satisfaction, experience half the turnover of their peers, and have a decisive competitive advantage, according to a Forrester report.
Supporting your support team means equipping them with the tools and processes they need to do their jobs well. Our Trends Report found that higher-performing teams are making structural changes to workflows that better suit employees’ needs.
Businesses can eliminate friction for agents in addition to customers by:
Arming agents with a unified workspace, so they have customer context at their fingertips and don’t have to toggle between different tools to help your customers.
Improving agents’ workflows by automatically routing customers to the agent with the right skills for the task and providing agents with prepared answers, so they don’t have to type out your reimbursement policy.
Passing on repetitive requests to a bot so agents can focus on the more engaging parts of their job.
9. Empower agents to collaborate
Resolving customers’ issues often requires agents to work with each other and other departments, and customers expect businesses to collaborate on their behalf. In fact, 31 percent more agents said they need tools that enable them to collaborate across teams internally this year compared to last, according to our research.
With tools like Slack and Zoom inside their workspace, agents can collaborate inside and outside the CX organization.
10. Use your analytics to improve
To keep up with customer needs, support teams need analytics software that gives them instant access to customer insights across channels in one place. This enables them to be agile because they can go beyond capturing data and focus on understanding and reacting to it, instead. Yet 40 percent of managers don’t have the right analytics tools to measure success for remote teams, according to our Trends Report.
With real-time and historical analytics built inside their CX solution, support leaders can take action on what’s happening at the moment and understand past trends. They can identify areas of development for their team and learn how customers interact with them so they can improve the overall experience.
