What Is Customer Service?

Getting crystal clear on customer service

What is customer service exactly? Specifically, what does great service look like?

With 75 percent of service leaders noting a notable uptick in tickets compared to previous years, having clear answers to these questions is critical. After all, your team can’t provide the quality service customers demand from brands if you’re not clear on what exceptional customer service entails.

In this blog post, we explain the key pillars of great customer service so you know what skills to train your team on. We also break down the key metrics you need to understand if your team’s efforts are working.

What is customer service?

Customer service is the assistance you give customers before and after they buy products and services so they have a positive experience with your brand.

Greeting customers cheerfully, answering customer questions fully, and resolving complaints efficiently are all examples of customer service.

But good customer service goes beyond merely replying to support tickets. It’s about delivering personalized, proactive support whenever customers need it and on their channel of choice—whether that’s phone, email, social media, or a combination.

Your team can provide the following types of customer support:

• In-person support: Interact face-to-face with customers in retail stores and other physical locations.
• Phone support: Resolve customer issues quickly by picking up the phone and speaking with customers in real time.
• Email support: Address detailed questions and issues via email and use email management software to prevent messages from slipping through the cracks.
• Social media support: According to The Sprout Social Index, 73 percent of social users say they’ll buy from a competitor if a brand doesn’t respond on social media—think DMs on Instagram, X, LinkedIn, and other platforms.
• AI support: Bring in AI agents to help with responding to questions, scheduling appointments, and other customer service tasks. But be sure to keep a human in the loop to monitor exchanges and review AI-generated responses.
• Live chat support: Engage in real-time, text-based conversations with customers via a chat window on your website or mobile app.

By providing omnichannel customer service, your team can support all customers—not just those calling in or coming through your doors.

Why is customer service important?

Customer service is important because it creates a positive brand impression and experience for customers, which leads to:

• Increased customer retention: Forrester research found that customer-obsessed organizations report 51 percent better customer retention than non-customer-obsessed orgs.
• Improved brand reputation: Happy customers spread positive word of mouth online and in person, enhancing your brand perception and reputation in the process.
• Higher revenue: Forrester also found that customer-obsessed orgs report 41 percent faster revenue growth.
• Stronger competitor advantage: Companies that provide great customer service stand out from those that respond angrily to customer complaints or don’t respond at all.

Meanwhile, the cost of poor customer service can be monumental, with consequences like damaged customer trust, negative reviews, customer churn, and decreased revenue.

Your team can avoid these risks by making excellent customer service a top priority. To achieve this, your team needs to understand the pillars of quality service.

7 pillars of customer service

Providing great customer service is easier when your team is clear on what it looks like. Focus on cultivating the pillars of great customer service with your agents so they’re best equipped to support customers.

1. Responsiveness

Customers expect service teams to respond quickly and helpfully to their questions. The Sprout Social Index even shows that most consumers want brands to respond within 24 hours or sooner.

Make sure your service level agreement (SLA) response times align with the following channel-specific benchmarks:

• Phone: Keep wait time to 2 minutes or less.
• Email: Respond within 1-2 hours.
• Social media: Respond within 4 hours.
• Live chat: Respond within 30 seconds.

2. Empathy

When your team puts themselves in the customer’s shoes, they can connect on a human level rather than providing generic service.

For example, an agent who understands a customer’s frustration with a malfunctioning product will know to acknowledge the customer’s frustration and validate how they’re feeling using empathy statements.

This could be as simple as saying, “I completely understand how frustrating that can be,” or “I’m sorry, you’re experiencing this. Let me see how I can help.”

3. Knowledge and competence

Service agents who understand the company’s products and services and handle customer interactions confidently make customers feel like they’re in good hands.

Skilled and well-informed agents also resolve issues faster, increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

Improve your team’s knowledge and competence by creating a robust training program that educates agents on company products and introduces effective customer service techniques like the HEARD (Hear, Emphathize, Apologize, Resolve, and Diagnose) technique.

Make sure training is continuous and offer plenty of options. For example, provide onboarding training to introduce reps to company products, job aid–style training for key topics like troubleshooting technical issues, and microlearning for quick product updates.

4. Clear communication

Clear communication is speaking to customers and addressing their concerns in a way that’s easy to understand. This means answering questions directly, avoiding jargon, and speaking at a moderate pace so customers can easily follow what you say.

When agents communicate effectively, they increase trust, speed up problem resolution, and strengthen customer loyalty.

5. Consistency

Businesses that provide the same quality service instill trust in customers. When customers notice a pattern of excellent interactions—from contact center calls that resolve their issue to speedy email replies that answer their question—they’re more likely to come back to a brand.

Ensure your team delivers consistent customer service by standardizing escalation processes, follow-ups, and other procedures.

6. Accessibility

Accessibility in customer service means all customers, including those with disabilities, can easily interact with and use your various support options.

For example, your in-person service counters are wheelchair-accessible, help center content is screen-reader compatible, and your call centers include telecommunications relay service (TRS) for people with hearing disabilities.

You can also increase accessibility by training reps on effectively interacting with customers with disabilities and making support available through multiple channels (phone, email, live chat).

7. Personalization

Personalization tailors support based on customers’ specific needs and preferences.

Tailored interactions are more important than ever before, with 78 percent of customers expecting personalized service, per HubSpot’s 2024 State of Service Trends Report.

Your team can personalize interactions by:

• Using customers’ names when communicating with them
• Making customized product recommendations based on previous order history
• Offering automatic ticket escalation and other benefits to VIP customers

When your customer service strategy is built on these key pillars, your team improves customer satisfaction and makes it a no-brainer for people to return to your brand.

How is customer service success measured?

Measuring customer service success is critical if you want to keep customers happy and encourage repeat visits. Here are five metrics to pay attention to:

Customer satisfaction score (CSAT)

Customer satisfaction score measures how happy customers are with an interaction or experience by using a 1–5 scale on a post-interaction survey.

CSAT indicates whether an interaction met, exceeded, or failed to live up to customer expectations.

How to calculate customer satisfaction score: (Number of satisfied customers/Total number of respondents) x 100

Net promoter score (NPS)

Net promoter score measures customer loyalty by looking at how likely customers are to recommend your company on a scale of 0–10, with respondents categorized as promoters (9 to 10), passives (7 to 8), or detractors (0 to 6).

A high NPS correlates with customer retention and predicts revenue growth.

How to calculate net promoter score: (Percentage of Promoters) – (Percentage of Detractors)

First response time (FRT)

First response time measures how long it takes for an agent to respond to a customer after they’ve reached out. Fast responses show customers you care about their time, which gives them a positive impression of your brand.

How to calculate first response time: (Sum of all first response times) / (Number of tickets)

Average resolution time

Average resolution time measures how long it takes to fully resolve a customer issue.

Shorter resolution time often leads to higher customer satisfaction because it proves to customers that your team can solve problems effectively.

How to calculate average resolution time: (Total resolution time for all resolved tickets) / (Number of resolved tickets)

Customer retention rate

Customer retention rate measures the percentage of customers your company keeps over a period of time. It indicates how well you’re maintaining your customer base and directly impacts profitability.

How to calculate customer retention rate: [(E-N)/S] x 100, where:

• E = The number of customers at the end of a given period
• N = The number of customers added within the given period
• S = The number of customers at the start of a given period

Having clear metrics means you no longer have to wonder whether or not your team’s customer efforts are successful. Now, you can look at data and adjust your team’s approach accordingly.

Create better customer service training that improves ROI

Robust customer service training is key to improving how your team engages with customers, which helps decide whether they come back to your brand. Here’s what you need to know before creating your own customer service training.

Core areas of customer service training

Effective customer service training covers the following key areas:

• Product knowledge and updates: Customer training programs should deepen agents’ knowledge of company products so they can assist customers when problems arise. Provide hands-on access to products, share brochures, and refresh training course content to keep agents updated on product changes.
• Communication and active listening skills: Use training videos and role-playing exercises to help agents cultivate their soft skills. Practice listening to and summarizing customer concerns, asking clarifying questions, and using empathy statements.
• Conflict resolution and de-escalation: Educate agents on different types of difficult customers and how to respond to them. Roleplay challenging customer service scenarios and introduce de-escalation strategies like the HEARD technique.
• Process and workflow training: To streamline your team’s workflow, create call center scripts and email templates. Also, train agents on how to use AI to summarize tickets and draft pre-written responses that they can then review for tone and accuracy.
• Technology and CRM tools: When training agents on your CRM and AI tools, encourage hands-on practice so agents can seamlessly integrate these tools into their daily workflows.

Types of customer service training

Customer service training can be broken down into six types:

• Onboarding programs: During onboarding, introduce new service agents to the support team, educate them on company products, and give them access to the tools they’ll use to do their jobs.
• Ongoing skills development: Have agents review communication, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and other essential skills in quarterly skill refreshers.
• Role-playing and scenario-based training: Include role-playing exercises where agents practice common customer service scenarios, like resolving a billing issue, to build their communication, active listening, and empathy skills in a realistic environment.
• Cross-functional product education: Rotate agents across the product, sales, and marketing departments so they develop a deeper understanding of products and can handle more complex questions.
• Leadership and coaching development: Build world-class service leaders by teaching managers how to foster a customer-centric culture and measure service success.

Effective customer service training gives your team the knowledge and skills they need to not only satisfy customers but also lead them to continuously choose your company over competitors.

Achieve customer service excellence through effective training

Great customer service is more than responding to customer questions. It’s making sure they feel seen, heard, and valued in interactions with your brand—and that requires empathy, deep product knowledge, and strong communication skills. Help your team develop these critical skills by creating effective customer service training. If you’re not sure where to start, our free guide covers how to design training that strengthens your team’s skills and drives ROI.

FAQs

What’s the difference between customer service and customer experience (CX)?

Customer service is one aspect of the customer experience that focuses on responding to customer needs in the moment. The customer experience involves every customer-brand interaction and focuses on meeting needs throughout the entire customer journey.

What are common customer service challenges?

Common customer service challenges include handling difficult customers, managing too many requests, navigating fragmented systems, and dealing with complex inquiries.

How is customer service evolving with AI?

AI is making customer service more efficient, personalized, and accessible. For example, agents can use AI to send automated responses to routine inquiries, give customers personalized product recommendations, and provide 24/7 support through chatbots. Enablement teams can also use AI-powered e-learning platforms like Articulate 360 to build effective customer service training.