Blog · Missive

Journey

March 28, 2024

All-hands Team Memo • March 2024

A small window into our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap. Written by our CEO.

At Missive, we're not fans of meetings. However, we’ve just started doing all-hands, few times a year, to keep in sync.

The idea is, prior to each, I send a written memo about our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap – a snapshot of our current status.

After writing the first one, I decided why not share it with our customers. Here it is, memo numero uno.

👋 Hello team,

Things have changed a lot in the last few months for us at Missive. It's important that we all share a common understanding of our journey, our goals, and the path ahead.

Instead of lengthy all-hands meetings where only I talk, I'll capture our vision, challenges, strategies, and roadmap in writing first so you can participate and ask questions.

I wrote each section of this memo to convey specific insights or updates, designed for clarity and brevity. While some sections are brief, each is important. Feel free to engage with each part as it resonates with your role and interests, but I encourage a thorough read to grasp the full picture of where we stand and where we're headed.

On origins

In 2013, Rafael, Etienne, and I started working together on a product called ConferenceBadge, a simple name badge designing tool for event organizers. The product quickly gained traction, allowing us to work full-time on it. However, early on, regardless of sales increasing, we decided that was not what we wanted to do with most of our time.

We wanted to work on a more ambitious project, Missive. The initial idea, devised by Etienne, was: Could we create a collaborative email draft editor? This idea quickly morphed into the first Missive prototype, a full-fledged collaborative email client merged with team chat.

From its inception, Missive was a bold move. By rejecting a safe path for something more ambitious — discarding a successful, revenue-generating, bootstrapped product like ConferenceBadge to work on an unproven idea — many called us crazy.

There, I see two guiding principles, which I think we all should keep and apply forward:

Level up: Build a foundation, a quick win, something achievable with your current means/skills. Then use this as a foundation to propel yourself to the next level.
Long-term thinking: Do not limit yourself or your ambitions to your current situation, think long-term where you want to be, and start acting now.

ConferenceBadge was our foundation, it gave us the means and de-risked our path to working on a product normally built by teams massively funded.

On our long journey

For much of Missive's history, we were a small team of three, ruthlessly prioritizing listening to and delighting our customers.

Our process to decide what to work on next was simple: do customer support ourselves and set out to improve some of the bigger pains our customers were experiencing at that moment. This shows on our changelog, a long list of incremental improvements.

This process worked magically at first, we could fix issues at a speed unmatched by our competitors and ship innovative features at a blistering pace.

After 8 years and more than 3500 paid customers, it started to show its limitations. As we've grown, so has our to-do list. Not too long ago, I found myself knee-deep in customer support, with Rafael and Etienne tackling bug reports that seemed to multiply overnight.

The three of us, juggling everything, had become too big of a liability. We didn't have enough time to do anything meaningful.

Working on a project like Missive can be extremely satisfying when you have the space and time to experiment. Lately, we were more and more heads down, just trying to make things work.

After a couple of attempts at scaling the team unsuccessfully, we were exhausted.

Then, on a rainy November day at a microbrewery near the office, we each took turns, Rafael, Etienne, and I, discussing what we wanted and where we wanted to go. What transpired was that we were absolutely not exhausted from working on Missive, but mostly we were exhausted from doing it alone. On that day, we laid down a plan.

Hire someone to help us hire. (Janie)
Move from our gloomy shared office to a nice HQ. (in construction…)
Hire someone to help us with customer support. (Philippe, Luis)
Hire experienced developers. (Louis-Michel, Grzegorz, Denys)
Hire a talented designer. (Arnaud)

Fast forward 5 months later and I believe we are on track. The team has grown, each of you brings something unique to the table, be it from past collaborations, as a customer, or through your work experiences. Your fresh perspectives and skills are exactly what Missive needs to leap forward. With more hands on deck, we're not just looking to distribute the workload; we're aiming to multiply our capabilities.

I’m confident in saying we are extremely talented and we have what it takes to make a big impact.

I personally set a high bar for ourselves, aspiring to be mentioned in the same breath as Notion and Linear; products known not just for their utility but for their innovative edge and the quality of their user experience.

We were a tiny team, now that we are a bit bigger, we are still going to punch far above our weight.

On mission

We have the ambition of being a meeting-less culture, that’s even why some of you were interested to apply to a job at Missive. Now to be meeting-less, there's a requirement, we need alignment, we need to agree on where we are going. To that effect I wrote this mission statement:

We are toolmakers. Our tools improve communication by breaking silos and ease collaboration. They are built for teams having an outsized impact on the world, like us.

Toolmakers love their craft. They are obsessed with the end result. They build in service of others. They don’t get lost in convoluted processes. They are always focused on creating the best possible product, in the end it’s the only thing that matters.

Missive 3.0

With more time to think, one of our goals this year is to redefine what Missive is. Aiming to make it not just a shared inbox app but a platform that helps small and medium-sized businesses plan around all the work that revolves around their communications.

This is how we’ve been using Missive at Missive for years now. But it’s not just us, our hubris, it’s also what our most fanatic users have wanted for years:

Etienne and Arnaud will spearhead this project and work together on UI improvements and improvements around task management.

Let me give you an example, a freight transportation broker using Missive will exchange hundreds of emails a day with businesses wanting to deliver parcels.

From these emails, hundreds of tasks need to be completed by different people. Currently, such a customer might use the basic task functionality in Missive to achieve this, but it's not an ideal experience.

They are most likely to fall back on using a platform like ClickUp or Asana to manage those tasks, alongside Missive. The feedback we've consistently received is clear: such users would prefer a seamless experience within Missive, where task management is integrated directly into the communication flow. The current task's implementation is too simplistic and conversation-centric. Once tasks are created, they are lost in the sea of conversations and there is no accountability possible.

I believe there's a significant market opportunity here, as virtually every business that relies heavily on daily communication via email or any other text communication channels could benefit from such a built-in way to manage tasks around communication.

We need to make this vision a reality on the product side but also to clearly articulate this via our brand and our different marketing initiatives. This will set us apart from traditional help desks.

On AI

AI is on everyone’s radar; it’s the new hot thing. To me, it would be a mistake to market ourselves as an AI product or define all of our roadmap around it. Of course, short-term it would be great, free media and a lot of attention. But long term all products will have AI built-in. This won’t be a differentiator at all. There is no moat in AI.

Now, I’m not saying it's not important, it is, what I’m trying to articulate it’s that AI should not be the main part of our DNA. We will experiment with it, we will create buzz with it, it’s just not what will set us apart.

On collaboration

As I wrote before, we were a small team, for a long time. We know we’ve developed ways of working that are not compatible with collaborating with more people. With the help of Louis-Michel, Denys and Greg on the tech side of things, we already started changing some of our practices.

I expect you, the new team members, to teach us, the original three, how to work and collaborate in a bigger team. But I expect us to teach you how to be mighty efficient. This will create tensions, it’s good and expected.

As toolmakers, our goal is to create the best product, not implement the best processes. The processes are only good if they help us achieve the best product.

On growth

Growth is the consequence of a great product. There is no shortcut. Any growth initiative should be about putting fuel on an already strong fire.

Historically, growth has been around 2%-6% month over month. We always had a solid stream of new inbound users.

This nice consistent growth, hides a darker reality, for every new users and existing ones who grow with us (seat expansion) we have a lot of users who churn, and usually, after a short period of time.

In this graphic, subscriptions = paid organizations. Above purple is good, orange is bad.

To increase our growth rate we need to work on that orange part and better nurture our inbound users. The recipe is simple:

Better product (make it simple, reduce the confusion)
Better support
Better documentation
Better onboarding
Yearly plan
Impactful brand/marketing
Better product metrics

We need to be more deliberate and eloquent about what Missive is by simplifying the product and the message.

On our changelog

I got curious writing this memo and parsed the data from our changelog and generated a graph showing the number of release elements either tagged as New, Improved or Fixed per quarter over the years.

The trends of both New and Improved features are decreasing faster than the Fixed one. With more and more technical debt and customers to care for, a tiny team can’t forever beat the odds.

On our tool stack

We use Missive, more than anything else, even when it’s not the best fit. We stick to it, we live with its weaknesses… then we improve it. This experience is our fuel; it guides us into creating a better product from a first hand experience.

We avoid using too many tools. Having a simple stack has more advantages than using the perfect tool for every job. The cognitive cost of learning and maintaining many platforms is high. Let’s not fall into this trap.

On the upcoming price increase

On Feb 28th, we announced a price increase. One goal is to make monthly plans more expensive and attract more customers to the new yearly plans.

The announcement email was sent to all ~6k+ admins and owners of paying organizations. We received 124 replies, with 34% neutral, 40% positive, and 26% negative, but none were hyper-negative. So technically, only 0.25% of users replied negatively, which is not bad.

Most of the replies inquired about the possibility of getting their grandfathered seats rolled up into a yearly subscription with a 20% discount. Originally, it was decided that if you upgraded to a yearly subscription, you would move to the new pricing. We decided it would be fair game not to do so. This change allowed me to reply with the following message, to which most responded extremely positively.

I expect to see a lot of customers switching to the yearly subscription next April and May.

On competitors

Who are our competitors? Missive being a pretty general email/collaboration solution, there are a lot of them. From Front to Spark, Superhuman and even to Intercom and Slack.

Should we care? No, we should always refrain from being obsessed with one or listen to only people who switched over to Missive from one of them. We are not copy cats chasing a space with a discounted product.

A lot of our users come from Front, just search for Front on this page to see. Because of this there are strong demands for us to implement their exact feature set. We sometimes do but most of the time we don’t.

We need to find our way.

――――

The end. That's it, this is the starting point, what are we going to achieve together? See you all, tomorrow, at the 🙌 all-hands!

Philippe Lehoux

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Productivity

March 13, 2024

11 Email Auto-Reply Templates to Save You Time

These simple yet effective automatic email reply templates will help you save time and make your work life easier.

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March 7, 2024

Top Property Management Email Templates You Should Be Using

This article provides you with the best email templates that any property managers should be using.

Productivity

February 23, 2024

How to Make Sure Your Emails Land in the Inbox

This in-depth guide dives into the key reasons emails get flagged as spam and offers tips to boost your deliverability.

Every day, approximately 350 billion emails are sent and received. Of these, more than 45% end up in spam. This leads to significant losses for businesses, as marketing emails don't reach their subscribers, transactional emails fail to inform users, and colleagues struggle to communicate effectively.

Magnification glass looking at customer base

Email deliverability is somewhat of a black box, much like SEO. The rules are constantly changing and are not clearly disclosed by major Email Service Providers (ESPs) like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others.

Sometimes these rules are disclosed, as seen recently with the announcement from Google and Yahoo about the enforcement of new security protocols starting in February, but they are often kept unclear.

The good news is, despite the uncertainty, you can greatly improve your email deliverability. If you are worried your messages are getting lost in an email black hole, keep on reading as we’ll delve deeper to understand the main reasons why emails end up in spam, and how to prevent this.

Table of Contents

What is Email Deliverability?

Before we dive into why your emails end up going into spam, let’s first explore a subtle yet so important distinction:

It’s not because your emails show as delivered in the tools you are using (also known as bounce/delivery rate) that they are actually reaching your recipient’s inbox.

Email deliverability is the odds that your email makes it to your customer's inbox and not in their spam.

Why Do Emails End Up in Spam?

There are several reasons why your emails might end up trigger the spam filters. It can be a long story, but it can be simplified into four pillars:

List Management: Sending emails to unsubscribed addresses is a major red flag. Your list should be built organically with permission-based opt-ins. Plus, if you’re still sending emails to old and inactive accounts that end up bouncing, it can negatively impact your reputation.
Content & Engagement: Using excessive exclamation points, ALL CAPS, misleading subject lines, or irrelevant keywords can trigger spam filters and route your email to no man's land.
DNS Configuration: Not implementing email authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC is another redflag for ESPs. These act like digital IDs by verifying your legitimacy and preventing impersonation by spammers.
Monitoring & Optimization: Not regularly keeping track your email deliverability metrics like spam rates, open rates, and click-through rates is another no go. This data can help you identifying areas where you could improve, like content adjustments, list cleaning, or technical optimizations.

By avoiding these red flags, your emails will be able to land in the inbox of your recipients more easily.

Best Ways to Prevent Emails From Going to Spam

List Management

Opt-in

The method you use to collect emails and build your subscriber list has a significant impact. If you employ a deceptive approach to obtain emails and then send these users unsolicited messages, it's likely that these recipients will be displeased with your unexpected emails. The more dissatisfied they are, the more likely they are to mark you as spam.

Ensure you use an opt-in form that clearly communicates to users that they will receive content from you by agreeing and checking a box or a similar mechanism. Be clear, don’t try to be sneaky.

Unsubscribe

Make it easy for people to unsubscribe. Don’t try to hide the link grey on white at the bottom of your email template. People who are unable to unsubscribe are actually people who will flag your email as spam and damage your reputation.

To encourage organizations to have the best practices on this, Google and Yahoo just made it mandatory to have an Unsubscribe button directly in the header of your email. Here’s how it looks:

Cleaning Your Lists

Deprecated Emails

You can use third-party tools to remove emails that have been deactivated or accounts that have been banned. Those create hard bounces and hard bounces are bad for your reputation.

We personally like Neverbounce.

Sunset Policy

If a certain group of subscribers has not opened a single email in the last six months, you might want to send them an email asking if they're still interested. Ultimately, emails that are not interacted with are likely to be flagged as spam.

This is not beneficial for your sender's reputation, and it's a poor final point of contact with your brand for the user. We recommend being kind and warm about it. Let them sail into the sunset if that's their wish!

Content

It's no secret that the type of content you send to your recipient is one of the most important aspects of a successful email campaign. People's time is extremely valuable, so ensure that when you ask for their time to read your content, your content is of top quality and feels genuine.

Here are the most important questions to ask yourself before hitting send:

Relevant and exciting content?
Is it well-written and to the point?
Is it well-designed and fun to look at?
Is it made for my audience?
Does it use any words that could trigger a spam filter?
Would I like to receive this email if I were the reader?

Infrastructure Configuration

Authenticating and securing your emails is a crucial step in ensuring your emails reach the inbox. It's often overlooked by many companies, yet it's one of the easiest ways to improve deliverability.

There's a complex relationship between security and compliance. ESPs aim to reduce spam, scams, and phishing attempts. To support this, they favor domains that have well-configured security and authentication protocols on their domain's DNS.

Although this part can be quite tricky to understand and configure, it's incredibly valuable. It can make the difference between a +39% open rate and a +34% purchase likelihood. Isn't that amazing?

So, What Are Those Authentication and Security Protocols?

Understanding DNS

DNS is like the address book of the internet. Computers use DNS to look up domain names to find the corresponding IP addresses needed to connect to websites, servers, and other internet resources.

That’s also where email service providers like Google, Apple, and Microsoft are instructed on how your emails are secured and authenticated:

Who is authorized to send emails on behalf of your domain (SPF)?
What is the signature they should look for to ensure the content is authentic (DKIM)?
Is your domain protected by a policy? (DMARC)
Is your sender’s identity verified? (BIMI)

Let's dive into each one of these one by one.

Authorized Senders List - (SPF Record)

SPF Records are like a guest list for sending emails. An SPF record is a line of text that specifies which domains or IP addresses are permitted to send emails on behalf of your domain. It resides in your DNS manager, under TXT records.

Here’s an example of an SPF record:

v=spf1 ip4:192.0.2.0/24 ip6:2001:db8::/32 include:_spf.example.com ~all

If an email from your domain is sent to a recipient server without your domain's permission, it could potentially decrease the email's deliverability.

A quick tip: To analyze whether your DNS is configured properly and if your email has a high likelihood of reaching the inbox, you can use Palisade’s free Email Deliverability Score tool. This tool audits your DNS configuration and provides suggestions for improvement.

Digital Signature - (DKIM Records)

DKIM records add a digital signature to your emails that proves they are authentic when they get to the recipient server. It's like the signature on the back of your credit card.

Each third-party service you are using with your domain typically needs its own DKIM key and record.

Here’s an example of an DKIM record:

v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIIBIjANBgkqhkiG9w0BAQEFAAOCAQ8AMIIBCgKCAQEAgAS4QZzH+/iM5ilpxexFK7uVnX5OasDMW61p7IvUjM+488QnpLqDTlsvGdJtG/oHgwRpXcNSxKKhtX3R4zg0MoSdLJYTEMiirr8UdeuGng/ZKM2XtLa+qGve6kp3H5NBx2uYHVj+E0WANeRT3bK5sMVRTYSAywN/m9ugX5T5PkbvJ2HRTmrX00ov4/VoVFSbfHZzaA/FDX/hyFnWEiOb1JihArP2+cMs+CYgIi7u8t+p0FqR/37kuEh5PLxOct/fnhqjn35XPn8C1s2fAC5J2WZjmmC5QM2qYV90isu03jeCI7Vap9ocKj5P+qJAlooYNujICd84ZmcHeA2UJqj22QIDAQAB

Defended Domain - (DMARC)

Protects your domain from people who try to send fake emails (phishing, spam) on your behalf.

The DMARC policy is central to your email deliverability and security. It tells the recipient servers what to do if the emails they receive from you are not authenticated properly in your SPF or DKIM (often referred to as alignment).

Here’s an example of a DMARC record:

v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:dmarc@palisade.email; ruf=mailto:dmarc@palisade.email; fo=1;

Recently Google and Yahoo have started enforcing DMARC policies for all email senders.

Brand Display and Verified Checkmark - (BIMI)

BIMI is the new hot kid on the block. It was just adopted by Google, Apple, Yahoo, and most major ESPs (looking at you Outlook) this past May 2023.

It is now required to verify your identity via email, display your logo in the inbox, and get a verified checkmark in the inbox. You can see it being slowly rolled out by major companies like LinkedIn and Google:

Verified checkmark in the inbox exemple with LinkedIn

Here’s an example of a DMARC record:

v=BIMI1;l=https://images.palisade.email/brand/bimi-logo.svg;a=https://images.palisade.emai/brand/certificate.pem

Monitoring

Monitoring your sender reputation is a significant component of ensuring your email deliverability remains high. Your sender reputation is much like a person's reputation. It takes time to build and is easy to damage.

Unfortunately, there is no "one tool to rule them all" for monitoring. However, there are tools available that can provide some insight into the status of your deliverability.

Domain Reputation, IP Reputation and Spam Rates

One of the best tools out there, even if it only monitors your reputation from Google's perspective, is Google Postmasters.

It allows you to get key data points on your sender reputation from three key angles:

Domain Reputation: How your domain is viewed by Google holistically. All emails coming from all apps combine into one reputation.
IP Reputation: How the third-party app's IP reputation influences your sender's reputation.
Spam Rate: The number of users reporting your emails as spam.

Wrapping Up

Email deliverability is not set and forget, it’s a constant piece of work but oh so worth it.

Many companies spend a significant amount of time A/B testing their funnels and producing content. However, they often overlook the crucial step of ensuring their emails reach their customers' inboxes. If your users aren't seeing your content, what's the point of investing so much in creating it?

We understand, it's not easy. List management best practices are always changing. Content engagement follows the latest trends and designs. DNS compliance is constantly evolving. Reputation Monitoring is sensitive.

After reading this article, we hope that you've gained a better understanding of the basics of email deliverability (and the difference between your emails being delivered), and that you will place more importance on it.

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Tips & Templates

February 5, 2024

How to Set Customer Service Goals for Success

Learn how to set customer service goals for success

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

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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Tips & Templates

February 5, 2024

4 Customer Satisfaction Metrics (NPS, CSAT, CES, & More)

Learn about the most popular customer satisfaction metrics and how to calculate, interpret, and leverage them to delight customers.

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?

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.

Survey for net promoter score — Image by Freepik

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.

Survey for how easy or difficult was it to find the information you were looking for?

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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Tips & Templates

January 31, 2024

Customer Experience Optimization: What Is It & Actionable Steps

Understand what customer experience optimization is, how it can be done, and how to implement it in your business with this short guide.

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.

Bicycles with different shapes of wheels representing the optimization of customer experience

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?

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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Productivity

January 30, 2024

Cc & Bcc in Email: What Do They Mean & When to Use Them

Discover the meaning of CC in emails and learn when to effectively use it. We also cover the difference between CC & BCC.

Emails have been around for a really long time now.

They were originally created as the digital version of mail and borrowed some terminology and core concept from it. Some of these terms that are coming from the paper era are CC and BCC.

If you ever wondered: What does it mean to CC someone in an email? You’ve come to the right place. In this article, we’ll explore what CC means in email and how to use it. Let’s dive into it.

What Does CC Mean in Email?

CC means carbon copy. It's a field in the header of an email that lets you to send a copy of an email to other recipients. When someone is in CC, they can see the email thread, recipients, including other people in CC.

It's a good way to keep other people informed about what is discussed in an email. However, it’s important to know that, unlike the regular recipients of an email, the content of an email is generally not addressed to CC recipients and are not necessarily involved in the conversation.

For example, you may contact a potential client via email and want to keep someone else in your team informed about how things are going with that lead. In that case, adding your colleague in the CC might be a good option as they will be able to see the email thread, but their input won’t be necessary for the conversation.

You can learn more about the history of CC and BCC here.

What Does BCC Mean in Email?

BCC stands for blind carbon copy. It is very similar to the CC feature, but with one major exception:

When you BCC someone on an email, other recipients of the email won’t be able to see it.

This means that the recipients in the "To" and "CC" fields won’t know that you included a BCC recipient in the email.

It is most used when you want to send a copy of an email to someone but don’t want the recipient of an email to know about it. It could be useful if you need to keep someone informed without revealing their identity to others.

The BCC will receive emails just like any other recipients of the email, but their presence won’t be known by anyone else than you and them.

You should always use BCC with care as it comes with some ethical implications around privacy, transparency, trust, honesty, integrity, and even compliance.

What is the Difference Between CC and BCC?

The main difference between CC and BCC in emails is that depending on the one used, other recipients might not be aware that the copy has been sent to someone.

When you CC someone on an email, all recipients will be able to see who received the email and their email addresses. CC is used when you want multiple people to be informed and don’t mind other’s knowing about it.

On the other hand, when you BCC someone, their email address is hidden from other recipients. Recipients are unaware of the presence of BCCs unless they have been mentioned by the sender. BCC is used when you want to discreetly let someone be informed about a conversation without the other recipients knowing.

CC promotes transparency, trust, and in a certain way collaboration among recipients, while BCC maintains confidentiality and privacy. While CC recipients are not expected to actively participate in the conversation, they easily can add their input at any moment. However, BCC recipients remain passive observers.

Here’s a quick breakdown:

	CC (Carbon Copy)	BCC (Blind Carbon Copy)
Visibility	All recipients can see each other	BCC recipients are hidden from other recipients
Recipient Awareness	All recipients are aware of each other	Only BCC recipients and sender are aware of all recipients
Communication Dynamics	CC recipients aren’t active participants in the conversation but can interact	BCC recipients are passive observers
Purpose	Used to keep multiple people informed and sometimes involved	Used to privately include someone without others' knowledge
Transparency	Promotes transparency and collaboration	Can raise concerns about transparency and trust
Privacy	Does not maintain recipient privacy	Maintains recipient privacy by hiding their presence
Ethical Considerations	May raise ethical concerns in a few situations	Raise ethical concerns and requires careful consideration

When to Use CC

CC is a useful tool in your email arsenal. It’s quick and easy to use and provides a good way to improve communication. But from a technical point of view, it is almost identical to the “To” field. The difference lies in the email “conventions”. The “To” field is for recipients the email is originally addressed to and the CC field is for people you want to be informed or want in the loop.

Here are some examples of when you should use CC:

‍Share Information Contained in an Email With Someone‍

CC is a good way to share information with people who are not the primary recipients of an email but want them to be able to see a conversation. CC allows them to stay informed and provides them with context.

However, as we’ll see below, there are some situations where CC is not the best option to use.

Introduce Someone New in a Conversation

When you want to introduce a new person to an existing email conversation, CC should be used. By CC'ing the new participant, you include them in the conversation and let them see the previous discussions. This way, they will be able to quickly catch up on the context and contribute to the conversation.

This use case also applies when you’re emailing someone to introduce them to another person, as the CC’ed person isn’t the person the email is originally addressed to.

When to Use BCC?

Unlike CC, BCC has some specific use cases that couldn’t be replaced by the “To” field. And since the BCC field is hidden from all other recipients, the BCC comes with some advantages.

Email a Large Group and Keep Privacy

This is probably the most common use case for the BCC field in email. Imagine you’re sending an email to all participants of an event you’re organizing, but don’t want all recipients to know the email address of each other. You could add all recipients in BCC and your email address in the “To” field. This way, everyone will receive a copy of the email, but won’t be able to see all the other recipients.

Send a Copy of an Email to Another Email Address Without Giving It to the Recipient

Using BCC is a good option if you want to keep a copy of an email in one of your other email addresses without giving it to the recipient.

When Should You Not Use CC or BCC?

CC and BCC aren’t all good. They also come with their downside, like the inability to easily exchange with colleagues inside an email thread. Let's take a look at situations when you should think twice before using CC or BCC.

You Might Be Overloading People With Emails

We all know how overwhelming it can be to be overloaded with emails and CC’ing people in almost all your emails is a surefire way to fill someone else’s inbox.

Sending every single email to many can make it difficult for people to prioritize their messages and result in the opposite of what you were trying to achieve; keeping them informed and in the loop. It's best to be mindful and avoid inundating others with unnecessary emails.

You Don’t Have People's Consent

Respecting privacy is crucial in all communication methods, and it certainly applies to emails.

Before adding new recipients to a conversation, you should make sure that the recipients accept that you add someone.

There might be sensitive information in the thread that the other person wouldn’t want to share.

You Expect a Response or Action

If you're hoping for a response or direct action from a recipient, then CC’ing them isn’t your best option. Instead, you should include them in the "To" field.

When you CC someone, they will generally assume that no action is required from them and that they should get involved in the exchanges. To avoid confusion and set clear expectations, you should always put people who need to take action in the primary recipient field.

What Are Your Options Instead of CC in Email?

While CC is a great way to add people to the loop, we’ve seen that it’s easy to overload your colleagues if you indulge in CC’ing too much.

A great alternative to the copy carbon field in email using a collaborative email client like Missive.

Share emails, chat inside them with a colleague in Missive without CC and BCC

Missive is a shared inbox and email management software that let you easily share emails with other team members and discuss with them in a conversation.

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FAQ

What is the Difference Between CC and BCC and Example?

CC is a way to send a copy of an email to someone who's not the main recipient. On the other hand, BBC is used to send a copy of an email to someone without the other recipients knowing.

People that are CC'ed will receive replies to the email when someone reply to all, as opposed to the people who are BCC'ed.

Should I Use CC or BCC in Email?

You should use CC (carbon copy) when you want to include other recipients who may be interested in or relevant to the email's content, without requiring a response from them. The CC recipients' email addresses will be visible to all other recipients. You should use BCC (blind carbon copy) when you want to secretly include additional recipients without disclosing their email addresses to the other recipients. BCC recipients will still be able to respond and reply to all, but their email addresses will remain hidden.

Use CC when:

You want to inform other relevant parties for transparency
The additional recipients do not need to respond or take action

Use BCC when:

You want to send the same email to multiple recipients privately
You don't want the additional recipients to be visible to each other
You want to be discreet and possibly more polite

What is the purpose of CC in email?

CC is used in email to send a copy of an email to a secondary recipient that may benefit from the email's content, without having to participate in the discussion.

By adding recipients to the CC field, you can:

Keep other relevant people informed, even if they are not the primary recipient. This can be useful for transparency and information sharing within your company.
Alert others who may find the email useful or important, even if they don't need to take direct action. For example, you may CC your manager on an email to a client, just to make them aware.
Add recipients who you want to "carbon copy" on the communication, without explicitly addressing the email to them. The recipients in the "To" field are still considered the primary audience.
Make it clear that CC recipients are secondary recipients who do not require a direct response. This avoids any potential confusion about whom the email is actually meant for.
Build an email trail within an organization by including relevant parties in communications. This can be useful to track discussions later.

Tips & Templates

December 22, 2023

5 Examples of Bad Customer Service (and How to Fix Them)

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:

Support agents not addressing a customer’s concern.
Prioritize company policy above customer needs.
Displaying a lack of empathy or rude behavior.
Making customers wait for too long.
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.

Tips & Templates

December 22, 2023

8 Soft Skills Proven to Improve Customer Service

Understand the importance of soft skills in customer service. Learn why it's important to invest time and effort into mastering them.

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?

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:

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.

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Crafting a better work experience

On origins

On our long journey

On mission

Missive 3.0

On AI

On collaboration

On growth

On our changelog

On our tool stack

On the upcoming price increase

On competitors

What is an Automatic Email Reply?

Best Automatic Email Reply Templates

1. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for a Holiday

2. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for a Vacation

3. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for Internal Emails

4. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for Maternity Leave

5. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template for a Sick Leave

6. Auto-Reply Email Template for Someone No Longer With Company

7. Out-of-Office Auto-Reply Email Template Offering Alternative Contact Methods

8. New Support Request Auto-Reply Email Template

9. General Business Inquiry Auto-Reply Email Template

10. New Lead Auto-Reply Email Template

11. Job Application Auto-Reply Email Template

How to Create Professional Automatic Email Reply Templates?

Automated Email Replies Made Simple

Setting Up Automated Email Replies in Outlook

Setting Up Automated Email Replies in Gmail

The Best Property Management Email Templates For Your Rentals

Application Communication

New Application Auto-Reply

Approved Application

Declined Application

Application on the Waitlist

Move-in Communication

Maintenance Requests

Receiving a Maintenance Request

Issue Is Resolved Follow-Up

Rent Payment Reminder Emails

Renewals

Move-Out Communication

Best Practices for Effective Property Management Emails

What is Email Deliverability?

Why Do Emails End Up in Spam?

Best Ways to Prevent Emails From Going to Spam

List Management

Opt-in

Unsubscribe

Cleaning Your Lists

Deprecated Emails

Sunset Policy

Content

Infrastructure Configuration

Understanding DNS

Authorized Senders List - (SPF Record)

Digital Signature - (DKIM Records)

Defended Domain - (DMARC)

Brand Display and Verified Checkmark - (BIMI)

Monitoring

Domain Reputation, IP Reputation and Spam Rates

Wrapping Up

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