What Is Great Customer Service And How To Deliver It [Step-by-Step Guide]

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Updated: April 26th, 2024

What Is Customer Service?

Customer service is the act of supporting and advocating for customers in their discovery, use optimization, and troubleshooting of a product or a service

Great customer service is something that you may want to consider prioritizing from day one. Good customer support will not only retain existing ones but will also directly impact future sales.

Do you know that 77% of customers are more loyal to businesses that offer top-notch customer service? Therefore, offering excellent customer service should be your top priority as it will make your business stand out from your competitors' and will increase the percentage of loyal customers.

In this post, we look at important things you need to know when it comes to ensuring great customer service.

Customer Service Key Takeaways

Consumers want personal and engaging experiences that develop into relationships
86% of customers are willing to pay more for great customer service.
When customers experience poor service, they switch to competitors
Great customer service is at the core of high customer retention

How Great Customer Service Supports Your Marketing Efforts

Customer service is important to your business because it is what retains customers and extracts more value from them.

Here are the top 7 reasons to invest in high-quality customer service:

Increases customer retention rate because satisfied customers are more likely to come back
Great customer service is essential in relaying to customers your brand image, mission, and vision.
Working to improving customer service results in increased revenue
Happy customers will recommend your brand to their friends and relatives
Professional customer service builds a better brand reputation
Great customer service equals higher customer lifetime value
Positive customer experiences build brand awareness

Therefore, customer service is no longer a cost center. Rather, it is an opportunity to generate more sales and improve brand awareness.

What does Great Customer Service Look Like?

Good customer service experiences are the result of a kind and customer-centric staff. Therefore, the customer-centric staff practices the following when handling their customers:

Respond quickly: Customers appreciate a fast response whenever they ask questions or highlight an issue
Act on customer Feedback: Whenever customer service employees act on customer feedback, it is an indication that customers' opinions mattered.
Show empathy: Employees that understand customer’s point of view make the customer feel valued
Maintain Updated FAQ Section: when customers want to find answers they can quickly view the FAQs or knowledge base on demand
Provides Omnichannel support: We live in a world characterized by different communication channels and so customers want customer service that provides flexibility.

Real World Examples of Great Customer Service

Here are examples of how brands focus on maintaining great customer service.

1. How Adobe Ensures Timely Customer Service Responds To Customer Service Complaints Before they Happen

When Adobe had an outage due to the issue with Amazon Web Services, they posted a tweet about the issue before customers' complaints started trickling in. The Tweet contained a video of puppies, the lighten the mood.

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This example shows that sometimes it is good for a brand to acknowledge and anticipate when customers are likely to start complaining. In this case, customers are patient and do not end up criticizing your brand.

2. How Tesla Offers Fast Customer Service

Tesla literally means it when it comes to providing great customer service. Fast customer service is convenient to the customers as they do not have to tow the vehicle or even sit around the repair shop for hours waiting to be served.

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In this example, Chris called Tesla and within less than an hour, the issue was attended to. The example illustrates that customers value it when you respond on time and ensure show that you care about their convenience.

Great customer service is something that you may want to consider prioritizing from day one. Support for your customers will not only retain existing ones but will also directly impact future sales.

How To Deliver Great Customer Service

Here are important tips to guide you when it comes to customer service

Know your product so that you can discuss the features and help customers troubleshoot
Maintain a positive attitude whenever you speak to customers
Solve customer problems creatively
Respond quickly and appropriately
Offer personalized customer service
Provide informative FAQ page, clear product pages, and knowledge base
Integrate customer service software to your service (see examples below)

Examples Of Effective Customer Service Solutions

Zendesk: Makes things easy on your customers and sets your customer service teams up for success while keeping your business in sync.
SproutSocial: Customer service software that helps facilitate conversations across all social media channels.
SAP : Engage your customers by acting on insights and delivering hyper-personalized experiences.
Facebook Messenger: enable customers to get fast, convenient messaging support on phones all over the world.
Slack: Allows internal customers to seamlessly get support from IT or HR departments.

Zendesk

Customer service software and support ticketing system.

Pricing: Freemium
Twitter: @Zendesk
Website: https://www.zendesk.com/

Businesses using Zendesk:

174 successful businesses are using Zendesk ➜

Get Zendesk ➜

All-in-one social media management platform unlocks the full potential of social to transform not just your marketing strategy but every area of your organization.

Try Sprout Social for free with a 30-day trial
Standard: $249/mo
Professional: $399/mo
Advanced: $499/mo
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Pricing: Paid
Twitter: @SproutSocial
Website: sproutsocial.com

Businesses using Sprout Social:

28 successful businesses are using Sprout Social ➜

Get Sprout Social ➜

SAP Customer Experience

Capitalize on customer insight, improve front-line efficiency and effectiveness, streamline critical business processes

Website: sap.com

Get SAP Customer Experience ➜

Slack

A cloud-based set of proprietary team collaboration tools and services.

Pricing: Freemium
Twitter: @slack
Website: https://slack.com/

Businesses using Slack:

1093 successful businesses are using Slack ➜

Get Slack ➜

Facebook Chat App

Live chat with your customers using Facebook Messenger.

Pricing: Freemium
Twitter: @beeketing
Website: https://apps.shopify.com/facebook-live-chat?ref=starter-story

Businesses using Facebook Chat App:

128 successful businesses are using Facebook Chat App ➜

Get Facebook Chat App ➜

Improve Your Customer Service

Great customer service is something that you may want to consider prioritizing from day one.

Support for your customers will not only retain existing ones but will also directly impact future sales.

Think about it - when you think of good customer service, which businesses immediately pops up in your mind?

I think we can all agree on a few, and easily identify what sets them apart from their competition:

Southwest - flexible cancellation terms and friendly staff
Apple - fantastic experts that can fix any technical issue
Trader Joes - joyful employees...need I say more?

We interviewed Travis Richardson, founder of Impressions Agency and he stated that building long term relationships with clients is hands-down the most effective way to attract and retain customers:

Case Study

Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?

Hands-down our customer service. Sure everyone says this but what sets us apart is our ability to wear our hearts on our sleeves and actually care for our clients. Part of our mission is to build long-term relationships and to truly be effective in this area it requires us to be flexible and to sometimes lose profit. At the end of the day, we know that life happens. It happens for us and our clients.

When a customer is hurting, we are hurting. A couple of examples include: for seasonal clients we adjust budget to work with them during their low season, when another client was in the hospital we gifted them marketing at no cost, this also means that our support manager may spend an hour on the phone with a client before they even talk about support issues. When I’m in a meeting, if someone wants to know what sets us apart, I send them to our clients to ask them.

In the beginning, what worked for us to attract customers was our pricing model. We could keep our costs lower than our competitors due to our mobility and this gave us an edge. We have niche our company to target small to midsize* local* businesses. If you are looking for customers within a specific radius of your brick and mortar with our pricing and the results we can provide it is hard for these types of businesses to say no to us. This has helped us identify who our ideal customers are and also helps us attract new clientele.

how-we-started-a-100k-month-marketing-agency-during-our-honeymoon-in-costa-rica

Travis Richardson, on starting Impressions Agency ($100,000/month) full story ➜

meet the author

Pat Walls

I'm Pat Walls and I created Starter Story - a website dedicated to helping people start businesses. We interview entrepreneurs from around the world about how they started and grew their businesses.

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