Customer service is a vital but often neglected component of CRM. When Zendesk asked customers who interacted with customer service over the past year about their experiences, the answers were concerning. Nearly half said their frustration with customer service had grown over the past year, and 52% said that it left them exhausted.

There’s a gap between what customers today expect and what they feel they get. So, how do you bridge this gap? How do you improve customer service?

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Taking a multi-pronged approach is key. Improving customer service involves a combination of following best practices, keeping up with trends and using the right tools in the right ways. Let’s dig in!

Article Roadmap

• Why Focusing On Customer Service Is The Key To Growth
• 15 Tips For Improving Customer Service
• 3 Cs of Excellent Customer Service
• Key Customer Service Tools
• Next Steps

Why Focusing On Customer Service Is the Key to Growth

A recent report by Qualtrics found that 72% of companies with above average customer experience scores had better financial results than companies with below average customer experience scores.

Customer experiences drive their purchasing decisions, which of course affects your bottom line. Retaining existing customers is just as important as gaining new ones, especially considering opportunities to cross-sell and up-sell your products and services. Providing excellent customer service encourages customers to continue making purchases and remain loyal to your brand.

Good customer service goes hand in hand with marketing. In fact, according to the same Zendesk report referenced earlier, 60% of customers say that they have made a purchasing decision in the past year based on customer service experience alone. Meanwhile, a PWC report from 2022 found that more than 25% of people surveyed had stopped buying from a brand in the past year due to a negative customer service experience.

The quality of customer service you provide directly impacts your ability to maintain a positive perception of your brand.

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Tips To Improve Customer Service

Let’s talk about some of the best practices to improve the customer service standards at your organization.

1. Understand Customer Needs

Around 80% of customers surveyed by Salesforce for both B2B and B2C organizations say that the experience a company provides is just as important as the product. If you want to deliver a high quality customer service experience to your customers, you need to start by understanding their needs.

Data-gathering tools, like what’s built into help desk software, can give you a better and more comprehensive understanding of customer needs. You can also use surveys as a way of directly engaging with customers, determining what they want and whether you’re delivering it.

Once you’ve identified what your customers need, you can start implementing strategies to provide it.

2. Create a Smoother Customer Experience

Nobody likes to wait around for service. According to the same Salesforce report mentioned above, over 70% of consumers say that they choose not to buy from companies with long customer service wait times.

Make your entire process— from support ticket submission to resolution— smoother and more user-friendly by emphasizing fast turnaround times and using technology to your advantage. Automation tools, for example, can personalize call routing, sending your customers to not only the best agents for their specific needs, but also to the same agent each time, so they feel like you’re building a relationship with them.

3. Prioritize Agent Training

Agents are the most crucial component of any customer service system. Despite the rise in AI technology and chatbots, the U.S. Department of Labor reports that there are still over 2 million people employed as customer service agents across the country. They form the backbone of the industry.

A solid training program helps ensure your agents are comfortable and confident at work, especially in difficult situations. Make sure they’re knowledgeable about your products and services and can respond to customer queries quickly and accurately. Make sure you always emphasize and enforce high customer service standards.

As much as the focus is on your customers, keep in mind that customer service can be extremely emotionally draining for agents. It’s helpful to be mindful of burnout and provide support for them too, so that they stay on top of their game.

4. Use Automation Where Necessary

76% of customers surveyed by Zendesk said that they expect to talk to a representative immediately when contacting a company, yet only about 20% of organizations surveyed say they feel satisfied with the speed of their service. Automating your operations with the right software can help you save time, minimize delays and maximize customer satisfaction.

Call center software and help desk software come with tools like automatic ticket categorization, agent allocation and call distribution that help you create a more streamlined customer service workflow.

While automation is a necessary tool, it is also important to maintain a balance between using human agents and AI. As mentioned before, customers continue to value the human element in customer service. It’s important to be judicious with technology, particularly in customer-facing situations.

5. Don’t Let Your Agents Burn Out

The customer service industry has some of the highest turnover rates among all industries. Emotional burnout, lack of incentives, excessive workloads and administrative apathy are some major difficulties faced by agents, leading to high attrition rates. According to the Zendesk report mentioned above, less than 30% of agents feel that their companies empower them to do their job well.

To prevent these issues from affecting your organization, it’s important to ensure proper workforce planning and support for your agents. Keeping workloads manageable is a major part of this, since overworking can negatively affect employee performance. You should also offer incentives and clear career progression frameworks to keep agents motivated.

Additionally, take your employees’ feedback into consideration when creating management strategies, and offer channels for their grievances to be heard and addressed.

6. Follow Up On Customers

Follow ups after a customer service interaction is finished can help you build customer trust. It shows your customers that you care about them and their well-being beyond just the initial support interaction. Follow up calls can also help you intercept any issues or complaints that the customer may be having even after receiving support.

Customer expectations are only growing. 62% of customers interviewed by Salesforce in 2022 said that they wanted companies to anticipate their needs. However, 56% feel that companies tend to treat them simply as a number. Follow up calls help customers feel valued instead of simply being a number on a balance sheet.

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7. Use the Right Customer Support Tools

Customer service is a very labor-intensive job. Large enterprises often have massive teams of agents interacting with hundreds of customers every day to resolve their issues. To ensure that your workforce is performing at its peak, you need to ensure that they have the right tools.

You can jump to the end of the article for more details on what kinds of tools you can use to improve customer service in your organization. But the main thing to keep in mind when selecting these tools is that they should meet the specific requirements of your organization. Check out our help desk systems requirements article for more in-depth insights on this topic.

8. Personalize Customer Care

In their 2023 report, Zendesk found that personalized customer service was a major emerging trend. 62% of customers agreed that personalized recommendations were better than general ones. Additionally, 59% of customers are now comfortable with companies using their private data to offer better, more personalized experiences.

Experts at McKinsey believe that personalized, white glove service will be the future for customer service. Individual customer profiles can not only help companies provide customers a more tailored experience, but also anticipate their needs and fix problems before they arise.

This level of personalization requires intelligent use of customer data, creating a balance between meeting customer needs and expectations while also respecting their privacy. It’s important to ensure that customer data is not being used haphazardly, but strategically.

9. Break Down Silos

Customer service is an essential part of customer experience and customer relationship management. Yet customer support teams often seem to work in their own silos, separated from marketing and product teams. This can cause confusion and information breakdowns between teams, leading to a disjointed customer experience.

It’s important to treat customer service as an essential part of your CRM strategy. As noted earlier, customer service experiences drive purchasing decisions. However, the aforementioned Zendesk report found that only 22% of companies share data between teams effectively, with many organizations unable to see the revenue generation potential of customer service.

Breaking down silos and working together is key in driving customer loyalty, enhancing brand perception and boosting revenue. Share data between customer service teams and other teams like sales and marketing. Provide your support teams with customer database data so that they can personalize service. Treat your customer service team as an extension of your marketing and branding team and invest in it accordingly.

10. Incorporate Artificial Intelligence

As ChatGPT has undoubtedly proven, AI technology is advancing faster than we can imagine or had expected. The revolution started by modern conversational AI presents unprecedented possibilities for the customer service industry. 65% of business leaders surveyed by Zendesk said that their support chatbots are becoming more natural and human-like, expanding the possibilities for customer service.

A survey by McKinsey found that AI adoption across companies had risen by 56% between 2020 and 2021. Additionally, contact center automation was among the top three most common areas where AI was being deployed. Customers are also more receptive to AI now, with the Zendesk report finding that 73% of customers expect more AI interactions in their lives and 74% believe that AI can improve customer service and make it more efficient.

With current trends being what they are, investing in AI-based customer support options, especially chatbots, is a no-brainer. While the current technology is not capable of fully replacing human agents, it can automate large portions of customer care operations and free up resources.

AI can help you create automated workflows that streamline operations and make your call center more efficient. Other AI-based tools, like ticket categorization and routing, response suggestion and automatic tone analysis, help your agents handle customers better. AI chatbots can even handle simpler customer queries by themselves, helping ease your agents’ workload.

11. Invest in Conversational Support

We talked about personalized customer support and how it’s the key to gaining your customer’s trust. Conversational support is another way of personalizing customer service and making customers feel valued. It aims to engage customers and understand their needs and requirements instead of offering a cliched or generalized answer to their queries.

Conversational support relies on agents having access to customer data so that they can personalize experiences and anticipate customer needs. With the rise of AI, conversational support also involves using advanced chatbots to gauge customer sentiment and understand their intent before passing them on to a human agent who can offer more tailored support.

The main strength of conversational support is its humanity. Agents need to be trained to see the customers as humans and exercise care, patience and compassion while handling their queries. Use the customer’s name where possible, be patient if they are frustrated and try to connect to them on a human level instead of speaking generally or off a script.

12. Pay Attention To Feedback

Paying attention to feedback is essential when your goal is to keep evolving and improving customer care. Customer feedback tells you exactly where you’re lacking and where you can do better. After all, there’s nobody better to ask how you can improve your customer service than your customers themselves.

Customer feedback can be gathered through CSAT (customer satisfaction) surveys. These are short surveys that measure customer satisfaction. You can request your customers to fill this survey after every customer service interaction to get their comprehensive feedback. NPS, or net promoter score, is another important feedback tool. It tells you how likely a customer is to recommend your brand based on customer service experience.

13. Keep Up With Trends

The customer service industry is constantly evolving. Technology advances, customer needs change and old practices become outdated. To ensure that you’re providing your customers with the best care possible, it’s important to keep up with the trends.

The data and the reports referenced in this article should give you some idea of where the trends are headed for customer service. If you want a more detailed look at recent trends in customer care, head over to our help desk software buyer’s guide and customer service software buyer’s guide. We not only cover trends but also how you can use technology to your advantage and differentiate your customer support from competitors.

14. Offer Omnichannel Support

Customers today interact with companies on multiple channels. It’s no surprise that they expect support across multiple channels as well. Salesforce’s survey cited above also found that 76% of customers prefer different channels of communication depending on the context.

While traditional communication channels like email and phone continue to be the most popular, other platforms are rising as alternatives. Social media and messenger apps like WhatsApp have grown in popularity since 2020. Zendesk’s 2022 report even found that the volume of support requests submitted through WhatsApp saw a 370% increase between 2020 and 2021.

Expanding the number of channels you offer customer support on helps you reach your customers more effectively. If you aren’t sure which channels to choose, look into what channels of support your competitors offer. Market research can also help determine which channels are most popular in your industry. Aim to cover all the most popular channels and a few others based on your specific audience’s preferences.

15. Use Self-Service Tools To Reduce Workloads

Self-service tools empower customers to resolve their issues on their own, without the need to contact support.

A report by Gartner found that customer self-service is a priority for business leaders in 2023. 51% of respondents said that funneling support queries to knowledge bases to reduce agent workload is a major priority. Findings by Salesforce in the previously mentioned report confirm that customers are also receptive to self-service tools. 59% of consumers already use self-service tools, and only 17% say they’re not interested in them.

Customers value convenience over everything else, including brand loyalty. Tools like knowledge bases and community forums allow them to resolve issues fast and go back to enjoying your products and services sooner, only reaching out to your agents when absolutely necessary. A lot of help desk software offer tools for setting up and managing detailed knowledge bases and community forums.

Additionally, you can create your own materials, like tutorial videos, user’s guides and webinars, to guide your customers. These tools are helpful for both helping new customers navigate your site or product, and keeping returning customers well-informed and satisfied.

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3 Cs of Excellent Customer Service

We’ve talked in depth about various tips and best practices that can help you improve customer service. But is it enough to just implement these tips? To make a real difference, you need to ensure that the customer service you provide embodies the three Cs of customer service — customer-centricity, consistency and care.

1. Customer Centricity

Customers are the heart and soul of any business. Customer-centricity means organizing your efforts around your customers, so you can make sure they feel valued.

The Ritz-Carlton model is a great example of what customer-centricity can do for your organization. At the Ritz, employees have the permission to spend up to $2000 per guest, per day to resolve a problem and ensure customer satisfaction. This way, the hotel puts their customers above anything else, and creates a memorable experience that leads to long-term relationships and loyalty.

Employees are also mandated to complete 250 hours of customer service training each year to ensure they can uphold the gold standards of Ritz’s customer care values. Additionally, they make sure to observe customers and “read” them to ensure each guest receives the treatment they want, not what the hotel thinks they want. For example, if a customer is rushing through check-in, staff won’t waste their time with small talk.

By maintaining the values of customer-centricity and committing themselves to improve their customer service constantly, the Ritz-Carlton embodies a gold standard of customer experience. But businesses across all industries can find comparable ways to serve and value their customers.

2. Consistency

Along with committing to customer-centricity, you also want your customers to have consistent experiences. Customers should feel secure that, each time they approach you, they’ll receive the same level of service and support they received last time. It can take as little as a single bad experience for a customer to switch brands, so maintaining a consistent, high-quality experience is crucial.

Consider what happened at Meta due to the recent layoffs. A lot of customer service executives were laid off following a massive restructuring of Meta’s workforce during the pandemic. This greatly affected the customer experience. Influencers and content creators who depend on platforms like Instagram for their livelihood had to deal with a flood of spam accounts — and when they turned to customer service for help, they had no one to talk to.

The short-sighted gutting of their customer service department badly hurt Meta’s image and caused a lot of hardship for its users. It also demonstrates why it’s important to invest in your employees and ensure that you have a solid team to maintain customer service standards, even during times of change.

3. Care

It’s also important to focus on the care aspect of customer care. Customers are human and want to be treated as such. However, corporations often take too formal an approach which can feel cold. So how do you incorporate more care in your customer service operations? Online pet supplies company Chewy is a great example to follow here.

When a Twitter user’s pet tragically passed away, she contacted Chewy to see if she could return an unopened bag of dog food. Chewy’s response is an example of what empathy and care can do for customer experience. They refunded the amount, asked the customer to donate the food to a shelter, and, a few days later, sent her flowers and a handwritten note of condolence signed by the customer service representative she communicated with.

This is what we mean when we talk about personalized service. It’s not just about using customer data to give better product recommendations, but more about creating personal, human connections with customers and fostering long-term relationships.

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Key Customer Service Tools

Here are some tools that are key in maintaining a well-organized and productive customer service system.

1. Call Center Software

Call center software is a platform that helps organize and manage the day to day operations of a call center. The software allows your agents to field calls more efficiently, and enables supervisors to monitor service quality more easily.

Programs like RingCentral, Avaya and Vonage offer a variety of features, like automatic call routing, auto dialers, call barging, voice intelligence and sentiment analysis, and call center scripting, which all make the customer support you provide more comprehensive and personalized.

2. Help Desk Software

Help desk software is a program that helps companies create a structured, all-in-one platform to manage their customer service or help desk system. It comes with a variety of tools to help you receive, process and resolve support requests in an organized and timely manner.

Programs like Freshdesk and Zendesk have features like omni-channel support, automated routing, self-service tools, collaborative tools and CRM integration. These tools not only help you help your customers, but they also provide more support for your agents, ensuring the support experience works smoothly on both sides.

3. Ticketing Software

Ticketing software is a help desk tool that converts customer support requests into trackable tickets. Agents view, process and resolve these tickets easily, especially as compared with support requests that can come from multiple channels.

Platforms like JitBit and HappyFox include features like ticket routing, ticket sorting, searching and filtering, multi-channel support and collaboration tools. The software makes it easier than ever to monitor requests from submission to resolution and ensure the best customer experience.

4. VoIP Software

VoIP software enables you to make and receive calls over the internet, without relying on traditional analog phone lines. You can set up virtual call centers and start fully remote customer service operations, even hiring agents from around the world to provide your customers with 24/7 support.

Platforms like 8×8 and MiCloud Connect are indispensable resources for virtual contact center teams. These tools also let you save money because you don’t have to deal with the cost of setting up and maintaining physical phone lines.

5. Knowledge Management Software

As mentioned above, customer self-service is a major emerging trend in customer service — knowledge management software enables you to provide just that. This tool can be used to set up and manage your knowledge base, which is a repository of tutorials, help articles, FAQs, troubleshooting instructions and other helpful resources to help customers help themselves.

Knowledge bases empower customers while also reducing ticket volumes, thus freeing up resources. Help desk tools like Salesforce Service Cloud and Zendesk offer knowledge base creation and management tools as well.

6. Remote Desktop Software

Remote desktop software enables support agents to offer remote software support by accessing a customer’s desktop. These tools help establish a connection between a distant and local host over the internet, allowing users to access another computer. Remote desktop software is an indispensable tool for software service and IT support providers.

Teamviewer is an example of a remote desktop software which can help you access a customer’s computer and offer remote software support easily.

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Next Steps

Good customer service is the backbone of any organization’s success. Providing your customers with a less-than-stellar experience may drive them to another company, even if they like your products or services.

We hope this guide gave you some useful tips on how to improve your customer service. If you’re ready to look for software solutions, you can also check out our call center software comparison report or our help desk software comparison report to find the right fit for your needs.

What’s the most important aspect of customer service in your opinion? How can companies offer better customer experiences? Share your insights with us in the comments below!