Crafting a better work experience

When I took over the customer service team at my last company, it was during a period of transition.

We’d just gone through an acquisition which, although welcome, meant we needed to reassess our resources, our tools, and our team’s strategy for the foreseeable future. I was also stepping from a senior role into a management role, and while neither management nor the team were new to me, the situation was changing quickly.

This presented a challenge: quickly leading the team through setting new expectations and requirements, while still delivering the same excellent customer service experience for our customers.

It also gave us an opportunity to move from good to great — by understanding where we were, where we wanted to go, and how we might get there.

Maybe you’ve also just taken over a new team, or you’re also going through an acquisition or reorganization. Or maybe you’re just looking to level up your support team.

Regardless of why you’re here, this article will help you understand what SMART goals are in the context of customer service and how to define SMART customer service goals for your team. It includes some examples of great customer service goals, and it will show you how to measure the success of your goals so your team can continue to grow and adjust your customer service strategy as needed.

Table of Contents

• Why Setting Customer Service Goals is Important
  • It makes good business sense
  • It makes for happier, more loyal customers
  • It makes for happier, more engaged customer support teams
• SMART Goals in Customer Service
• Setting SMART Customer Service Goals
  • Specific
  • Measurable
  • Achievable
  • Relevant
  • Time-bound
• 3 Examples of Customer Service Department Goals
  • Improve customer self-service
  • Implement a quality assurance program
  • Improve customer satisfaction
• 2 Examples of Customer Service Manager Goals
  • Improve customer service team engagement and satisfaction
  • Become the voice of your customer
• 2 Examples of Customer Service Representative Goals
  • Improve customer service skills
  • Owning the customer experience
• Customer service goals level up your team

Why Setting Customer Service Goals is Important

Being on a ship with no destination is unpleasant and nerve-wracking for everyone aboard.

Setting solid customer service goals for your team provides a common purpose and keeps everyone moving in the same direction. It improves your odds of reaching your destination: consistent excellent customer service.

And beyond the psychological benefits of having clear goals, there are plenty of more tangible benefits too.

It makes good business sense

Clear customer service goals ensure that your team’s efforts align with the broader objectives of the company, so it’s clear how your team is contributing to business growth.

It also means both you and the company can make more informed decisions about budget and resource allocation, using the real data and trends you glean from measuring your progress against your goals.

It makes for happier, more loyal customers

Goals focused on customer satisfaction directly contribute to improving the overall customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal, to make repeat purchases, and to recommend your business to others.

Consistently meeting and exceeding your customer service goals also builds your company’s reputation for reliability and trustworthiness, which is essential for long-term brand success.

It makes for happier, more engaged customer support teams

Setting specific goals and measuring how each member works toward these objectives allows customer service teams and managers to identify strengths and weaknesses. It also allows individual team members to understand and direct their own professional development.

Well-defined goals also provide teams with a clear sense of direction and purpose. Team members who understand how their work contributes to larger goals are happier and more committed to the company’s success.

SMART Goals in Customer Service

You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before. It’s a handy mnemonic tool that reminds everyone that effective goals are:

• Specific
• Measurable
• Achievable
• Relevant
• Time-bound

But why do the goals you set for your customer service team (or that they set for themselves) need to be SMART?

The point of setting goals is to be as clear as possible about expectations:

• How you expect your team to work independently and with each other
• How you expect to create satisfied customers
• How you expect to contribute to your company’s success

There shouldn’t be ambiguity in customer service goals. That’s because while a well-defined goal tells your team members what success looks like, it also acts as a catalyst or guide to help you get there.

This may be from a customer standpoint (satisfaction, response time, self-service, etc.), from an individual perspective (performance or professional development), or from a company perspective (cost per customer, retention rate, expansion rate, etc.).

Setting SMART Customer Service Goals

First, keep in mind that you usually can’t jump right into creating a goal. There’s always an assessment period first.

You need to spend some time figuring out what the current state of your customer service team is.

Some questions you can ask to guide your assessment:

• What is our budget? Are we over or under-budget?
• What is our team capacity?
• What is our incoming ticket / chat / phone volume?
• Does our team capacity match our ticket volume?
• What are our most important customer service metrics (like first response time (FRT), average handle time (AHT), and customer satisfaction (CSAT))? What is the current baseline for each of those metrics?
• What are our most important customer success metrics (like Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer churn and retention rates, and customer lifetime value (CLV))? What is the current baseline for those metrics?
• What tools do we have? How much do they cost? Are they necessary?
• What tools don’t we have that we need?
• What internal and public-facing product resources do we have? What do we need?
• Are there any existing company goals that are relevant to the customer support team? If so, what is the team’s current progress / contributions toward those goals?

Your assessment will be highly dependent on your team and company, but these questions should give you an idea of the things you should consider as you work to define your goals.

Once you’ve done the foundational work to understand what your team needs to improve on, you can begin using that information to define your goals.

Let’s break it down in the context of a real customer service SMART goal.

Specific

Any goal you set should be clear and well-defined. For example, “answer customers faster” is a nice aim, but what are the channels where you want to answer customers faster? What does “faster” mean?

A more specific goal for reducing customer wait times would be to set a target first response time for a specific channel, such as: “Send a first response to customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”

Depending on your needs, you could get even more specific: “Send a response to customers inquiring about their order status in 60 seconds or less.”

Measurable

Any customer service goal should be measurable, so you can understand whether you’ve achieved the goal (or not) and adjust your strategy appropriately.

Taking our example from above, a measurable target chat response time goal could be: “80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds.”

Achievable

This is the point at which your initial assessment becomes really important.

“80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds” may sound like an achievable goal. It might be doable if you have a simple product or many agents trained and available to handle chats.

But what if you have only two chat agents and are receiving hundreds of chats each day?

Of course, you still want to strive to improve their first response times, but you’ll have to set reasonable expectations to give your agents a fair shot at success.

An attainable goal in this context might instead involve increasing the initial chat response time or decreasing the percentage of customers you’re targeting, like this:

• 80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 120 seconds
• 60% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds

Your context will determine what makes the most sense for your team. Just remember to aim for a goal that’s stretching, yet realistic.

Relevant

This is another area in which your foundational assessment is key.

First, are your proposed customer service goals aligned with your customer service values and company’s objectives? If not, they won’t be effective or successful, no matter how well they fit the SMART parameters.

Secondly, are your goals relevant to your team? For instance, a manager with a high chat volume might adapt our example to involve implementing a chatbot in order to hit their desired initial chat response time goal.

But a manager with a low ticket volume probably can’t justify the time and expense of implementing a chatbot because the benefits will never outweigh the costs for their team.

Time-bound

This parameter is closely tied to being measurable. You won’t be able to determine whether you’ve succeeded unless you know when the goal needs to be achieved.

To make our example time-bound, we could edit it to read: “By the end of Q2 2024, we’ll be responding to 80% of customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”

3 Examples of Customer Service Department Goals

Improve customer self-service

Customer service goals aren’t just about how your agents interact with your customers. Surveys have shown again and again that customers want the option to solve their own problems.

A goal for developing effective self-service could be:

“By [DATE] we’ll have launched a knowledge base with articles answering our 10 most frequently asked questions about [PRODUCT], resulting in at least a 10% reduction in tickets about those issues.”

Many knowledge base tools will have built-in ticket deflection tracking features, such as giving you the number of views for an article and the number of tickets created after the article was viewed.

You can also measure the success of this goal by tracking ticket volume for a specific category or tag over time.

Implement a quality assurance program

Implementing a quality assurance program is a great way to improve overall customer satisfaction, response and resolution times, and brand recognition. It’s also a more objective way to measure and track agent performance and to kick-off conversations about professional development with your team.

It might look like this:

“In January 2024, develop a draft QA scorecard based on ticket reviews from the previous 3 months, so that we can begin calibration sessions with the team in February 2024.”

In this case, measuring success is relatively simple: is the draft scorecard available by February 2024 when calibration conversations must begin?

Improve customer satisfaction

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is crucial to your support team’s success, but also the overall success of the company. To build a customer-first organization, improving or maintaining your customer satisfaction score should be one of your main goals.

A sample goal for CSAT could be:

“Each month next quarter, maintain an overall CSAT across text channels (chat and email) of 85% or better.”

You can gather CSAT ratings using built-in tools on your customer communication platforms, or through a dedicated CSAT tool to send customer surveys. Most tools will calculate your CSAT score or percentage automatically.

2 Examples of Customer Service Manager Goals

Improve customer service team engagement and satisfaction

As we’ve already covered, customer service agents are most engaged when they understand what their role is and can see how their contributions matter (both to their entire team and the company).

A goal for improving your customer service team’s overall engagement could be:

“Have a monthly one-on-one with each agent on my team and arrange at least one team social event a quarter, with the aim of reducing employee turnover by 10 percent by the end of the year.”

As you can see, this goal includes multiple conditions for success, and the team turnover rate is a metric that can be directly measured.

Become the voice of your customer

As a customer service manager, you get an especially broad view of how customers use and feel about your product. You also have the ability to take that customer feedback and put it in the hands of those who need it: your product team, your engineering team, your marketing team, and so on.

This can be as simple as implementing a public customer feature request tool where your customers can share their feedback and vote on what they want to see, or as complicated as setting up an internal, cross-functional customer feedback process.

The goal for becoming the voice of your customer could be:

“Have a bi-weekly Voice of the Customer meeting with the product development team, leading to at least one product bug fix and one new customer-requested feature release every quarter.”

You could measure this goal in a number of ways, depending on your strategy. If you have implemented a dedicated customer feedback tool, you can track customer usage against the rate of product releases and bug fixes. You could also track ticket volume in a specific category as well as any impact on CSAT ratings.

2 Examples of Customer Service Representative Goals

Improve customer service skills

Everyone has their specialties and their weaknesses, and your customer service agents are no different. Quality assurance programs are a great way to identify areas for improvement, but you may also uncover opportunities during performance and career development conversations.

Your customer service reps can improve by seeking training in special topics, professional development courses, and peer support. Working with each team member to set and achieve goals for improvement fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement.

A good example of goal for your agent could be:

“Get training on my weakest skills as identified by our QA reviews during the next month so that my average handle time goes down to [TARGET] by the end of the quarter.”

They can measure the success of this goal through attendance and completion of training, as well as by looking for improved QA scores and handle times.

Owning the customer experience

The more customer service agents take ownership of their customers’ experience, the happier both they and the customer will be.

Owning the customer’s experience will mean something different for every team. It may look like being the customer’s one point of contact for an issue, or it may mean acting as the customer’s guide as they move through the escalation process.

It may look like answering every CSAT rating, good and bad, to thank the customer for their thoughts and solicit more feedback. Or it may mean reviewing their own customer interactions, identifying missed opportunities for exceeding customer expectations or anticipating customer needs, and devising strategies for doing so in the future.

A goal for owning the customer experience could be:

“I’ll reduce my ticket escalation rate by X percent in Q2 by being the primary agent on tickets about Y topic.”

Measuring your growth at owning the customer experience will depend a lot on what specifically that means for your company. For the example above, you’d measure the achievement by looking at the percentage of tickets you’re still escalating on the specific topic.

Customer service goals level up your team

As you’re building out goals for yourself or your customer service team, remember to take a step back occasionally and look at the big picture.

Are these goals aligned with your company and your team’s vision? Are they clear or confusing? Are they too inter-dependent, so that if you fail at one, you fail at them all?

There’s nothing magical about setting SMART goals. They’re a fantastic tool for customer service teams, but the real key is in making goal-setting a discipline and a habit you’re regularly engaging in. Setting goals is not a one-time task — it’s an ongoing process of adaptation and growth.

The landscape of customer service is always changing, and your goals will need to evolve with it.

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Ah, unhappy customers. The not-so-silent killer of business.

Our teams may deliver, innovate, and grow... but if customers aren't happy, we won't be doing it for long. Can't improve what you don't measure, so...

How do you actually measure customer happiness?

With customer satisfaction metrics.

There are dozens of them, but fret not, we've highlighted four key metrics easy to understand, track, and improve upon.

All right, let's get you the measuring tools you need to improve customer satisfaction.

But first, a definition

Table of Contents

• What are customer satisfaction metrics?
• The 4 main customer satisfaction metrics (and when to use them)some text
  • 1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • 2. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT score)
  • 3. Customer effort score (CES)
  • 4. Churn rate
• Going beyond metrics

What are customer satisfaction metrics?

Customer satisfaction metrics are what companies use to understand how happy customers are with their product, customer service, and overall experience. These metrics provide insights into how well your organization does at delighting customers.

Customer satisfaction metrics also play a crucial role in developing your customer experience strategy. They’re a critical feedback loop that allows you to understand how your customers perceive your business and customer support, then to make course corrections where needed to keep improving.

The 4 main customer satisfaction metrics (and when to use them)

Some customer satisfaction metrics shed light on the performance of specific employees and departments, while others serve as indicators of the overall customer experience, reflecting the efforts of the entire organization.

Let’s dig into the key customer satisfaction metrics and explore benchmarks, examples, and situations where each of them is particularly useful.

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS score is a customer satisfaction metric that attempts to gauge your customers’ satisfaction based on their likelihood to refer others to your product or service. If a customer will enthusiastically tell their friends about your product, it’s a good indicator that they’re happy with what you’ve created.

Net Promoter Score is based on a single survey question:

How likely would you be to recommend X to your friend or colleague?

Respondents rate the likelihood of recommending your product or service on a scale from 1 to 10. Based on their rating, they fall into one of three groups:

• Detractors are customers who gave a rating from 1 to 6. They are not satisfied with your product and make up the largest group in the NPS model. That’s because negative customers are often the most likely to talk about their bad experience with you.
• Passives are customers with ratings from 7 to 8. They generally feel good about your product, but they aren’t overly enthusiastic. The NPS model suggests excluding them from the NPS equation.
• Promoters are respondents who provide ratings of 9 or 10. These customers love your product. They’re highly satisfied and likely to spread the good word.

How to calculate Net Promoter Score

First, determine the percentage of promoters and detractors from the total ratings pool.

Then, subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. That gives you your Net Promoter Score:

NPS = % of promoters - % of detractors

Let's say you received 100 responses to your NPS survey. Out of these:

• 50 people gave scores of 9 or 10 (50% promoters)
• 30 people provided ratings of 7 or 8 (30% passives)
• 20 customers appeared to be detractors (20% of the total responses)

In this case, your NPS would be 30, calculated as 50% promoters - 20% detractors.

Helpful tools

The good news is you don’t have to calculate your NPS score manually. Popular survey and user analytics tools like Survicate, Qualtrics, or SurveyMonkey can automate the process and handle the job for you.

How do you know if your NPS is good?

NPS can range from -100 (if all customers are detractors) to 100 (when all customers are promoters). But both of those are unlikely — you’ll usually land somewhere between those two extremes.

Any score above 0 is considered a good sign, as it indicates that you have more promoters than detractors. And generally speaking, the higher the number, the better. Benchmarking data varies across industries and company sizes, but according to recent research by Survicate, the overall NPS benchmark is defined at 32.

While benchmarking is helpful, paying attention to your NPS trend is just as important. An increasing NPS trend means that your efforts to improve customer satisfaction are paying off.

But if NPS drops despite your efforts, it’s probably the right time to revisit your customer service strategy and employ more comprehensive customer satisfaction analysis tools – such as customer interviews or analyzing support tickets to better understand the source of customer dissatisfaction.

When to use Net Promoter Score

Theoretically, you can use NPS to track customer satisfaction with any product, service, or even documentation materials and specific touchpoints in the customer journey. While that’s possible, practically speaking, NPS is usually used to assess overall customer satisfaction with a product.

The implementation of NPS can look different depending on the type of business:

• For web apps, it’s common to send email or in-app surveys after the onboarding stage and repeat them every quarter to maintain a regular pulse on the account.
• E-commerce stores typically follow up with an NPS survey via email within a week from the delivery date..
• Brick and mortar stores have more limited options, as digital surveys are rarely possible there. Instead, many stores opt for a physical machine with buttons that customers can press to share their feedback. In recent years, it’s becoming increasingly popular to use QR codes that customers can scan at the exit to provide their NPS score and feedback.

Product and marketing teams often rely on NPS as a key performance indicator (KPI) to gain insights into customer satisfaction and track it over time. However, other departments can also benefit from NPS.

Freich Reichheld, the developer of NPS, suggests that it can be a tool to predict customer loyalty. Customer success teams often leverage NPS as a data point for churn prediction models and within customer health score formulas to identify at-risk accounts.

Pros & Cons

• Insights into the overall customer satisfaction.

• Likelihood to recommend a product doesn’t always correlate with customer satisfaction. Nor does it mean customers actually are recommending your product.
• It isn’t always clear where to make improvements based solely on NPS data.

2. Customer satisfaction score (CSAT score)

The CSAT score is a customer satisfaction metric widely used by customer-facing teams to gauge “in-the-moment” customer satisfaction at specific customer touchpoints.

The score is calculated based on a CSAT survey asking customers to rate their recent experience with your company. It’s like a snapshot of the customer’s satisfaction level at that particular moment.

How to calculate CSAT score

Your CSAT score is the percentage of customers who rated their experience positively.

To calculate it, categorize your customer satisfaction survey responses into ‘satisfied’ and ‘unsatisfied’ categories. If you’re using the typical 5-grade scale, you’ll define ratings from 1 to 3 as ‘unsatisfied’ and assume that ratings 4 and 5 indicate satisfied customers.

The next step is to determine the percentage of customers who provided satisfied ratings. This percentage becomes your CSAT score.

CSAT score = (number of ‘satisfied’ ratings / total number of ratings) * 100%

For example, let’s say you have 100 customers complete your survey and 80 of them indicate a satisfaction level of 4 or 5. In that case, your CSAT score would be 80% (80 satisfactory ratings / 100 total number of ratings * 100%).

How do you know if your CSAT score is good?

A CSAT score can range from 0% to 100%. A score under 50% is concerning, because it means you have more unsatisfied customers completing your survey than satisfied customers.

In highly-competitive industries, like SaaS or ecommerce, the benchmark hovers around 80%.

The higher your CSAT score, the better. Just know that achieving a perfect 100% in the long run is unrealistic, even with top-notch service. There will always be some random scores or customers having a bad day. In my experience, a 95% CSAT score is an attainable goal for a high-performing customer service team.

You should also expect a 5%-20% CSAT survey response rate, to get enough data for a reliable score. If you receive fewer ratings, revisit your survey settings, including the timing of your surveys, the messaging you use, and the communication channel.

When to use CSAT

While some companies use CSAT surveys to gauge customer satisfaction with help articles or specific product features, the most common use is to assess the performance of customer-facing teams.

Although you can send a CSAT survey after every customer interaction, I strongly recommend against it. It can be annoying, especially since many of us are bombarded with various surveys on a daily, and sometimes hourly, basis.

Instead, send CSAT surveys as follow-ups after key touchpoints with your team to measure how happy customers are with the service provided. Here are some common touchpoints to consider:

• After a support conversation
• After a sales demo
• After a business review session with your customer success team
• After an in-store purchase

Many companies use CSAT score as a KPI for their customer-facing team, reviewing scores of both individual contributors and teams to evaluate performance.

Pros & Cons

• Allows measurement of customer satisfaction at specific touch points along the customer journey.
• Gives customers an opportunity to provide instant feedback.

• "Satisfaction" is a subjective team, and what it means to be "satisfied" varies due to cultural biases.
• Like any survey, response rates will vary and your results may not always reflect your wider customer base

3. Customer effort score (CES)

Customer effort score indicates how easily customers find it to use your product or get assistance from your team. Unlike traditional satisfaction metrics, CES focuses on measuring the ease of the customer experience.

The score is based on a survey where instead of questions about satisfaction, customers are prompted to assess how easy or difficult it was to complete a task, such as navigating the product or getting the answers they needed.

Customer effort score has been gaining in popularity, often replacing CSAT scores in support teams’ performance management.

The main benefit of using CES is that it helps differentiate between overall product satisfaction and customer satisfaction with the support experience, focusing on how easy it is for customers to receive assistance. If customers consistently find something difficult, you have a clear area you can work on improving.

How to calculate CES

Customer effort score is measured with a 7-point scale. To determine your CES, divide the number of 5, 6, and 7 ratings — customers who rated an experience as easy — by the total number of ratings, then multiply the result by 100%.

CES score = (number of 5, 6, 7 ratings / total number of ratings) * 100%

For example, if 100 customers submit responses and 60 of them give ratings of 5 or higher, your CES score would be 60% (60 ratings of 5 or higher / 100 total number of ratings * 100%).

How do you know if your CES is good?

Your CES score can range from 0% to 100%. The higher your CES score, the better.

But since CES is a relatively new metric (invented by Gartner in 2010), benchmarking data is still limited. And even with more data, there probably won’t ever be a one-size-fits-all number, as products and services can vary in ease of use even within the same industry or across different touchpoints within the same company.

Having a higher CES score than your competitors doesn't necessarily imply that your customers are less satisfied or unhappy (although reducing customer effort is almost always a good idea). A high score can simply indicate that your product is more feature-rich and advanced, or that you need to invest more in customer onboarding.

To gauge the effectiveness of your customer experience efforts, monitor how your CES changes over time and look for trends.

When to use customer effort score

CES is becoming increasingly popular as a KPI for customer-facing teams aiming to provide more effortless service. According to some research, creating experiences that are consistently easy is a more reliable predictor of customer loyalty than other metrics.

Common touchpoints to send CES survey include:

• After receiving assistance from your customer support team
• After engaging with your product or service for the first time
• When viewing self-service resources.

Survey timing is crucial for CES. Aim to send it immediately after the measured experience, while the memory is still fresh in your customer’s mind. Significant delays can lead to inaccurate scores as customers will struggle to recall all the details.

Pros & Cons

• Highly actionable, providing insight into exact touchpoints requiring the most effort from customers.
• May be a better predictor of customer loyalty than CSAT.

• Can be misleading without context or without understanding the overall complexity of the product or service.

4. Churn rate

Churn rate is the ultimate customer satisfaction metric, because it measures the rate at which you lose customers. When customers cancel their service with you, it’s usually a clear indicator that they’re unhappy or that they found an option they prefer more.

Satisfied customers are less likely to leave – as long as your product isn’t seasonal and there’s a strong product-market fit, of course.

Although it’s a broad-reaching metric that’s impacted by way more than just your customer support team, churn rate can help you find connections between your customer experience efforts and business success.

How to calculate churn rate

Calculating customer churn rate is quite straight-forward and can be done on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.

First, divide the number of customers lost during a given period of time by the number of customers you had at the beginning of that period. Then, multiply the result by 100%.

Churn rate = (number of customers lost / number of customers at the beginning of time period) * 100%

For example, if you start a month with 100 customers and lose 20 customers by the end of the month, your monthly churn rate would be 20% (20 customers lost / 100 customers at the beginning of the month * 100%).

Helpful tools

Tools like Profitwell or Baremetrics can seamlessly integrate with your payment systems and retrieve the real-time churn rate with a button click. Both tools offer churn rate forecasts, help identify correlations, and can even reduce churn.

For example, by automating follow-ups on overdue invoices when churn is primarily attributed to failed charges rather than intentional cancellations.

Is your churn rate reasonable?

The lower your churn rate, the better. It should be lower than your growth rate and ideally below 7% annually.

A high churn rate undermines business growth, because it means all of the effort and money you’re spending to attract new customers is worth less. Even if your sales team is doing their jobs well, your business may not grow. A high churn rate can signal issues with customer experience and potential misalignment with your ideal customer profile (ICP).

When to use churn rate

Churn rate is crucial for all subscription businesses, especially when it comes to financial reporting and forecasting. The lower your churn rate, the more valuable each customer is and the more revenue you’ll see from them over time.

Despite your efforts, some customers will churn and it’s normal. Churn rate doesn’t always indicate dissatisfaction — a customer might love your product, but find they no longer have a need for it, so they cancel. Or perhaps their budget got cut and they were forced to make a tough decision.

If your churn rate is higher than expected, make time to dig into the triggers leading to churn. Churn rate is a lagging metric — you can’t measure it until after you’ve lost those customers. So when you see churn rate increasing, you need to move quickly to get ahead of it and find ways to improve your product and your customer experience.

Understanding the reasons customers churn is a critical first step in identifying ways to address issues and improve customer retention.

Pros & Cons

• Helps understand the effect of customer satisfaction on finances and growth

• Not very actionable on its own. It requires further investigation and analysis to identify specific areas for improvement.
• Affected by a vast range of factors, making it difficult to pinpoint underlying issues

Going beyond metrics

While metrics and quantified data are excellent for setting KPIs and identifying trends, it's crucial to delve deeper than a simple rating to truly understand your customers. Creating opportunities for them to share open-ended feedback openly and frequently is key.

In my experience, adding a free-text field to our CSAT survey proved invaluable. We discovered that, despite poor metrics, customers were quite content, and all the low ratings stemmed from a few easily fixable product issues. They were happy with our customer service, but their dissatisfaction with the product was showing up in our CSAT surveys.

The opposite is possible, too. You may find that while customers are happy with the specific experiences you measure, they may not be satisfied with your overall product.

These examples highlight why customer feedback is so crucial. The more you can make people feel heard and valued, the more open and honest feedback you’ll receive. With tools like Missive, you can automate follow-ups with customers, giving them opportunities to feel heard, appreciated, and motivated to share more. This ultimately helps you improve your customer experience and boosts your bottom line.

If you're keen on taking control of your team communications & customer support, give Missive a try for free!

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Creating a good customer experience is a heavy lift for any organization. It requires constant maintenance and continuous improvement, a process usually referred to as customer experience optimization.

86% of consumers say they’re willing to pay more for a superior customer experience. And 80% of customers surveyed by Qualtrics said they have switched brands due to a poor customer experience .

In today’s market, there just isn’t room for delivering a bad customer experience today.

Due to constant change in technology and consumer expectations, customer experience is in perpetual evolution. This means you’re never really “done” optimizing your customer experience — it’s an ongoing process. Every business needs to regularly revisit what it means to have an “optimized” customer experience.

Table of Contents

• What is Customer Experience Optimization?
• 4 pillars of CXO
• Why customer experience optimization is important
• Challenges of customer experience optimization
• 7 tips for optimizing the customer experience
• Optimizing your customer experience is a necessity

What is Customer Experience Optimization?

Customer experience optimization (CXO) is the ongoing process of enhancing all of your customer touchpoints throughout the customer journey. Customer experience optimization aims to create positive and valuable experiences that meet or exceed customer expectations. When CXO is done right, customers are happier and more loyal, and they will advocate for your brand.

Customer experience can feel nebulous, because it’s ultimately about your customer’s perception of how your company treats them. Every customer who encounters your brand has their own perception of your business, and that perception affects their behavior with your service or product.

A customer who associates negative experiences with your brand is less likely to become a loyal customer. In contrast, a customer who has had a positive experience with your brand is more likely to be a long-time satisfied customer.

So how do you shape the perception customers have of your business? How do you impact customer behavior?

Let’s start by looking at the 4 pillars of customer experience optimization.

4 pillars of CXO

The 4 pillars of Customer Experience Optimization are:

• Personalization: Tailoring experiences to individual customer needs.
• Consistency: Ensuring uniform experience across all touchpoints.
• Responsiveness: Quick and effective responses to questions and feedback.
• Accessibility: Ease of interaction across various channels.

Focusing on each of these components is a great start to building a better (more optimized) customer experience. Let’s look at each of these more closely.

Personalization

Adobe reported that 67% of customers want a personalized experience .

The one-size-fits-all approach to customer experience is no longer an option. Customers come to a business from various backgrounds, with different types of problems, and with various (but often high) expectations.

That’s why creating a personalized experience is a must to be competitive in today’s business landscape. A personalized experience helps build trust and increases customer engagement, which increases customer loyalty. You need to understand who your customers are and what they need so that you can create an experience that resonates with them.

Consistency

We’ve all been here: we’re on the phone with a support agent only to find we’re getting transferred to another agent for help. The next agent answers the phone, and we find ourselves explaining our problem again.

Or maybe you’re stuck with a product, so search Google for some help documentation — only to find information that contradicts what you learned during the sales process.

Either scenario is frustrating, and both illustrate a lack of consistency in the customer journey.

Customer-facing team members must be well-trained and equipped with the right tools and information at the right time to deliver a consistent customer experience. Web pages and other resources should contain up-to-date information without discrepancies that may confuse customers. Designers and writers should be trained and have access to your company style guide to ensure any customer-facing graphics or content are true to your company’s brand.

Consistency is hard to manage across dozens or hundreds of touchpoints, but it’s a critical part of customer experience optimization. It’s more than how you engage customers. Consistency across the entire customer journey makes customers more confident in your brand. The more confidence your customers have, the more trust you will build with them.

Responsiveness

Consumer expectations evolve alongside the evolution of technology. You could even say that our patience has plummeted as we become more technologically dependent. When things go wrong or when we have a question, we want an answer quickly.

It is, after all, what we expect.

A Forrester study reported that 77% of consumers say that valuing their time is the number one thing companies can do to provide a great online customer experience. To be responsive, companies — and the teams within those companies — must be equipped with the right resources and technology.

If you have customers all around the world, that might mean offering 24/7 support. Or it might mean implementing an AI-powered chatbot that’s always available to handle your most common customer inquiries.

Start by tracking your response time and other time-based customer service KPIs so you have an idea of where you’re at today, then work to improve it over time.

Accessibility

In addition to fast responses, customers want an effortless experience when it comes to using your product and finding help. Customers today want a seamless user experience and an omnichannel support experience.

Removing friction from the customer experience will help decrease the effort required for customers to get their problems solved, which leaves room for increasing customer satisfaction.

Simple tactics like making sure it’s easy to find your support team’s contact information or embedding help guides within your product go a long way to making your company seem more accessible.

Why customer experience optimization is important

Optimizing the customer experience will help your business grow.

Delivering a great and consistent experience is something prospective customers will recognize. They are also likely to tell people about their experiences, which can exponentially increase your brand’s awareness and, ultimately, your growth rate.

Even better, Deloitte’s research found that customers who have a positive experience are likely to spend 140% more than customers who have negative experiences. That’s good news for your bottom line.

A good customer experience will also increase engagement from existing customers. No one wants to use a product that’s difficult to use or that comes with a poor customer service experience. Customers will be more likely to use your product more when the experience meets or exceeds their expectations.

In short, optimizing your customer experience will retain existing customers and bring in new customers.

Challenges of customer experience optimization

Optimizing the customer experience is incredibly valuable, but it comes with challenges. Here are obstacles you should look out for as you begin your customer experience optimization journey.

Accessing the right data

It’s hard to optimize your customer experience without accurate data about your customers. Unfortunately, many CX leaders find it difficult to capture or access the data they need.

To overcome this challenge, you’ll need to work closely with your engineering or data teams. If your organization already uses tools like Tableau or Looker, you may be able to set up dashboards or reports that make accessing and analyzing data far easier.

Giving up on your optimization efforts

CXO is not a one-time thing. The ongoing need to optimize the customer experience is a challenge in itself. Companies must be invested in optimizing the customer experience all the time. It’s one of the cost of having a business in today’s world.

As your product or service changes, your customers’ expectations and needs will also change. Don’t set it and forget it. Empower a team or a person to own the customer experience and continually act on opportunities to improve it.

Choosing the wrong tools

You’ll need tools and systems to build and maintain a great customer experience. Choosing the wrong technology will only make this difficult task harder.

For example, you might choose a tool that serves your support team’s needs well, but fail to consider how it integrates with your data visualization tool or the CRM your sales team is using. Because having a clear view of your customer’s holistic experience with your brand is important, this would be a painful misstep that would require a lot of time or money to correct.

When choosing CX tools, involve stakeholders from other business teams to ensure you’re accurately understanding how they’ll interact with your entire tool stack.

7 tips for optimizing the customer experience

Now let’s look at some specific ways you can optimize your customer experience.

Create a customer journey map

A great customer experience starts with understanding as much as you can about your customers . A good way to start learning about your customers is to map out their journey with your brand by creating a customer journey map, which is a visual representation of the ways they interact with you. A good journey map also highlights your customers’ needs and expectations at each point of the journey. Once you’ve mapped out every customer touchpoint, you’re able to optimize the experience at each point.

Leverage data

In addition to a customer journey map, you can use customer data to learn more about your customers. Quantitative data like purchase details, geographical location, and industry type give you details about customers so you can segment customers and personalize their experience.

Qualitative data, like customer feedback and customer support conversations, help paint a fuller picture of your customers. Combining both types of data enables you to create both product and support experiences leads that are optimized to your customers — not to some generic avatar or audience that isn’t buying from your business.

Understand purchase motives

Your customers are hoping to “hire” your product to do a job for them. Do you know the job your customers are looking for your product or service to do for them? By understanding the pain points your customers are facing, you gain a deeper understanding of their purchase motives — the reason they bought your product. You can uncover these motives by using the Jobs to Be Done framework and asking questions like:

• When using our product, what’s the final outcome you’re hoping for?
• Why did you choose our product over other competitors?
• If our product wasn’t available to you, what would you do instead?

Understanding purchase motives enables you to guide your customers to that “aha” moment of achieving their goal faster, creating a more powerful experience from the get-go.

Create a personalized experience

With qualitative and quantitative data and an understanding of the customer’s purchase motives, you can craft a unique and personalized experience that resonates with your customers.

Simple ways to personalize your customer experience include:

• Using your customers’ names in your product and in your communications with them, including your canned responses .
• Making it easy for support agents to review past conversations with each customer.
• Soliciting customer feedback and letting them know once you’ve acted on it.

There’s plenty more you can do to personalize your customer experience and create meaningful customer connections.

Optimize content

As we mentioned earlier, customer experience optimization is looking at every touchpoint your customers have with your product or service. A touchpoint can be many different things, including any web page on the internet related to your company.

So ask yourself:

• When you search Google for a common question about your product, what web pages are showed first?
• Do you have old, outdated web properties showing up?
• Is your help center easy to read on a mobile device?
• Is your sales team using the most recent version of your company sales deck?

Have a plan in place to maintain your customer-facing content and ensure you’re delivering consistent, up-to-date, and valuable information.

Experiment

Experimentation and personalization are a powerful combination when it comes to customer experience optimization. You never know exactly how a change will affect your customer experience, so run experiments to see how different approaches to personalization impact things like customer satisfaction or retention.

For example, you can experiment with two different onboarding processes or different types of messaging. If you try two different formats in your onboarding emails, which one has the higher open and click-through rates?

Be consistent

It’s important to deliver a consistent experience across all customer-facing channels. Giving customers a consistent experience sets clear expectations for them.

For instance, a consistent tone of voice across your emails, chatbot, and help center helps customers know who they’re talking to. Clear policies help them know what to expect when working with you. Consistent response times enable customers to know you’ll follow through on your promises.

Being consistent requires a good amount of planning and disciplined execution. Your customer journey map will help you identify where you can inject consistency throughout the entire customer experience.

Optimizing your customer experience is a necessity

We’ve seen a massive shift over the last ten years. Nowadays, it seems like every company is claiming that they’re “customer-centric.” It’s no longer enough to just make the sale — you have to make the sale and keep customers coming back for more. This is largely due to the transition to a subscription-based business model in so many industries, but it’s also due to an increase in competition.

But what does “customer-centric” mean today?

A customer-centric company is one where everyone at the organization — from the frontline support agent to the CEO — is thinking about the customer every day. It’s a company that optimizes the customer experience and makes decisions with the customer in mind.

Customer experience optimization is a cross-functional effort . Everyone from CX to engineering to product managers and executives needs to be involved. Everyone has a role to play.

As your customer’s expectations evolve and change, you’ll see big benefits — like high retention rates — if you consistently optimize your customer experience.

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Not long ago, I came across a company whose support team was swamped with tickets.

Their solution to handling the overwhelming volume of customer requests was… particular.

All incoming tickets received outside business hours were automatically closed, with an automatic message asking the customer to contact the customer service team again during business hours.

However, that’s a sure way to a negative experience for your customers, and it reflects horribly on your brand.

Bad customer service is still far more common than it should be, which got us asking: what are some examples of horrible customer service?

Sometimes it’s easiest to learn about what your customer service team should do by taking a look at times when other customer service leaders made the wrong choice. Negative examples, if you will.

So if you’re curious to learn how your business can be customer-centric and consistently deliver excellent customer service, read on to learn more about terrible customer service interactions (and to find tips on how to turn a terrible interaction into a great one).

What is bad customer service?

Bad customer service occurs when a support interaction doesn’t meet a customer's expectations. Excessive delays in responding to an inquiry, rude or unhelpful behavior from customer service representatives, mishandling customer complaints, and not fully resolving a problem are all examples of inadequate customer support.

Obviously, that's a subjective definition. And in some sense, there’s no way around that. Whether an interaction with a customer service rep is good or bad depends on what a customer expects.

But on the other hand, some customer interactions are just flat out bad. Take obscenely long hold times or rude customer service agents, for example.

These things are bad for business, but they happen all the time.

And that’s despite the considerable impact that customer service has on business. 68% of customers will willingly pay more for products from brands known to offer a great customer experience. Great experiences increase revenue, boost retention, and improve customer satisfaction.

Or look at it the other way: 65% of customers have switched to a different brand after a bad experience. Bad customer support increases churn and hurts your bottom line.

That’s why you need a sound customer service strategy — because in today’s competitive landscape, your company can’t afford to offer poor customer service.

5 clear examples of bad customer service

Below, we share five common examples of poor customer service and give tips and ideas on how to make them better:

 
1. Support agents not addressing a customer’s concern.
 
2. Prioritize company policy above customer needs.
 
3. Displaying a lack of empathy or rude behavior.
 
4. Making customers wait for too long.
 
5. Making it challenging to access support channels.

1. Support agents not addressing a customer’s concern

In an ideal world, customers would ask for exactly what they need in terms your support agents can understand.

That’s not what usually happens in a real interaction, though.

Customers explain situations based on their own understanding and how they’re experiencing an issue. They share the symptoms as they see them, and your customer support team has to play the role of a doctor identifying the root cause of their pain.

That’s why learning to ask good questions and read between the lines are key customer service skills.

Here’s an example from a recent support ticket at a bank:

A worried customer contacted her bank’s customer service department. Her card purchases were being declined, despite having a positive balance in her account. She feared her money was blocked or, worse, lost.

In response, the customer service rep shared a knowledge base article about existing limits on the number of card transactions. The article wasn’t exactly wrong — she did exceed the number of transactions — but the agent completely missed the real pain point. The main source of the customer’s concern was whether she’d lost access to her money, and simply offering some reassurance would have transformed the interaction.

How to fix or avoid this issue:

Train agents to use critical thinking and ask great questions. That’s how they’ll pick up on what customers need (even when they don’t say it directly). In the interaction above, the bank employee should have addressed the primary concern, reassuring her that the money wasn’t blocked and informing her when the transaction limit would reset.

Other tactical tips to improve in this area include:

 
• Monitor customer conversations through a quality assurance program to ensure they meet your standards. If agents are failing to identify the root cause of an issue or to address all of a customer’s concerns, give them extra coaching or try role playing complicated customer scenarios.
 
• Encourage frontline staff to truly listen to customers. This often means you’ll need to make sure your customer service KPIs — like handle time or resolution time — aren’t overly aggressive. Spending a bit of extra time to ensure an issue is fully resolved is well worth it. You’ll see the difference in increased customer loyalty and less follow-up conversations.

2. Prioritizing company policy over customer needs

Bruce Lee famously encouraged his students to “Be water, my friend.” He recognized the importance of adapting and flexing based on the situation at hand.

Sure, policies and guidelines are there to be followed. They’re crucial in keeping all departments on the same page and ensuring your business operations function smoothly.

But a strict or inflexible process can also be harmful.

Let’s say one of your biggest customers contacts you because they need to make a return, but they happened to miss the deadline by a week. They’ve spent a lot of money with your brand, and they also happen to be an influencer in your industry.

But their phone call gets routed to a new support rep, and they opt to follow the return policy by the book, explaining that the customer is ineligible for a refund. That puts the customer in an awkward spot — they can push for an exception, they can share about the bad experience, or they can suffer in silence.

A knowledgeable agent will know that keeping this particular customer happy is more important than following the standard process.

How to fix or avoid this issue:

Empower your frontline staff. Knowledgeable customer service reps can recognize outdated processes that no longer serve the business. They can also identify situations that are the exception to the rule.

Other ideas to help here include:

 
• Regularly auditing your existing policies to adjust or eliminate polices that no longer serve your business well.
 
• Segmenting your customers in your CRM so that you’re able to identify customers needing a VIP experience and route their tickets to specific team members.

3. Displaying a lack of empathy or rude behavior

Frontline staff should never demean customers or display brash or sarcastic attitudes. The same goes for showing apathy or simply displaying no interest in solving a customer’s issues.

Unfortunately, it happens.

A full 73% of customers surveyed by chatbot and AI solution provider, Netomi, reported being on the receiving end of rudeness from a customer service agent.

This actually happened to me personally, very recently. My wife ordered a new area rug online. It ended up being the wrong size, so she initiated a return. The rug was so large that it needed to be picked up by a third-party logistics service, and she waited two weeks to hear from them.

Silence.

After calling the logistics service, she was told there was no record of her request. So she tried again, and after several more days of silence, she called back the company she’d purchased from.

The customer service rep gave her the runaround, ultimately telling her that it was her fault the return had stalled out so long because she had waited too long — even though it was their system that failed to notify the logistics service of the request.

How to fix or avoid this issue:

The moment a customer takes the time to contact your support team, they’re already frustrated. Opening the conversation with empathy and communicating a willingness to resolve their problem goes a long way.

To help with this:

 
• Focus on hiring people who display a high degree of emotional intelligence and communicate with empathy. Role-playing difficult conversations can help surface these skills.
 
• Equip your support team with strategies to keep calm even when dealing with rude customers.

4. Making customers wait for too long

Long wait times are a classic example of subpar customer support. They’re a great way to create frustrated customers and build a negative brand reputation.

If you’re curious how it plays out, there are entire Reddit threads about how long consumers have waited on hold.

You’ll read about a customer trying to cancel their phone company and waiting 85 minutes on the phone. Or the 42 minutes it took to book a doctor's appointment.

That’s about 84 minutes and 41 minutes longer than customers should be waiting.

An excessive response time is only made worse by having to repeat yourself multiple times across different agents. In a recent survey, almost two-thirds of US adults shared that they believe valuing their time is the most important thing a brand can do to provide them with a good customer service experience.

How to fix or avoid this issue:

Reduce your hold times and respond faster. There are many different ways to reduce hold times, and the right one will depend on your situation. Here are some ideas:

 
• Find and improve processes that may be slowing your team down. Intelligent conversation routing is essential to speedy service. Use support automation to improve your speed and efficiency, for example, by routing specific tickets to qualified agents without manual work or time sitting in an inbox.
 
• Use canned responses or templates. For example, Missive allows you to compose and reply faster with pre-written snippets or templates that still allow for personalization through custom variables.
 
• Offer a callback option. While long hold times are never ideal, offering a callback option at least gives customers the option of getting off the phone and moving on with their lives while they wait to hear from your team. It’s still a long wait, but it feels like less of a pain when they’re not stuck with their phone in hand for ages.
 
• Adjust your hours or your staffing. When your agents are spread too thin, your customers are forced to wait longer. While reducing your operating hours may sound like a negative, if it dramatically improves your customer experience during those hours, it may still go over well with your customers. Alternatively, hiring more agents or adjusting the shifts they work can make a big difference.

5. Making it challenging to access support channels

Is anything worse than finding it hard to reach a business when you need help?

Comcast/Xfinity is infamous for this, as Reddit threads like this show. Here’s a snippet from one user:

“I asked to cancel (which took 4 tries as it 'accidentally' kept hanging up on me in the process..) and I said the same to them. They offered $75 at first and I said no. They then offered $45. I thought about it, but they said that's only for a year then it's back to the "regular rate" I told them to cancel it then. Had my fiancée sign up immediately after that, and now we are locked in at $30 for two years.”

Is it possible that the phone system hung up on them four times? Technically, yes. But it’s highly unlikely.

Whether it’s unhelpful support agents, a chatbot that gets users caught in a loop, or burying your contact form deep in your help center, situations like these are incredibly frustrating. While offering great self-service is a critical part of a modern customer service strategy, you should always make it easy for users to get human help when they need it.

How to fix or avoid this issue:

Whatever communication channels your support team offers, make them easy to find and access. Customers look to contact you when they have problems, so don’t create additional problems by making it hard to reach your support team.

Tactical tips to do this include:

 
• Use software that enables teamwork. Your customer support team can handle tickets much faster by working on a collaborative platform like Missive, which includes features like tagging teammates as observers and real-time collaboration on replies.
 
• Offer support where your customers are. If most of your sales are through social media, offer support on social. If you have a mobile app, embed easy support channels right in your app.

The underlying causes of poor customer service

We’ve seen examples of inadequate customer support and how to improve it. It’s tough to deliver a consistently great experience. It takes hard work and intentionality.

Across the board, there are a number of underlying reasons why bad customer experiences are still so prevalent. These include:

 
• Inadequate training. Without properly training frontline staff, you risk agents offering lousy service. Your team might even be providing insufficient support without you knowing, hence why it’s so crucial that quality assurance is part of your support operations.
 
• Low employee morale. Don’t expect excellent customer support from unmotivated employees. In a survey, about 75% of employees said that workplace culture affects their ability to serve customers.
 
• Operational inefficiencies. Cumbersome processes and outdated systems impact your team’s ability to serve customers quickly and reliably.
 
• Lack of automation. Excessive reliability on manual work isn’t scalable. Companies often deliver great service when their customer base is small, then struggle to maintain that quality when they experience growth.
 
• Lack of omni-channel support. Forcing users to use a specific contact channel risks creating frustration and increases customer effort.
 
• Poor customer feedback handling. Ignoring or mishandling customer feedback can lead to customer resentment and negative reviews. It also robs your organization of an opportunity to learn and improve.

Great customer service is a game-changer

Negative customer experiences are damaging to your business. Your customers are your company’s most important resource, and building out systems that enable you to support them well won’t happen by accident.

At the same time, your customer service processes will always be evolving. This work is never done, so don’t focus on getting across a finish line that doesn’t exist.

Instead, make it a regular part of your routine to audit your customer experience and analyze customer feedback. By creating feedback loops that enable you to continually improve, you’ll build a flexible customer service operation that your customers can rely on.

There’s a saying in the support world: no one majors in customer service.

Which is to say, that there’s no single educational or career path that will prepare you specifically for this kind of impactful work. Most of us go on a professional journey before arriving at our final destination of a customer support career.

It also means that we pick up the excellent customer service soft skills we need to do our jobs along the way, sometimes formally (through college education) or informally through direct work in different customer-facing fields.

That was definitely true in my case. My college and career journey has spanned everything from journalism to public health to logistics. While my career hasn’t been a direct path, it’s proven over and over how soft skills are in customer service.

It’s also reinforced an important point over and over: it’s never too late to improve your soft skills.

Whether you’re a college student working part-time or a career customer support person, this post will help you understand more about the skills that are so important to customer service — and why you should invest time and effort into mastering them.

Table of Contents

• What are soft skills?
• The benefits of soft skills in customer service
• 8 soft skills proven to improve customer service
• How to train your soft customer service skills
• Balancing soft skills and hard skills

What are soft skills?

Soft skills are commonly distinguished from “hard” skills on the grounds that they have to do with things like emotional intelligence and communication ability, while “hard skills” are more technical competencies like coding or accounting. Ostensibly, hard skills are measurable, whereas soft skills are more abstract.

But here’s where I have to break with common wisdom (a bit).

As a longtime customer support professional and as a hiring manager and leader, I don’t think there’s anything “soft” about the support agents need to do their jobs well in customer service. Many software engineers couldn’t handle a phone call with an aggressive customer — there’s nothing “soft” about the skills needed to calm them down and find a path forward.

I also disagree with the idea that soft skills aren’t measurable, particularly in the realm of customer service.

Do you have a best-in-class customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating? That’s a measure of your support team’s empathy and care.

Do you have a high bug fix rate and feature release tempo? That’s a measure of your support team’s problem-solving skills, their ability to build productive and healthy relationships with other teams, and to advocate on your customers’ behalf.

Do you have a high Net Promoter Score and retention rate? That’s a measure of your customer support team's active listening skills and their ability to anticipate and address your customers’ needs (i.e., their emotional intelligence).

Do you get an outpouring of understanding and support from your customers following major outages? That’s a measure of your support team’s positive attitude, helpfulness, conflict resolution, and de-escalation skills.

I could go on. Suffice it to say that while it’s okay to use the term soft skills as a categorization method, it’s important to remember that they’re just as vital and valuable as any other skills.

The benefits of soft skills in customer service

If you’re still not convinced, let’s go over some hard numbers:

• Customers who have a good customer experience are likely to spend a whopping 140% more than customers who have a bad experience with your company.
• 96% of customers say the customer service a brand offers plays a role in their loyalty to that brand.
• On the opposite end of the spectrum, 61% of customers have ended a conversation with a customer service agent mid-call out of frustration, while 71% of customers have dealt with a rude customer service agent (yikes!).
• When customers leave a company, 68% of the time it’s because of poor service

All of these points are somewhat related to customer service agents’ soft skills. Their ability to remain calm even when a customer is rude, be empathic, and understand your customers’ problems will directly impact their experience with your brand.

In sum, soft skills in customer service will help keep customers happy, loyal and even make them spend more.

8 soft skills proven to improve customer service

1. Empathy, compassion, and patience

Ok, this is kind of three skills in one. But they’re so related and interconnected that separating them is difficult.

Customers are often contacting us in moments of real need and frustration. Sometimes they just won’t be at their best.

Empathy and compassion are required in order for us to truly understand their problems and make them feel heard. Through showing empathy, you also give customers permission to express themselves honestly, so that they can trust you to fix their problems.

Patience is crucial in all customer interactions, regardless of the product or service you’re offering. Customers may not have the technical understanding of why something isn’t working, so your support agents have to be capable of kindly drawing out the information you need or guiding them through a solution, without pressure or judgment.

2. De-escalation and conflict resolution

Customers don’t reach out for customer service because they enjoy it — they reach out because they need help. And while abusive customers can happen at times, most customers aren’t overly aggressive. They’re just regular people working through frustration, stress, fear, pain, and probably other private struggles you’re not privy to.

And if they’ve had poor customer service experiences with other companies, sometimes they’re coming to you conditioned to expect the same poor treatment. That makes it extra important to be able to hear and constructively address a customer’s feelings without taking it personally or making judgments about it.

This reduces stress for both you and the customer. It shows them you see their humanity and helps them trust that you want to help.

By remaining calm and de-escalating conversations, you create positive associations with your company. You help customers get to a place where they can share what’s really going on.

3. Positive attitude and friendliness

Customer perception can form instantly, and when customers are frustrated or when a problem can’t be solved right away, a positive and friendly attitude can work wonders.

Simply reframing the language you use to be positive instead of negative can have a big impact.

For example, instead of saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t offer you a refund,” you could try, “I can get that product replaced for you, would that help?”

The second option offers a solution and asks for the customer’s input, rather than providing a dead-end that the customer has to figure out how to get around.

Similarly, putting a smile and warmth in your voice when you speak to customers over the phone or appropriately using emojis over chat builds a customer’s trust and good feelings about the company’s brand. It’s a bit of a cliché, but people can often tell if you’re smiling when you answer the phone.

4. Effective verbal and written communication

Effective communication fosters understanding and builds emotional connections with your customers. These two things are core to creating an engaging experience that’s catered to each customer’s needs.

Customer service agents must be able to explain information clearly, concisely, and at the customer’s learning level. They need to be able to guide customers through tasks like troubleshooting step-by-step, so customers don’t get confused or frustrated. Reply templates can help, but they’re best used as a starting point.

Clear and effective communication is vital no matter the support channels you’re using — whether you’re talking to customers over the phone, managing your team inbox, or handling live chats.

It really is the core of the job.

5. Active listening and attentiveness

The ability to be present and listen actively to customers is a key skill for any customer service agent.

By actively listening, you can often glean insights from what the customer’s not saying or how they’re conveying information to you, which means you can ask more informed and relevant questions that will get you to a solution faster.

Moreover, customers hate having to repeat themselves. By actively listening, you can show your customer that you value their time as well as their business.

6. Curiosity, adaptability, and resilience

It’s not unusual for support agents to run into situations or issues they’ve never encountered before — in fact, that’s pretty much status quo for customer service professionals.

When a customer brings us a gnarly problem or asks about a part of the product we’ve never even heard of, we have to be able to respond with curiosity and flexibility (not panic). Resilience is just as necessary because sometimes you just have to buckle down and work on an issue until it’s resolved without getting tired or flustered.

When even the most unpredictable issues are handled calmly and confidently, it builds customer confidence in your team and your brand.

7. Problem-solving and resourcefulness

It’s not enough to be curious about a new topic or bug. You have to know how to work the problem and go about finding answers within a reasonable amount of time, so that you’re not leaving customers hanging with no resolution or explanation.

This could mean having god-level Google-fu, or having a tried-and-true troubleshooting methodology. It might also mean knowing what tool or database to query for answers, or knowing who to ask for help (and when).

The greatest customer service agents are super sleuths, tracking down answers with creativity and determination.

8. Ownership and advocacy

Speaking of asking for help, customer service agents should be a customer’s greatest advocate.

While support agents may handle dozens of customer conversations each day, they’re probably only interacting with each customer once. Here’s what that means:

What’s routine for you is rare for your customer.

Your support team does two things when they take ownership of each customer’s problem:

• They create a satisfied customer
• They transmit valuable feedback to the rest of your organization

Creating opportunities for advocacy across your customer service team makes them more than just a transactional machine handling routine questions. Instead, they become an invaluable asset to your company. They become your customers’ champions.

How to train your soft customer service skills

Did you read through that list and come across a few skills you’d like to work on or to help your team improve in?

Being a good customer support agent means always being open to growth, and although there’s no degree in customer service (yet!), there are many ways you can beef up your customer service skills.

As the customer service profession has grown and evolved, so have the resources available to us for learning and improving our most important customer service skills.

You can find professional education and courses on all the skills we covered in this article on training platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy, Skillshare, and more.

Customer service professionals and leaders have also written many books covering these soft skills and related topics, including some of the tougher competencies to build on like empathy, growth mindset, and adaptability. Some recommendations include:

• Never Lose a Customer Again
• The Service Culture Handbook
• Exceptional Customer Service

Finally, your peers and leaders are excellent resources for developing your customer service soft skills.

Take advantage of peer feedback and mentorship your team can offer. Role-playing customer interactions with your team is a great way to practice conflict resolution and active listening in a low-stakes environment.

Balancing soft skills and hard skills

Customer service professionals are the living embodiment of why it’s important to maintain a balance between soft skills and hard skills.

We keep customers happy by understanding their problems, solving them, and listening to their feedback.

We keep our product and engineering teams happy by understanding and valuing their work, translating customer needs into business objectives and technical requirements, and helping those teams fulfill their commitments to the product and customers.

If I can share maybe the most pivotal lesson I’ve learned in my customer service career, it’s that there are no hard skills without soft skills.

It’s a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship, and when you find someone who can demonstrate both skill sets, it’s a beautiful thing.

‍

In a recent McKinsey & Company study, customer service leaders were asked:what is your highest priority?

The answer at the top of the list was improving customer experience.

This goal has become the driving change of many aspects of the customer service industry, from the tech we use to how we design omnichannel experiences and even response times.

To highlight the different aspects of customer service and their importance, we have collected 66 key customer service statistics that talk about rapid changes like AI, chatbots, and automation that are helping customer service teams meet these expectations.

These statistics can help you see the direction the customer service industry is heading in—and what you need to do to prepare your business in 2024.

Let’s take a look 👇

Table of Contents

     
• The Evolving Role of AI in Customer Service
     
• The Power of Chatbots in Customer Satisfaction
     
• How Poor Customer Service Drives a Negative Experience
     
• The Positive Impact of Excellent Customer Service
     
• How Omnichannel Customer Service is Evolving
     
• Predictions For The Future of Customer Service
 

The Evolving Role of AI in Customer Service

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing everything we do, from how we write to how we program and yes—how we talk to customers.

Forbes labeled AI as a new industrial revolution, and a 2022 IBM survey found AI adoption rates are steadily increasing across the globe.

For the customer service industry, the emergence of AI has led to some monumental shifts:

 
• Globally, the AI customer service market was worth $308 million in 2022, and that figure is set to explode to $2.8 Billion by 2030. (Generative Research)
 
• 78% of support leaders expect AI to transform customer support careers in the next five years and create new opportunities and job roles. (Intercom)
 
• 79% of customer service professionals say AI and automation tools are important to their overall strategy, while some 49% say these tools will be able to do most customer service-related tasks completely independently. (HubSpot)
 
• 73% of support leaders believe customers will expect AI-assisted customer service within the next five years. (Intercom)
 
• Customer service centers using AI can handle over twice as many calls, and 74% say AI helps save them time. (Dialpad)
 
• Businesses that have invested in AI and automation are beginning to see the benefits. 61% have seen improvements to their customer experience over the past year, while 58% have improved their CSAT scores. (Intercom)

According to HubSpot, AI is making customer service teams more efficient across the board:

But there is a gap in how business leaders are investing in AI, and how much customers want to interact with it.

 
• 56% of customer support leaders are concerned about how to balance investment in AI and existing customer support resources. (Intercom)
 
• 68% of support leaders struggle to implement a baseline report or success metrics to measure cost savings thanks to AI and automation. (Intercom)
 
• 44% of customers still prefer to talk to and interact with a human over AI. (HubSpot)
 
• 53% of support teams are worried about the potential negative impact of AI on the customer service industry. (Intercom)

The worries of such disruptive tech are not new. The same thing happened when computers were put into workplaces in the 1980s—many people feared they would lose their jobs. But just as those computers still require a human to run them, Intercom found AI and automation tools will need people to develop chatbots, design AI conversations, and create strategies.   The future of customer service and AI looks different—but the progression looks promising.

The Power of Chatbots in Customer Satisfaction

Customer demands have changed rapidly as support tech has improved. Gone are the days when businesses can get back to customers in 3-5 working days.

Customers want answers. And they want them quickly.The main driver of this change? Chatbots 🤖

 
• The chatbot market is predicted to grow 23.3% annually and reach a worth of $15.5 billion by 2028. (MarketsandMarkets)
 
• 88% of people had at least one conversation with a chatbot in 2022. (Tidio)
 
• 64% of internet users say 24-hour service is the best feature of chatbots. (Drift)
 
• Chatbots can handle up to 80% of routine customer service tasks. (IBM)
 
• Live chat is used by 67% of B2C businesses solely for customer support. (Source: Finance Online)

The other big bonus of chatbots is they are incredibly beneficial for a company’s budget. Not only can chatbots cut customer service costs by up to 30% (IBM), but:

 
• Chatbot conversion rates in some industries can reach up to 70% (Tidio)
 
• 47% of consumers would happily buy items via a chatbot. (Smart Tribune)
 
• 40% of customers don’t care if they speak to a human or a chatbot—as long as their query gets resolved. (HubSpot)

However, there is also a generational divide around chatbot preferences. While 20% of Gen Z customers want to start a customer service experience with a chatbot, that figure drops to just 4% for Boomers. (Simplr)

It also depends on what type of issue the customer has.

 
• 74% of customers will choose a chatbot over a human to answer simple questions (PSFK).
 
• 60% of consumers prefer to wait in queue for an agent to reply than receive an instant response from a chatbot. (Userlike)
 
• 80% of consumers will talk to a chatbot if there’s an opportunity to quickly switch to an agent. (Simplr)

Chatbot use is definitely increasing, and more customers are happy to use them. But the stats are clear—a large portion of customers out there still want to talk to a real human 🙋

How Poor Customer Service Drives a Negative Experience

In the early 90s, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs commissioned a study into customer service and what made customers tick. As HuffPost reminisced, the results were… humbling.

An unhappy customer doesn’t stay quiet. In fact, they will tell nine to 15 other people about their bad customer service experience with your company. Some customers tell 20 people or more. And for every customer who complained to you, there were another 26 others who kept quiet about their dissatisfaction.

Yikes 🥴

Further research from Qualtrics and ServiceNow found that 80% of customers have switched brands because of a poor customer experience, and US companies risk losing $1.9 trillion in spending because of it.

What’s interesting is just how unwilling customers are to give a business a second chance if they receive poor customer service 👇

 
• An eye-watering 96% of customers will cut ties with a company if they receive bad service (Hyken)
 
• The top reason customers switch companies is because they feel unappreciated.
 
• 64% of customers say they can’t get help or solve their problem through their provider’s customer service. (Airkit)
 
• 65% of customers will go back to a competitor if they have a negative customer experience. (Forrester)
 
• Only 34% of customers felt they were consistently treated with empathy when interacting with customer service. (Qualtrics)
 
• 54% of customers say customer service feels like an afterthought for businesses. (Zendesk)

Interestingly, this sentiment was shared across age brackets. A Propel Software study found a majority of Millennials (57%) will cut ties with a brand after one bad encounter, while 54% of all survey respondents said they would do the same.

What is perhaps most alarming for brands is how unforgiving customers are unless the customer service team can save the day.

 
• Only 15% of consumers will forgive a “very poor” experience with a brand, but almost 80% of consumers will forgive if they rate the service team as “very good.” (Qualtrics XM Institute)

These statistics couldn’t be more clear: customer service teams can not only win people back, but they can do it even if a customer has had a rotten experience.

The Positive Impact of Excellent Customer Service

The goal of any customer service team is to deliver a five-star experience to their users. But what does that look like? 🤔

 
• 90% of customers say issue resolution is their top concern. (KPMG)
 
• Customers want service reps to act quickly. 90% of customers say an "immediate" response to a question is very important to their experience, and 60% say the response time should be 10 minutes or less. (HubSpot)
 
• A third of customers say the most critical aspect of a good customer service experience is for their problem to be solved in one single interaction. They even said it didn’t matter how long it took. (Statista)
 
• An overwhelming 83% of customers feel more loyal to brands that respond to and resolve their complaints. (Forrester)
 
• 94% of American customers will recommend a company if they rate their customer service as “very good.” (Qualtrics XM Institute)

What’s interesting is brand loyalty can be achieved through great customer service. Propel Software found that brands can win over customers for life if they remember their birthday, service reps call customers by their name, and are swift to make changes when complaints are made.

How Omnichannel Customer Service is Evolving

Take a look at these and see if they look familiar:

🤖 Chatbot: “Shoot an email across to the support team so we can get this sorted.”

📞 Phone call: “I will transfer you to another department that can help.”

🐦 Twitter: “Send me a DM so I can get this sorted for you!”

These are all responses from a customer service agent to an angry customer. While there is nothing wrong with each response, there is a risk that when the customer jumps from one channel to another, they will have to repeat their problem to another agent… and that's where the problem begins.

Customers want a painless support experience. In fact, 9 out of 10 customers expect a seamless omnichannel experience no matter what communication method they use. (CX Today)

 
• 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments. However, 54% feel like service, marketing and sales teams don’t share information. (Salesforce)
 
• Over 70% of consumers think customer service teams should collaborate so they don't have to repeat information to different representatives. (Zendesk)
 
• Chatbots can play a crucial role in omnichannel support. They have a 75% resolution rate for routine questions and can integrate with other communication channels to connect customers with a live support agent. (Microsoft)

Brands must decide what communication channels to prioritize, depending on customer preferences.

 
• 40% of customers say having multiple communication options is the most important part of a customer service department. (TCN)
 
• Phone and email are still the most preferred customer service options for older generations, while younger customers prefer channels like online chat, social media and text. (Qualtrics)
 
• Despite online chat being ranked the third channel across all age groups, it was the second most effective channel for resolving issues quickly. (Qualtrics)

However, some brands struggle to meet these customer demands.

77% of companies struggle to create a cohesive customer experience across devices and channels, even when 62% of customers say they want to engage over multiple digital channels. The good news is there is a huge opportunity for businesses to let customers self-service a problem 👇

 
• 88% of customers want the option of an online self-service portal. (Statista)
 
• 92% of customers are open to using a knowledge base, with 83% saying they would also use a community forum for help if it was available. (Vanilla Forums)
 
• 39% of customers say resolving issues with a self-service option is quicker than other customer service channels. (Freshdesk)

But be warned—self-service doesn't mean forgetting about your customers. 77% of customers say a poor self-service option is worse than not offering any support at all, as it wastes their time!

Predictions For The Future of Customer Service

There is no doubt the way we approach customer service is changing at a rapid pace.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, customer service teams that use AI in their multichannel customer strategy will boost operational efficiency by 25%. And 84% of companies think AI chatbots will become a crucial communication tool for talking to customers (CCW).

What’s interesting is how these changes will come about. Research by Boston Consulting Group (BCG) predicts generative AI will be embedded and rolled out across customer service functions until it can provide continuous assistance across all customer journeys:

If this predicted rollout becomes a reality, BCG expects Generative AI to increase customer service productivity by anywhere from 30% to 50%.

Gartner also expects that by 2027, chatbots will become the main customer service channel for a quarter of all businesses. If this happens, it will lead to a major shakeup of the entire customer journey, and businesses must start to plan for how AI will work alongside customer service representatives.

According to McKinsey research, an estimated 75% of customers use multiple channels in their ongoing experience. It has offered a vision of what a future customer service model could look like if AI was introduced at every customer touchpoint:

While the statistics we have talked about highlight that customers are not quite all in on AI and automated support experiences, they are getting more comfortable.

The best thing your business can do to prepare for these developments in 2024 is to embrace the new tech in customer service. The bottom line is: customers don’t care how they get good service, but they expect good service. And brands that win in 2024 will leverage every tool in their toolkit to satisfy customers.

Use chatbots to speed up customer service. Share information across your team to improve every omnichannel experience. And use AI to optimize every touchpoint in your customer’s journey.

Follow these trends in 2024—and your customer service team will thrive 🥳

Everyone has a story about how poor customer service made them never want to engage with the same brand again. On the other hand, excellent customer service makes customers feel appreciated and plays a key role in their buying journeys (alongside factors like quality and price).

PwC’s research underscores this fact, revealing that 42% of consumers are ready to pay more for friendly, welcoming customer service. That's right – customers are ready to open their wallets if you don’t drop the ball in assisting them.

But recognizing the importance of customer support is just the first step. Without a strategic approach, your valuable time, resources, and energy will get wasted on unnecessary actions and tasks, resulting in a less-than-optimal customer service experience.

To turn customer service into a competitive advantage, you need to act strategically and ensure that your every action contributes to providing excellent customer care.

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What Is a Customer Service Strategy?

Your customer service strategy is the action plan for how your organization will consistently deliver high-quality customer service across your customer base. It’s the roadmap you’ll follow to create satisfied customers and to develop a customer-centric strategy.

At the core of an effective customer service strategy lies a proactive and purposeful approach to meeting customer expectations.

A good strategy outlines specific goals and processes for your customer service team so they can deliver a positive experience to your customers. It helps allocate your company's resources to create an optimal customer experience and service efficiency, ensuring consistently great experiences across all customer support interactions. But it’s not just about the tactical — how you’ll answer customer questions or handle complaints — it's also about maximizing your organization's resources to create a customer-first company culture.

When creating a customer service strategy, start by understanding your customer needs and take into account factors such as market dynamics, competitor research, and your brand’s overall mission and value prop.

The Impact of an Effective Customer Service Strategy

Investing in a strong customer service strategy has hardly any downsides. Instead, it brings a ton of benefits, all of which help maximize the impact of your sales and service efforts, driving long-term growth. The key benefits include:

 
1.    Improved customer relationships.    Instead of crossing your fingers and hoping customers have a good experience, you’re working intentionally to build a positive experience for them across the customer journey.
 
2.    Lower churn and increased customer loyalty. More positive experiences make it more likely    for customers to stick around. They’re also willing to pay more money for those experiences. 
 
3.    Increased operational efficiency.    A customer service strategy keeps your entire team aligned on what’s most important. As your customer service team grows, it gives clear direction and KPIs that show new team members what you value.

You’ve likely heard about tools like Buffer, Zapier or Basecamp — companies that have seen massive growth by placing big bets on great customer service. Why? Because happy, loyal customers tend to have a higher life-time value and become strong brand advocates, spreading the word and driving referrals.

In an era where trust in traditional marketing is declining, satisfied customers advocating for your brand become a powerful force for attracting new customers. According to Hubspot, 75% of consumers don’t trust advertisements, but 90% of people believe the purchase recommendations of their friends.

That’s why acting strategically and consistently elevating your customer service is crucial for sustained business growth.

8 Steps to Create a Customer Service Strategy

If you’re just starting to develop your customer service strategy from scratch, the journey may seem daunting. But fear not. Below, we’ll go over the key components of crafting a winning strategy that drives lasting success.

Each step here is a critical building block toward a customer service culture that stands the test of time, even in the middle of ever-changing market demands.

1. Understand your customers’ needs

Researching and understanding your customers' unique needs is the cornerstone of building a robust customer service strategy. Really knowing your customers — being customer first — is how you take a generic plan and tailor it into something transformational for your business.

Here are key considerations that should guide your research:

 
•    Customer journey: Begin by mapping out the customer journey from the point of sale to onboarding through ongoing usage to potential offboarding. What are the key touchpoints that every customer hits when interacting with your brand? Can customers easily connect with customer service agents, and are self-service resources readily accessible? Assess your customer service offering for each stage of the journey to pinpoint problems and uncover opportunities for improvement.
   
• Recurring themes in support inquiries: Watch out for trends in customer tickets to identify potential pain points and areas causing friction. Understanding frequently asked questions empowers you to plan improvements, whether it's improving confusing product functionality or adding knowledge base resources to enable better customer self-service.
   
• Customer feedback: Customers hate not feeling listened to. Pain points from negative customer feedback highlight areas for immediate improvement and future development opportunities. Positive feedback, on the other hand, sheds light on things that contribute to customer loyalty and satisfaction. Customers may highlight things like quick response times, effective customer issue resolution, personalized interactions, or the availability of omni-channel customer support. Double down on whatever your customers seem to love.
   
• Competitor analysis: Your competitors will have a significant impact on customer expectations. It’s crucial to understand what customers appreciate in competing offers — both the product and the customer experience — and to identify areas where those competitors may fall short.

2. Define your vision

With a deeper understanding of your customer needs, the next step in crafting your customer service strategy is defining your vision. A customer service vision, at its essence, is your team’s shared understanding of what good customer service looks like.

It helps get everyone on the same page and align perspectives.

At this stage, you must clearly articulate how you want your brand to be perceived by customers. Based on that vision, you’ll be able to define key elements of your customer service strategy, such as:

 
•    Team values -    the core qualities you want your organization to uphold.
 
•    Customer service channels    - from email support to social media, your customer service channels should match up well with your customer’s preferred communication channels.
 
•    Operational systems    - across different areas, you’ll define how you want to embrace the efficiency of automation and AI chatbots, and where you want to invest in the warmth of personalized human support as a competitive advantage.
 
•    Service level objectives    - including response and resolution times to manage customer's expectations.

3. Create a playbook

The next step in the process is to create a customer service playbook with guidelines that your support team should follow. It’s where you define what customer interactions should look like and serves as a reference point for your team.

Just like an NFL team uses a playbook to show every player where they should be on the field, your customer service playbook will guide your team’s actions each day.

Your playbook should cover your customer service best practices, and can include things like:

 
• Team objectives, vision and values
 
• Responsibilities and expectations for each role on your team
 
• Communication and service standards, including the tone of voice for customer interactions
 
• Available tools along with instructions on how to use them
 
• Internal resources, reference materials and scripts for managing customer inquiries 
 
• Internal and external communication channels
 
• Escalation and outage handling procedures
 
• Best practices and smart tips

As you work on creating your playbook, avoid complex terminology. Aim to keep it concise and clear, making the document easy for your team to use whenever they need it. You may want to consider using a knowledge base tool like Guru or KnowledgeOwl to make your playbook easily searchable.

4. Build your customer service team

The fourth critical step involves developing a hiring process that ensures the alignment of your new team members with your established vision and values.

A scorecard for rating candidates based on how well they resonate with the values you've defined can be a game-changer during the hiring process. It helps you translate your feelings about candidates into quantified data, which you can use to make better decisions.

This ensures that every addition to your team is not only equipped with the necessary skills but also shares a genuine commitment to the customer-centric vision and culture you aim to create.

By prioritizing cultural fit in the hiring process, you lay the groundwork for a team that can deliver on your strategy. But building your team doesn’t end there when a new employee starts. You’ll also need to coach and train your team to keep people engaged and motivated.

Remember, how you treat your team members shapes how they, in turn, treat your customers.

5. Identify Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

No strategy is complete without defining the KPIs for measuring your team’s success. Based on your vision, identify which metrics will best reflect successful execution.

Common customer service KPIs include:

 
• Customer effort score and customer satisfaction scores (CES and CSAT)
 
• First reply time
 
• Issue resolution time
 
• Escalation rate
 
• QA evaluation score
 
• Retention and churn rates
 
• Net promoter score (NPS)
 
• Self-service score

Remember, if you can measure it, you can manage it. Most customer service tools will include customer service analytics that will help here. Don’t feel tempted to measure every KPI under the sun. Pick a few complementary KPIs — like first reply time, CSAT, and NPS — and optimize around those metrics over time.

6. Set S.M.A.R.T. goals

Monitoring your KPIs is important, but you’ll typically improve upon them through executing specific, time-bound projects. That’s where SMART goals come into play.

If you’re not familiar with SMART goals, they’re goals that are:

 
• Specific
 
• Measurable
 
• Achievable
 
• Relevant
 
• Time-bound

Sometimes customer service leaders feel like SMART goals aren’t applicable to their teams (because support tickets never stop coming in and KPIs are ongoing), but they’re actually a helpful tool.

For instance, maybe you’re not happy with your team’s first reply time. Instead of setting a hard-to-action goal like, “Reduce First Reply Time by 10%,” SMART goals help you prioritize and manage projects that are likely to reduce first reply time:

 
• Implement new AI-powered chatbot solution by end of Q2
 
• Revamp existing case routing workflows in June to reduce handoffs by 10%

With SMART goals like these, you’re bound to see a positive impact on your overarching first reply time goal.

7. Establish feedback loops

Your customer support strategy is a dynamic thing. It’s continuously evolving, and you’ll need to make regular process adjustments as your customers’ needs and your company’s strategy shift.

That’s why you need feedback loops.

The two main sources of feedback on your customer service strategy are your customers and your team:

 
•    Create an open channel for feedback within your team. Frontline employees possess valuable insights into actual workflow challenges and customer challenges. Actively listen to their experiences, suggestions, and concerns that may elude higher management. You can solicit feedback through Q&As, brainstorming sessions, or one-on-ones.    
 
•    Develop a process for gathering customer feedback. Customer feedback isn’t just limited to your survey tool. You can learn a ton from routine customer inquiries, call logs, and chat transcripts. You can also conduct customer interviews to dive deep into understanding a customer’s specific use case. Regardless of your preferred methods, it’s crucial to find systematic and regular ways to listen to your customers (and to act on their feedback). Feedback analytics tools like Kapiche or SentiSum can make this analysis far easier.    

When boxer Mike Tyson was interviewed about his fight plan for fighting Evander Holyfield, he famously replied, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”

Your customer service strategy is going to take punches over time — negative feedback from customers, pivots from your product managers, and budget cuts from your board. Whatever shape those hits might take, the key is building a resilient and flexible strategy that allow for real-time adjustments whenever needed.

8. Cultivate a company-wide commitment to customer happiness

Customer service used to just be a function within a company. You had a customer service team, and they were responsible for solving customer issues.

You probably still have a customer service team, but today’s best organizations are recognizing that customer experience is far bigger than one team’s job. It’s massive and far-reaching. As Harvard Business Review puts it, “To deliver that complete customer experience, organizations must unite around the customer in ways they’ve never had to before.”

Customer-facing teams can only achieve so much in isolation; true success comes when the entire organization rallies behind the goal of making customers happy and successful.

And that means you need to foster an organizational culture where every department understands and prioritizes customer experience. It’s easier said than done, and it’s work that takes time, but your customer service strategy should include details on how you’ll affect this kind of change.

Great places to start include sharing success stories and customer feedback across the organization. It’s also a good idea to cultivate relationships with key decision-makers who impact the customer experience — from product and engineering, to sales and marketing.

The more you can help people at every level of your organization understand what customers need, how they’re feeling, and how they can become more successful, the higher your likelihood of long-term success becomes.

Implementing Your Customer Service Strategy

Providing exceptional service to your customers isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s a strategic business move. A move that will improve your bottom line and lead to better long-term results.

Crafting a beautiful customer service strategy is only the beginning of that journey. A beautiful strategy on paper doesn’t change anything — it’s the implementation and execution that makes all the difference. And it starts with investing in the key tools that your customer service team is using to interact with your customers all day, every day.

That’s where Missive comes into play. Missive is a team inbox and chat app that empowers your whole team to collaborate and help customers effectively across a ton of different channels. If you’re ready to transform your customer conversations and join the ranks of high-growth companies like Buffer, try Missive out for free today.

Nearly 80% of customers say speed, convenience, knowledgeable help and friendly service are the key ingredients to any great buying experience.

But the pressure of delivering that experience usually falls at the feet of your customer service team. The reality is, no matter how well you train a customer service team, sooner or later they will be hit with a scenario they won't know how to deal with.

When it happens, they will either sink or swim… right? Well, there is also a third option—equipping them with a customer service values playbook.

Customer service values are essentially a compass to guide support reps on how to communicate and handle customer interactions. If a customer service representative doesn't know how to deal with conflict or thinks a customer is about to go to a competitor, these values act as a rulebook on how they should interact and react to every situation.

In this guide, we will walk you through why customer service values are so important and how to implement them to keep customers happy.

Let's dive in!

Table of Contents

• What are customer service values
• Why customer service values are important for your business
• Best Practices to Implement Customer Service Values at Your Company
• Excellent Customer Service Values Examples That Won Over Loyal Customers
  • 1. Chewy wins customers over with empathy
  • 2. Nordstrom puts customer satisfaction first
  • 3. LANDR uses consistent communication to educate customers
• Customer Service Values Should Always Be Aligned With Your Company’s Values

What are customer service values

Customer service values are strategies and principles that guide customer service staff to ensure every buying experience is positive, from communication to product satisfaction. In practice, they are words or phrases that encapsulate how support agents should interact with customers.

These core values directly align with a brand's mission statement and act as a benchmark for how your support team should deal with issues, communicate with customers, and talk about the brand publicly. Because of this, customer service values make a huge impact on a company's reputation and bottom line.

Why customer service values are important for your business

Customer service values are a compass for how service representatives should talk to and treat customers.

Essentially, these values are a framework that empower every decision a customer service rep makes, from how they talk to customers to how disputes are resolved and what ethos the company wants to portray.

A customer service team aligned behind core values not only creates a consistent customer experience, but also empowers employees to take charge in handling customer complaints and give customers a better experience.

To really figure out why customer service values are so important, I trawled through Newsweek’s America’s Best Customer Service 2023 report. It surveyed 30,000 U.S. customers over three years to see what made them open their wallets and buy from a company. Scores were based on 5 factors:

And… the winners were a bit of a surprise.

Usually, these types of customer service articles list the same brands, like Zappos or Apple, as benchmarks. But the Newsweek survey had different results. Customers voted for brands like Everlane for best online apparel retailer and Nordstrom Rack for best brick-and-mortar discount clothing outlet.

But why do customers love these brands so much? 🤔

Simple. Most companies have built trust with customers thanks to a solid set of customer service values based around consistent communication, empathy, focus, and satisfaction.

As a discount retailer, Nordstrom Rack has built its reputation on providing Nordstrom-level service at lower price points. Their values around friendliness, individual attention and making every customer feel valued have helped them gain and maintain loyal customers.

As for Everlane, its values of prioritizing transparency in its supply chain and communication offers customer an insight into ethical manufacturing and transparent pricing. Both companies clearly demonstrate how aligning operations with values can help build relationships and drive positive customer experiences.

So, how can you implement customer service values to give every customer the same experience with your brand? 🤔

Best Practices to Implement Customer Service Values at Your Company

Having great customer service require all your customer service employees to follow the same playbook to do their job well.

Defining clear customer values is the most crucial part to set the standard for how employees in the company should interact with customers and with each other. For example, if a core customer service value is integrity and transparency, a team is empowered to admit mistakes and take ownership if there is a problem with a customer's order.

Here are some best practices to follow when you create customer service values:👇

1. Get the Basics Right

Every customer service value strategy should be built from wider company values. Usually, these are taken from key principles like:

• Empathy. Each interaction with a customer should show genuine understanding and compassion while acknowledging and resolving their issues. In short: put yourself in your customer's shoes.
• Reliability. Customers need brands to show up and be dependable when they need them. Good customer service = meeting deadlines and hitting targets around shipping times/refunds.
• Responsiveness. Customers want quick responses and problem-solving. Responsiveness can significantly impact customer experience and can leave a good (or bad) taste in their mouth after dealing with your brand.
• Transparency. Customers expect you to be honest with them about products, services, pricing, and policies. It can build trust in your brand and help resolve conflicts if there are ever any issues.

Once you have laid this foundation, it's time to shape each value so it's unique to your brand.

Let's use Netflix's cultural values set as a hypothetical example.

It's clear the company wants to empower its employees to do great work by using sound judgment, good communication, and treating people with respect. Netflix could use these wider company values to create more direct customer services values for its team, like:

• Inclusion: Treat every customer with respect, no matter how long they have been a customer. Every Netflix customer is important.
• Communication: Remain calm and courteous every time you speak to a customer. Search for the root cause of the problem so you can make an informed decision about how to resolve it.
• Judgment: Always take a customer at their word. If they say their experience is subpar or they have been billed incorrectly, trust them and deal with their complaint immediately.

This example shows just how easy it is for a company already with a solid set of cultural values in place to create specific values for its customer service team. If a Netflix customer service rep faced a problem they weren't trained to deal with, these core values can guide them when handling the issue.

2. Create Concise Values

A common pitfall when creating a customer service value strategy is to go overboard.

The reality is, you don't need 20 customer service values written into a code of ethics for your team to succeed. Choose around 3-5 core values to guide your customer service agents when making decisions.

These may be customer service values like:

• Conflicts: When faced with a problem, treat customers with empathy, respect, and always aim for quick resolution.
• Always be positive: Centre every conversation around positivity and finding a happy resolution with the customer. When our customers are happy, we are happy.
• Authenticity: Good customer service feels fresh and real. Show our customers you can react and communicate in a personal, human way. Don't be afraid to inject your personality into conversations.
• Empowerment: Use your best judgment when speaking to customers. Make a decision based on your intuition and experience at our company.

Your values should also be short and easy for your team to remember. Whatever set of values you decide on will depend on your brand, but just make sure each one is directly tied to your wider values and company culture.

3. Use Values as a Foundation for a Customer Service SOP

Studies show companies that are more focused on solving customer problems grow faster than their competitors. But it's also important to make sure every customer problem is handled consistently.

Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) outline how your team should handle specific situations consistently based on the values you defined.

Let's say a customer's order is lost. An SOP could provide a guideline tailored to your core values on how the agent should respond. Depending on your guiding principles, agent could:

• Option 1: Apologize and give the customer a timeframe on when the issue will be resolved
• Option 2: Immediately post out a new order to keep the customer happy

This SOP should also include finer details like what language the customer service rep should use to keep interactions consistent:

• Will the customer be asked for order/tracking information to confirm a parcel has been lost, or should the customer service rep trust the customer's word?
• Should they focus on being empathetic and authentic? Or is speed and urgency more important?
• Should their goal be to resolve the conflict immediately by sending out a replacement? Or resolve it in a way the customer prefers, like issuing a refund?

These small (yet important) details during a customer interaction could mean the difference between smooth conflict resolution and a bad review on Google. If customer interactions are based around core customer service values like empathy, trust, and respect, they are more likely to end positively.

At the end of the day, a set of customer service values help your support team do its best work and more importantly—keeps customers happy.

Excellent Customer Service Values Examples That Won Over Loyal Customers

Instead of putting a list of generic tips here, I decided to take a look at how real brands use customer service values to keep customers coming back.

What I found wasn't all that surprising. Companies that put customers first and consistently deliver don't just retain customers—they turn them into lifetime brand advocates.

This approach also pays off, a Deloitte study found that customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than competitors that don't prioritize customer experience.

Let's look at how some brands win using customer service values. 👇

1. Chewy wins customers over with empathy

Chewy is an online pet supplies store that sells all the essentials like food, toys, treats, and even medicine.

After taking Newsweek's survey, customers ranked Chewy a whopping 9.16 outta 10 (and nearly .5 points ahead of second place). I looked at what customer service values made Chewy so special, and a few really stood out:

• 🐶 Partnership: One of the brand's taglines is "With Chewy, no one pet-parents alone". It's a promise to customers they will be there for every step of pet parenthood and equip them with everything they need to keep a pet happy and healthy.
• 💰 A customer first philosophy: Chewy has a 100% Unconditional Satisfaction Guaranteed Policy on every order. If a customer doesn't like a product, a customer service rep swiftly triggers a refund.
• ☎️ Availability: Chewy's team is available in the morning, noon, and even at 3 am. Thanks to 24/7 service (365 days a year), customer support is always open.
• 🍋 Understanding: They are experts at turning lemons into lemonade. For example, if an order arrives with the wrong product, the customer service team acts with understanding instead of thinking about lost profits. They ask the customer to donate the wrong items to a local animal shelter while they send out a replacement. This small gesture can help customers feel good and shows Chewy cares more about animals than money.

The one customer service value that stopped me in my tracks was Chewy's empathy towards customers.

Its customer service reps are trained to recognize how attached customers are to their animals—especially when they experience loss. When Anna Brose's beloved dog Gus passed away, she contacted Chewy to return some unopened food. Just look what happened next:

Thank you all for the kind messages and shared stories in the comments 💙 Gus would have been blown away! pic.twitter.com/DiopASuHIi— Anna Brose, MSc (@alcesanna) June 16, 2022

The tweet was flooded with hundreds of thousands of comments. Amazingly, some of them were from other customers saying they received the same empathetic support from Chewy. One customer even said Chewy sent a hand-painted portrait of their pet after she crossed the rainbow bridge. 🥺

These customer service values set brands like Chewy apart—and ensure its customers stick around for life.

2. Nordstrom puts customer satisfaction first

Nordstrom is so well known for its customer service, there has even been a book written about it.

It's easy to see why. If you open up Nordstrom's code of ethics, this ii the first thing you will see:

This core customer service value is a continuous theme for how the brand approaches customer service. It not only empowers employees to take care of customers, but it guides the customer service team on how to approach situations like product returns and conflict resolution.

Just take a look at how the retailer asks its team to use good judgment with its flexible returns policy. Regardless of the reason, Nordstrom allows customers to return products without hassle or time limits, and even without a receipt!

A quick Twitter search comes back with a ton of happy customers who have returned items TWO YEARS later—no questions asked.

Yesterday I returned a bra to @nordstrom that I bought in 2020 (and never used because it didn't fit well) and they gave me a full refund. Nordstrom's #customerservice truly cannot be beat! pic.twitter.com/zXGkhfEEVY— Katie-Rose Watson (@krwatson) February 11, 2022

The bottom line with Nordstrom's customer service values is a simple one: meet and exceed customer expectations—and they will shop with us again.

3. LANDR uses consistent communication to educate customers

You can't keep customers happy if they can only contact you between 9-5or if their only option for a refund is to call you. That strategy may have worked 20 years ago, but today—it's dead in the water.

A customer service department is only as efficient as the tech it uses. To track communications and connect with customers, agents need the right toolkit.

Here's an example:

LANDR is a creative platform that has helped over 2.5 million musicians turn their ideas into real tracks.

But as LANDR grew, its support team struggled to handle customer service queries. The team decided to use these questions as a chance to educate users on how to get the most out of the platform and build trust in the platform.

LANDR used Missive to communicate efficiently with users based on a core set of customer service values:

• Expertise. Each support team member covers one product line. This approach allows each support rep to become an expert in a specific feature and maximize value when they talk to a customer.
• Useful information. Thanks to Missive's collaboration feature, different customer service members can chime in and provide more information to users if needed.
• Quick communication. A lot of questions the customer service team receive are the same, so they use canned responses and templates to answer them in seconds.

LANDR now uses its customer service values around education and quick communication to build trust with customers and grow its brand.

Customer Service Values Should Always Be Aligned With Your Company’s Values

Your company's customer service values should act as the guiding principles to how you treat customers.

With a customer service values playbook, your team can navigate even the toughest scenarios with the right approach. Anchor every value to a wider company goal, like empathy, communication, or authenticity, to help set your service apart and empower your team to handle every situation with confidence.

Most importantly, a solid customer service values strategy will keep your team on the same page and ensure every customer has the same great experience with your brand.

Think about what your company stands for and build your customer service values from the ground up. As long as every value puts your customers first and follow customer service best practices—trust and customer loyalty will always follow. 🙌

Think about a brand you love.

I don't mean a store you buy from every now and then. I mean a company you hold a freakin' torch for. You are loyal to them. And it'll take a lot for you to change to a competitor.

For me, it's Apple.

Cliché, I know. But that company has always been there for me. When I dropped my laptop on my way to a lecture at University a couple (okay, more like 15) years ago. When I email them. When I drop into a Genius Bar because my phone is glitching and I need to get on a flight. When a new product feature drops that improves my working day. They are there.

In my mind, Apple is the perfect example of a customer-first company. Every product they have produced has been for its customers, from iPods to watches. Heck, even Steve Jobs said it was his job to figure out what we want before we do.

This is the epitome of a customer-first approach. It's a brand that puts customers' needs first and fulfills them so well, they never shop anywhere else.

So, how does a customer-first strategy like this work?

Let's take a look 👇

Table of Contents

• What does Customer First Mean?
• Benefits of Adopting a Customer-First Strategy
• 4 Steps to Implement a Customer First Approachsome text
  • Step 1: Figure Out What Your Customers (Actually) Want
  • Step 2: Listen To Customer Feedback and Input
  • Step 3: Talk to Customers 1-on-1 Whenever You Can
  • Step 4: Give Your Team The Tools to Serve Customers First
• Real-World Examples of Customer First Businesses

What does Customer First Mean?

A customer-first culture means a company puts their customer base at the center of every decision—from product design to initiatives, marketing campaigns and support.

With a customer-first approach, every product, service, conversation, campaign, and interaction is designed around what the customer wants. By listening, taking on feedback, and putting customers first, you lay the foundation for long-term partnerships with your customers so they stick around.

The tough reality about a customer-first approach is to achieve it, your productivity or even your bottom line might take a hit. However, with 65% of customers surveyed in a Khoros study admitting poor customer experience caused them to switch brands—putting customers first is a strategy worth pursuing.

To figure out what this really meant and what a customer-first company really had to do to succeed, I dug a little deeper.

That's when I found Bloomberg's Customer Centricity Index. It rates the world's leading brands on their customer-centric approaches. You might just recognize some of the names that made the leaderboard:

So, how did they crack the top 100? 🤔

Well, each company was tested on eight factors:

• ✓If they anticipate customer needs
• ✓How much they care about customers
• ✓If they manage to deliver exceptional customer service
• ✓How easy it is to do business with them
• ✓If their leadership is ethical
• ✓How honest are they with the public
• ✓If their products/services are relevant with customer's needs
• ✓If they respect customer privacy

Ticking all these boxes will score a company a slot at the top of the leaderboard. This checklist is a great foundation for what you should aim for if you want to turn your company into a customer-centric machine.

But before we dive into how to do that, let's take a detour and look at why a customer-first approach doesn't mean you should hand over control to customers.

"Customer First" vs. "The Customer is Always Right"—What's the Difference?

Don't confuse a customer first strategy with a customer is always right strategy.

A customer-first strategy will build a bridge between what a customer needs and what your company can achieve. On the flip side, following a "customer is always right" strategy can lead you down a garden path where you try to meet every customer demand, even if it hurts your business.

Build a strategy to strike a balance between meeting customer needs and maintaining your own business objectives.

Benefits of Adopting a Customer-First Strategy

A customer-first strategy helps a business truly see its target customers and allows them to build out products and services they really need. It also helps improve customer retention and employee satisfaction because both parties are satisfied.

Let's break that down a little.

Great service can mold how customers spend money. A recent Zendesk study found a whopping 87% of customers changed their future buying behavior thanks to a good customer service experience.

It found they were more likely to purchase more products, recommend the company to other people, or even switch who they shopped with. Forbes also found brands that give customers a "super experience" reap the (cash) benefits and bring in 5.7x more revenue than competitors.

Apart from increased sales, a customer-first strategy can also:

• Bring repeat business.
  Satisfied customers stick around. It's not rocket science. 89% of companies say an excellent customer experience plays a huge role in customer retention, which helps lower acquisition costs and keep more money in your pocket.
• Give you a competitive advantage.
  Industries get crowded. Putting your customer first helps you truly understand them and tailor solutions that fit their specific needs. Your company can create a unique selling proposition around this solution instead of just marketing a generic solution to your customer's problem.
• Consistently grow your company.
  Brands need consistency to grow. I don't just mean consistent revenue—I'm talking regular referrals for other customers and more awareness about your products. Happy customers aren't just a buffer against economic downturns, they help grow your business through word of mouth.

A lot of these benefits are down to one thing: customer satisfaction. And most customers will pay more for an exceptional customer experience.

4 Steps to Implement a Customer First Approach

Step 1: Figure Out What Your Customers (Actually) Want

The days of closed-door innovation—when teams got in a room and figured out what to build or supply next—are over.

That's not a bad thing. Today's customers are more vocal and tell you exactly what they want from a product or service. All you have to do is listen. Monitor your social media channels and check online reviews to see what customers are saying and if they are asking for a product or upgrade they need.

Oh, and don't forget about asking your employees on the front line (like those in the customer support team) what they hear on the ground. Any nagging issues or suggestions from customers should be put into an internal shared document to follow up on. The sooner you act, the better.

This brings us to step two—getting feedback.

Step 2: Listen To Customer Feedback and Input

The most loyal customers aren't just happy—they've got their skin in the game.

Asking customers for feedback and acting on it is the best way to prove to customers that their voices are being heard. Set up feedback loops through surveys using tools like Tally, or trawl through customer reviews or social media posts to understand how your customers perceive your brand.

Maxie Schmidt is a Principal Analyst at Forrester. She recommends taking a look at whether this process is measurement-obsessed or customer experience-obsessed using this chart:

Obviously, you want to be on the right side of the chart (no pun intended.)

Just look at how Starbucks gets feedback from customers.

Ever tried a pumpkin spice latte? If so, you have mystarbucksidea.com to thank. The site was launched over 15 years ago to give customers a platform to share and vote on ideas to improve their Starbucks experience. It wasn't pretty, but it worked:

Customers posted over 150,000 ideas on how to improve Starbucks on the platform, and nearly 300 of them were brought to life. And even though the mystarbucksidea.com site has been wound down, it showed thousands of customers the brand wasn't just willing to listen, but their ideas were good enough to use in-store.

The takeaway here is simple. Actively address customer feedback and use it to drive trust in your brand.

Step 3: Talk to Customers 1-on-1 Whenever You Can

A good product fit can only get you so far. If your post-sale support sucks or customers don't feel appreciated, there's a risk they will churn to a competitor.

Make the effort to connect with customers on a 1-on-1 basis whenever you get the chance. Whether it's replying to an email or a comment on social media, a personal interaction will always score points. It also shortens the feedback loop and you can instantly solve a problem or take a great idea back to your team instead of wading through surveys.

He may be controversial, but Elon Musk is (very) visible on social media and makes the effort to reply to customers about concerns they have with Tesla. Look at how he replied to this comment about electric vehicle charging stations:

You're right, this is becoming an issue. Supercharger spots are meant for charging, not parking. Will take action.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 11, 2016

This showed the customer that his feedback mattered and action would be taken immediately. It's a great example of showing your customer you care.

Step 4: Give Your Team The Tools to Serve Customers First

Finally, equip your team with the tools they need to successfully implement a customer-first strategy.

Talk about what a customer-first culture will look like at your company and make sure your team is on the same page. Then, set some goals for them to hit:

• Set metrics for response times.
  Don't leave customers in the dark. Create a Service Level Agreement (SLA) for when emails, text messages, and social media comments will get a reply. Use shortcuts like canned responses or automated replies if your team is short on time.
• Share communication responsibilities.
  Encourage your team to share the customer load. Use a tool like Missive to create shared inbox and chat channels so everyone can jump in and talk to customers. If each department (e.g. sales, support team) has its own inbox, teams can collaborate on emails and stay on top of messages so no customers slip through the cracks.

It's also a good idea to put all your data under one roof. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) software to collect and store customer data. That way, if your team needs to get up to speed on a customer or look at recent feedback—it's all in one place.

Real-World Examples of Customer First Businesses

Not all companies are customer first. But those who have adopted this strategy have learnt how listening to what their customers want can pay off.

Here are two examples of companies that have used this strategy to improve customer experience. 👇

1. Uber Changed How it Catered for Its (Furrier) Customers

You may have to pay an extra couple of bucks, but you can now take your pet in an Uber.

Before the feature launch, individual drivers could decide whether or not a cat, dog, bird, or any non-human was allowed in their car. For customers with pets, this led to an awkward (and sometimes heated) standoff where they had to message their Uber driver to make sure the ride would be accepted.

After a ton of feedback from customers in certain areas like Hong Kong and Germany, Uber decided to launch a dedicated option to order a pet-friendly ride.

This change accomplished two goals. It gave a subsection of Uber customers a feature they asked for. Plus, it cut out the annoying (and awkward) messages between customers and drivers about whether a pet was allowed in the vehicle or not.

Talk about a win-win!

2. Lionize Retooled its Tech Stack to Reply to Thousands of People Every Day

Lionize is a SaaS software platform built to simplify the lives of marketers. It serves thousands of influencers every day along with the brands that work directly with the company.

But there was a problem. The Lionize team was juggling a ton of influencer and client communications and its team… couldn't keep up. Influencers were left hanging and waiting for a reply, and Lionize's brand partners were also leaving money on the table.

Eddie Dalrymple, Senior Account Executive at Lionize, said it was really difficult to organize communication channels as they were all over the place. For example, the team is sending emails to influencers, but they might get a reply via text.

"It was really difficult for us to manage a Gmail inbox, and also manage a Twilio number which was what we were doing originally. We needed a way to group all communication together to be more organized when reaching out to these influencers", he said.

"It's difficult to check that a person emailed us but we sent them a text an hour ago, and you get these mismatches in communication."

Lionize knew it wasn't replying to its influencers' emails and texts quickly enough. So, the company set a goal to reply to each influencer within 48 hours. And they hit it.

The company started using Missive (our team inbox and chat app) to keep communications under one roof and reply strategically. The best part is anyone can reply to an influencer when an email lands in an inbox, as they can see the last 10 conversations and get up to speed on where they are at.

Since Lionize prioritized putting its customers first and (dramatically) improving its communication, it has cut response times and most importantly given its clients a better service. 🥳

Want to join Lionize (and 3000+ businesses) and put your customers first? Missive is a team inbox and chat app rolled into one to help your team truly collaborate. Take it for a free test drive here!

If you’ve ever worked the customer service desk at any time in your career, you know running into an angry customer is inevitable and can be tricky to navigate—especially if there is no official guidance from management on handling the situation.

Do you just let the customer walk away angry and run the risk of them telling other people about your “bad service”? Or do you do whatever you can to make the customer happy?

In situations like these, it helps to have a service recovery plan in place to help deescalate tensions and make things right with the customer.

If you don’t already have a customer service recovery plan in place (or you’re looking for tips to improve yours), this article is for you.

Table of Contents

• What is Customer Service Recovery?
• 8 Steps to Customer Service Recoverysome text
  • 1. Listen to the customer
  • 2. Apologize to the customer
  • 3. Take ownership of the problem
  • 4. Identify and clarify the problem
  • 5. Solve the problem
  • 6. End on a positive note
  • 7. Follow up with the customer
  • 8. Learn from the recovery experience
• Service Recovery Email Free Templates
• Improve Customer Satisfaction with Service Recovery

What is Customer Service Recovery?

Customer service recovery is a company’s steps to solve an unhappy customer’s issue through excellent customer service. When customer service blunders happen, it can feel like a mark against your business, but it doesn’t have to be—you just need the right systems to fix the issue.

In a perfect world, customers would be delighted with the service they receive 100% of the time. Unfortunately, we don’t live in an ideal world, and when customers receive lousy service, nearly 80% of those customers will take their business elsewhere, especially if they feel their complaints are unheard. That’s when customer service recovery should come into play.

Here’s how to handle complaints effectively:

1. Identify the service complaint
2. Work with the client to resolve the issue
3. Learn from the experience
4. Implement necessary process changes 

While it may seem that customers with a bad experience will be hesitant to continue doing business with your company, that’s not the case.

According to the Service Recovery Paradox, when your employees go above and beyond to solve an unhappy customer’s issue, they’re helping to increase the customer’s brand loyalty even more than if no issue had arised.

Clearly, service recovery should be a priority for your business and employees. Let’s look at the eight steps to create a service recovery plan to ensure your employees knock it out of the park when issues arise.

8 Steps to Customer Service Recovery

1. Listen to the customer

As a customer, there is no worse experience than not being heard when you have an issue with a product or service.

Recently, I experienced this with my Internet service provider.  After days of trying to get help from customer service and multiple transfers to various departments, my issue was solved with a straightforward click of a button. The entire experience was frustrating, and as a result, I would not recommend their service.

It could have easily been solved if customer service had taken the time to listen to my concerns and identify my problem. The point of this story is simple: take the time to listen to your customers and understand their issue.

Encourage your reps to use specific phrases to show customers that they are heard. Train your employees to use terms like:

“I understand how this is upsetting.”

“I will work to resolve this issue.”

“I understand your concerns.”

2. Apologize to the customer

Along with listening to the customer’s concerns, the next step in customer service recovery is apologizing for the mishap.

Appropriate apologies never pass the blame on someone else or another department. Instead, they are genuinely heartfelt to help customers understand their needs and issues matter. Usually, a sincere apology helps to calm a customer, too. And when customers are cool and collected, it becomes easier to work with them to resolve the issue.

3. Take ownership of the problem

Part of a good recovery service plan is allowing your employees the authority and resources to resolve customer issues.

The goal is to avoid making customers wait a long time for answers, or make them repeat the issue to multiple people. Bouncing your customers from one department to the next only increases their frustration.

Although a breakdown in service may have happened for various reasons outside your control, it is your customer care team’s responsibility to own and fix the problem.

Research about service recovery through empowerment shows that it’s an  effective way to improve service recovery performance and service team’ job satisfaction. 

4. Identify and clarify the problem

Before your customer service reps attempt to resolve anything, the customer’s issue should be clearly understood. Learning to ask appropriate questions is vital to providing excellent customer service and resolving a problem.

Sometimes, getting to the root of an issue is as easy as asking clarifying questions like, “I understand this is the problem. Is this correct?” Other times, your reps might have to play the role of a detective and ask, “Can you walk me through the steps you took with our product that led you to this issue?

It’s crucial that your customer service representatives do not attempt to solve a problem without understanding it. Attempts to solve an unknown problem will only lead to more frustration for your customers and employees. 

Show your customers you care by seeking to understand their issues.

5. Solve the problem

The customer care team members are expert detectives and problem-solvers. Their job is troubleshooting the customer’s problem and finding an appropriate solution. Armed with the knowledge of the issue, your customer service reps can now do what they do best: solve the problem.

At this stage in the customer service recovery process, your reps should be focused on solving the customer’s issue and actively working to maintain the customer relationship. Maintaining customer relationships while solving a problem sometimes involve offering a refund. Other times, it’s fixing a broken product or upgrading a service. It should always include the company covering all costs associated with the fix. Research shows that when companies overcompensate for service failure, customers are more likely to accept the fix as fair and satisfactory.

It’s important to note that a problem is not solved until the customer is completely satisfied. Be sure not to make assumptions about customer satisfaction. Instead, ask them if they are satisfied with the solution and the service they have received.

6. End on a positive note

The service recovery process isn’t over when the customer is satisfied with the solution. Remember, customer service recovery is also about enhancing brand loyalty.

It’s often not enough that an unpleasant situation has been made right. After all, that’s the service or product your customer should have received in the first place.

Instead, show your customers you care and offer them a token of appreciation. If you’re a subscription service, think about offering a free month of service or waiving shipping fees for delivery. Or, offer a 15% discount for the next purchase. Come up with offers that make sense for your company and offer those to your customers in appreciation for sticking with you through their bad experience.

By doing this, you’ll be sure to end the interaction on a positive note and keep a loyal customer.

7. Follow up with the customer

Want to score extra points in the brand loyalty department? Follow up with the customer to ensure complete satisfaction.

Good customer service recovery continues well after the initial conversation with the customer ends. Ask them if they are still satisfied with the solution and service you provided with a follow-up email, a simple phone call, or take it a step further and mail a handwritten note. Consider asking the customer to respond to a satisfaction survey, too.

It’s also a good idea to keep a record of customer interactions for future reference or analysis.

8. Learn from the recovery experience

While service recovery might seem like it only benefits the customer, that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Service recovery is just as much for your team as it is for customers because it helps your team identify lapses in service or defects in your product line. You’re missing out if you’re not using it as a learning opportunity.

With the information your customer service team gathers from troubleshooting with customers and responses from the customer satisfaction survey, you and your team have the tools to ensure a bad customer experience doesn’t happen again.

Continuously improving and tweaking your products or services based on what you learn makes for a better experience for all, including your customers and employees.

Service Recovery Email Free Templates

Implementing a service recovery plan for your business doesn’t have to be complicated. If your business operates online, you can use these service recovery email templates as a guide to writing your own emails.

Apology Template

Hello [Customer]-

Thank you for emailing us about your concerns with our product line. I’m sorry to hear you are experiencing an issue with our product.

I apologize for the inconvenience, and I appreciate you bringing this to our attention. We stand behind our promise of guaranteeing the best product on the market, and we’ve failed. This one’s on us. 

To clarify, you are experiencing [describe the issue in detail]. We want to make this right for you, and we have a couple of options.

We can offer you a full refund of your order or replace the defective product entirely at no extra cost to you.

Please let us know which option you prefer.

On another note, as a valued customer, we are offering you 20% off your next order. 

Thank you for being with us! 

[Your Company]

Follow-up Template

Hello [Customer]-

I hope this email finds you well!

I just wanted to follow up with you about your product replacement. I see that it was delivered to your address yesterday.

Please let me know if you experience any issues with your replacement product. Y

If you have a minute, we’d love if you took a second to complete a short survey about your experience. We’d greatly appreciate your responses to help us continue to improve.

Don’t forget to use your 20% discount for being such a valued customer! 

Thanks for being awesome!

[Your Company]

Improve Customer Satisfaction with Service Recovery

If you provide a product or service, encountering an angry or rude customer is bound to happen. It’s almost inevitable. But with the proper service recovery plan in place, your customer service team has the power to calm your customers and do right by them.

When mistakes happen, don’t squander an opportunity. Use it as a chance to show your customers you care and build lifelong business relationships.