Key Elements of Customer Service

11 key elements of excellent customer service

Businesses today can’t afford poor or even mediocre customer service. According to the 2024  Achieving Customer Amazement (ACA) study, 81 percent of customers will abandon your company because of a bad customer service experience, such as rudeness or apathy. Unhappy customers are also very likely to share their negative experiences with others. The ACA study found that 56 percent would leave a negative rating, while 45 percent would write a negative online review after a bad experience.

Adequate customer service isn’t enough. The entire team must strive to delight the customer. Consider the following 11 elements of excellent customer service and take the time to train your customer support team and implement these best practices. 

1. Excellent customer service teams prioritize each customer.

Customer retention is critical, so every customer deserves to be treated as a vital business asset. Set this standard to ensure your team knows customer satisfaction is the No.1 priority. 

Consider the following ways to prioritize your customers: 

• Treat your customers well at every touchpoint: You must treat each customer like royalty during every interaction. Your customers are the reason you’re in business. It’s your job to ensure they’re happy and want to return for more. 
• Stay professional during every interaction: Everyone gets overwhelmed and frustrated at times and customer support professionals are no exception. However, they should never take out their negative emotions on customers and risk losing them. The ACA report found that 79 percent of customers would switch brands if they knew they’d receive better service from a competitor, so don’t give them a reason to look elsewhere. 

2. Excellent customer service teams are empathetic. 

When a customer contacts your business about a problem, your customer service team must react with empathy. Representatives must recognize and acknowledge that the customer has experienced some pain — whether physical pain, inconvenience, frustration or other harm — due to buying your product or service. 

Reps should listen carefully to the customer and converse in a sympathetic but professional tone, even if the customer is angry or unreasonable. Agents may or may not be able to completely alleviate the customer’s pain or rectify the situation. However, whatever the circumstances of the call, they should respond with statements like “I’m so sorry for that inconvenience” or “I understand that must have been frustrating.” 

Next, they should offer reassurance by saying something like, “Don’t worry, I will work on resolving this for you.” Sometimes, expressing empathy will be enough for the customer to feel satisfied, even if you can’t completely resolve the problem or make up for their inconvenience.

3. Excellent customer service teams apologize for mistakes. 

It’s OK to make a mistake; after all, we’re all human. However, when a business messes up, its frustrated customers will likely expect some contrition. Knowing when and how to apologize for a mishap is essential.

Train your customer service teams on the following best practices for apologizing: 

• Take responsibility for the mistake: Take responsibility for the mistake, own it and sincerely apologize. Never try to deflect blame.
• Fix the problem if possible: Your next order of business should be fixing the problem and resolving it to the best of your ability. Some problems have straightforward fixes that can be implemented immediately.
• Make it up to the customer: Sometimes, it’s not enough to apologize and fix a mistake. For example, say a package shipped later than promised and didn’t arrive in time to meet a customer’s needs. You can apologize and refund shipping costs but that may not be enough to save the customer relationship. Consider compensating the customer for the inconvenience with a benefit, such as a hefty discount or free product or service. 

According to Ruby Newell-Legner’s book Understanding Customers, it takes approximately 12 positive experiences to make up for a single poor one. Offering an apology and making a sincere attempt to fix the problem as quickly as possible are crucial first steps to help reverse the damage. 

4. Excellent customer service teams are easy to reach.

Ensure your customers can reach you when they need a problem resolved or just a listening ear. Being reachable means the following: 

• Being accessible: According to Salesforce’s Sixth Edition State of Service report, 77 percent of customers expect to reach a helpful agent immediately when contacting a company. Some customers prefer to communicate by email or phone, while others (especially younger customers) like live chat, social media and texting for customer service. Ensure you have a team available to respond to customers on all platforms.
• Empowering agents to solve problems: Customers want to contact a company and resolve their problems quickly — they don’t want to be bounced around and repeat their story multiple times. The ACA study revealed that 72 percent of customers would stop doing business with a company if they were repeatedly transferred to different people during a service call. To avoid this problem, empower your employees to make decisions so that your first-call resolution — and customer satisfaction — increases. 

5. Excellent customer service is responsive. 

Responsiveness is a critical element of customer service. To develop a responsive customer relations team, train your employees to return every email, phone call and other form of communication within 48 hours. Even if your team responds to complaints or demanding customers, every return phone call or email should be a priority. 

Responsive customer service also means customers don’t have to wait long for help. The ACA report noted that 73 percent of customers would be “delighted” if a company responded to a support email within an hour. When it comes to calling for help, 48 percent of customers say they’re willing to wait on hold for 10 minutes, but any longer than that would make them angry. Additionally, 75 percent would prefer to be called back than wait on hold, so consider incorporating a call back strategy to alleviate customer frustration and improve responsiveness. 

6. Excellent customer service teams communicate well. 

Customer service requires excellent communication skills. Even if you consistently teach your team customer service best practices, such as responding promptly and apologizing when needed, these lessons may fail to translate to happy customers if your agents don’t know how to listen to, interpret and address customer complaints. 

Excellent communication is unquestionably among the most important elements of customer service, but it’s easy to overlook, so don’t make that mistake.

7. Excellent customer service teams are creative. 

Resolving a customer service complaint is often straightforward. However, in many cases, solving a problem takes creativity and foresight. Encourage (and empower) your reps to think outside the box and train them on creative problem-solving. 

For example, say a customer bought a large, high-ticket item that broke or malfunctioned after they brought it home. In this case, it wouldn’t be practical for them to ship the item back for an exchange or repair. Instead, a quick-thinking customer service rep could refer the customer to a local repair shop and offer to credit the customer’s account for the cost of the repair. 

Empowering reps to devise creative solutions shows customers that your company will go above and beyond to make them happy. It also gives your customer support team more agency, boosting morale.

8. Excellent customer service teams don’t rush customers. 

Efficient customer service is an excellent goal. However, “efficient” doesn’t mean hasty or rushed customer interactions. You never want your customers to feel unimportant or dismissed. It’s important to establish a rapport with the customers via brief small talk and pleasantries and then focus on the issue at hand.

Reps must take sufficient time to truly understand the customer’s issue and create the best solution possible. Rushed and clipped responses are unacceptable. After resolving the problem, reps should ask if there’s anything else they can do to assist the customer, thank them and wish them a nice day before disconnecting. 

9. Excellent customer service provides multiple support options.

Today’s customers expect to be able to reach customer support in a way that’s convenient for them, whether via phone, email, chat, ticket or social media. Providing multiple customer support channels helps ensure customers feel positive about your company. 

Customers also want the ability to seamlessly transition between customer support channels without re-explaining the issue. To provide a better customer experience, consider offering the most robust omnichannel customer experience possible.

10. Excellent customer service is personalized. 

Customer service reps should come to each conversation armed with as complete an understanding of the customer as possible. They should be able to view previous purchases, prior customer service interactions and other customer history details.

After pulling up a customer’s account, reps should reference this information by saying something like, “I see that you have been a customer for 10 years. We really appreciate your business!” or “I see that you called us last week. Is this the same problem you experienced previously or a new issue?” Your CRM software and point-of-sale (POS) system can help personalize all customer interactions. 

11. Excellent customer service is consistent.

The customer journey, including all customer service interactions with your brand, should be consistent and frictionless. Customers should view your brand as a cohesive unit and experience the same high-quality service at every touchpoint. 

Prioritize providing a consistent customer service experience in the following ways:

• Across locations: Whether a customer speaks to a representative on the phone, comes into your brick-and-mortar store or uses a self-service channel on your website, it’s vital to ensure your brand’s policies and procedures are consistent. 
• Across communication channels: Customers expect to communicate across channels without re-explaining their issues. If a complaint originated on social media, your customer service phone rep should be able to access those interaction notes to continue the resolution process seamlessly.
• Throughout your brand: Your business’s tone and voice should feel familiar across your team and craft a consistent customer experience. Deliver consistency through your persona, branding and website design. Consistency throughout the customer journey increases customer satisfaction, boosts loyalty and builds trust.