10 essential tips for improving the quality of your customer service

Often neglected or downplayed, customer service plays a vital role in a company.

It acts as an intermediary, in direct contact with customers, while at the same time representing the company. So having a high-quality, efficient customer service is an essential asset for attracting, satisfying and retaining your customers. It's also a powerful lever for standing out from the competition.

Discover our guide, our 10 tips and our selection of tools to strengthen and enhance your customer service. 👇

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Let's go back to the basics of customer service

What is customer quality?

In practical terms, customer quality refers to a company's ability to meet its customers' needs and expectations effectively and satisfactorily.

It is demonstrated by positive interactions at every stage of the customer journey, from initial contact to after-sales.

💡 Quality customer service means rapid, personalised responses and solutions tailored to customers' problems, thus contributing to their satisfaction and loyalty.

What is the role of a customer service department?

Customer service acts as an intermediary between customers and the company. More than just meeting customer expectations, it must exceed them.

1. Its role is to respond to customers' needs and requests at different points in the purchasing process (before, during and after).
2. Their aim is to satisfy the consumer and offer a quality experience.

Even in the digital age, customer service is still a human affair, because it is above all based on exchanges and interactions. So it's impossible to automate (at least not entirely)!

What are the 4 challenges of customer service quality?

1. Building customer loyalty

For your business to survive and be sustainable, you need... customers!

And for consumers to remain loyal to your products or services, they need to be :

• be satisfied with what you have to offer ;
• have a positive experience with your company or brand.

Customer service plays a major role in both these aspects. It can intervene at different levels depending on the company's activity, customer strategy and consumer expectations.

Some entities only manage customer relations prior to purchase (product information, various enquiries, taking orders, etc.). Others are responsible for after-sales and may even have an assistance role (this is the case for technical support).

2. Changes in customer expectations

Customer expectations have changed considerably in recent years. They have given rise to a new concept: experience.

Beyond price, a certain quality or even a brand image, consumers expect not only to have products or services that meet their needs, but also to have a quality experience. And this is all the more achievable for them given the wide and diverse range of products and services on offer today.

👎 If a buyer has a bad experience and the customer service has not met their expectations, they prefer to go elsewhere, even if the product suits them. And the figures prove it. According to a PWC study, 32% of customers change brands if they have had just one bad experience with them.

3. Capturing and retaining customers

Quality customer service helps to

• attract potential customers before they buy ;
• retain them after the sale.

A responsive, well-informed customer service department responds quickly to customers' questions, provides them with personalised advice and guides them in their purchasing decision.

👉 For example, a customer who is hesitant about buying a product will be more reassured if they get clear, precise answers about the product's characteristics, delivery conditions and returns policies.

After the purchase, customer service plays a crucial role in building customer loyalty. By managing complaints effectively and resolving problems quickly, it boosts customer satisfaction.

👉 For example, a customer who encounters a problem with a product and obtains a rapid and appropriate solution will be more inclined to renew their purchase and recommend the company to friends and family. What's more, attentive follow-up and personalised responses show customers that they are valued, which encourages their long-term commitment.

4. Company image

Finally, it's important to remember that customer service represents the company, whether it takes the form of a call centre, technical support, online chat or after-sales service.

For the consumer, who very often has only this channel for communicating or exchanging views with the company, it is the company. So if the branch is not optimal or does not meet customer expectations, it is the company's image that is impacted.

What are the qualities of good customer service?

A small number of qualities are necessary to ensure positive interaction and, ultimately, to boost customer satisfaction and loyalty:

• customer knowledge: understanding customers' needs and preferences so as to offer personalised solutions.
• knowledge of the company: knowing the company's products, services and values perfectly so as to provide precise and relevant answers.
• Active listening: knowing how to listen to customers so as to fully understand their problems and expectations.
• responsiveness: responding quickly and effectively to customer requests and problems.
• empathy: putting yourself in the customer's shoes to better understand and meet their needs.
• Adaptability: managing several channels of communication and adapting to different situations.

What are the 5 essential skills for quality customer service?

An attentive ear and a well-honed discourse are a good start. But it's not enough. Quality customer service is a team that combines know-how, interpersonal skills... and a bit of resourcefulness when needed.

However, certain skills are essential if you want your customer service to shine on a daily basis.

👉 Excellent communication
Talking, writing, explaining, reassuring. A good adviser needs to juggle words like a tightrope walker. And without falling over. No incomprehensible jargon or long-winded sentences. You have to get straight to the point, clearly and precisely.

👉 Good priority management
A spike in complaints, an emergency to deal with, a customer to call back... The day-to-day running of a customer service department is often a jungle. You need to be able to identify what can't wait (and what can wait a little longer), and that's a valuable skill.

👉 A real sense of diplomacy
Dealing with an angry customer without losing your cool is quite an art. It's not about agreeing with everyone, but defusing tensions with tact and respect.

👉 Mastering digital tools
Chat, CRM, databases, tickets, social networks... These tools are an integral part of the job. A good advisor needs to know how to use them with agility, without losing the thread of the conversation.

👉 A culture of feedback
Listening to feedback, learning from it, continuously improving: humility and the desire to progress make all the difference. Because a customer service that's stuck in its ways is a customer service that's stagnating.

10 tips for setting up a quality customer service or improving the existing one

Are you getting poor feedback from your customer advisers? Would you like to create a new department or take on new recruits?

Here are the essential features of a quality customer service 👉

Tip 1: Know your customers

For customer services to respond accurately to customers and provide them with a personalised, tailored solution , they need to know their customers well. And for that, there's nothing more effective than a complete and up-to-date customer file.

Having access to all the customer's orders, favourite products and exchanges with after-sales service is a real advantage for the customer service department, which can then take personalised action and guide its proposals.

It is therefore crucial to enrich the customer file on a regular basis. Advisers should also use it in their communications.

Tip 2: Get to know the company

Giving the customer service team a document with standard answers that they have to repeat over and over is a frequent and damaging mistake.

It is much more productive to have involved advisers who know your company, your expertise, your catalogue of products or services, your values... so that they can provide customers with a qualitative, rather than formatted, response.

Tip 3: Listen to customers

To provide an appropriate response as quickly as possible, the customer service department needs to know how to listen to the buyer. This is a crucial stage in identifying the problem and providing a solution.

It is out of the question, for example, to systematically offer a voucher to a customer who has not received their order. Disappointed at not having received their product or service, they are unlikely to repeat the experience and place another order.

This same customer may wish to :

• cancel their order and be reimbursed
• receive their order as soon as possible (which requires another parcel to be resent);
• obtain an equivalent replacement product, if the one ordered is out of stock or no longer available;
• simply make a change (colour, size, delivery address, etc.).

So to know what response to give, you need to listen carefully to the customer to find out what they want.

Tip 4: Admit your mistakes

A late delivery, a broken product, a pricing error or a discount not taken into account - it happens! No company is immune to these internal or external hazards.

Saying that the fault lies with a third party (carrier, manufacturer, preparer, etc.) or, worse still, with the customer himself is likely to scare off the buyer. The consumer has paid to have a product or service and the whys, hows, by whom, etc. are of no interest to them.

💡 It's better to remain fair-minded by acknowledging that there has been a mistake and offering, for example, a commercial gesture (return of another product, a voucher, etc.).

Once heard and satisfied, the customer

Tip 5: Propose a solution

This point has already been covered in the previous tips, because it stems from knowing the customer and understanding their needs.

However, as it lies at the heart of customer relations and is one of the main tasks of customer service, it's important to come back to it.

👉 A quality customer service department must be able to offer a personalised, tailored solution. You can't simply say that the order has been lost, that the product is out of stock or that the change of address has not been made.

Customers expect a concrete, precise and fairly favourable response to their problem.

✅ Tip: the ideal solution is to draw up an inventory of the various possible responses beforehand, so that when the time comes you can react quickly to offer a suitable solution. The customer will have the feeling that the company is listening to him and is doing its utmost to satisfy him.

Tip 6: Be responsive

Communication, information, consumption, transport... responsiveness is essential these days. So when consumers contact a customer service department, they expect a quick and efficient response.

This doesn't mean rushing to satisfy the customer immediately, but it is crucial to react quickly enough with an initial exchange indicating that the company has heard their request and will get back to them as soon as possible:

• to propose a solution;
• to provide the missing information
• or to find out more about their experience (parcel tracking number, exchanges with after-sales service, etc.).

The response time varies considerably depending on the communication channel used by the customer. They may understand that the customer interface can take 24 or 48 hours to reply to an email (taking into account working hours). But in today's hyper-connected world, they will be rather surprised not to receive a response within the hour to a message sent on social networks.

Tip 7: Support the customer

It's not always about late delivery or damaged parcels. Sometimes a customer contacts customer services for information about the composition of a product, because they can't place an order on the website, or because they want to change their order.

Customer service has to be able to support them throughout the purchasing process and the customer experience. It must make them smooth and pleasant.

Tip 8: Measure customer satisfaction

To find out whether your customer service is effective and of high quality, you can conduct regular surveys of your customers, or encourage them to leave their opinion.

This will enable you to improve your customer service by adjusting its skills.

Tip no. 9: Be proactive

Not all customers are so keen to take part in surveys and opinions. So to improve your consumers' experience of your products, your company and your customer service, you need to be proactive!

👉 Think, for example, about creating social network accounts and diversifying your communication channels. That way, each customer can use the means they prefer to get in touch with you, talk about you, describe their experience, etc.

All this data and feedback will enable you to adjust your activities (including customer service) and optimise the customer experience.

Tip 10: Train your customer service team

It's important that all employees have the same skills and knowledge so that they can speak to customers with a single voice.

Certain skills can be developed and improved, such as empathy, patience and adaptability. By training your new recruits in the same way as your existing advisers, you'll have a consistent and efficient customer service.

💡 Good to know:

Of course, you can train a team to hone your skills... but to work in a customer service department and thrive there, it's also preferable to have certain predispositions. ☝️

So if you're thinking of recruiting, here are the 6 essential qualities of a customer service employee :

1. Enthusiasm 😃: talking to someone who is positive and pleasant is always more interesting than talking to someone who is grumpy or negative. The customer becomes more open and receptive. They also get a good impression of the company.
2. Communication skills 📞: knowing how to draft a clear written message without spelling mistakes, being at ease on the telephone, expressing yourself distinctly without resorting to colloquial language... The candidate must be a good communicator.
3. Know how to manage stress 😡: customer service is often the complaints desk (few consumers call or email to say they are satisfied with a product or service). Employees are therefore directly confronted with annoyed customers. They may also have to deal with an influx of dissatisfied customers (on the phone, in chat rooms and in email inboxes). It is therefore essential to know how to control your own stress and calm that of your customers.
4. Empathy: employees must be able to put themselves in the customer's shoes, or at least understand their situation and expectations.
5. Patience 😐: knowing how to listen to the grievances of an unhappy customer without flinching, having to repeat the same things several times... Customer service representatives need to be patient and zen.
6. Adaptability: they often have to manage several channels (telephone, chat, social networks, email, etc.) at the same time. The employee must therefore be flexible enough to adapt quickly to these different means of communication.

What tools are needed for quality customer service?

💡 There are many tools for delivering automatic messages or setting up a chatbot that can respond instantly to general or recurring problems.

You can rely on them to start a process of exchanges with customer service and to filter requests.

👉 Certain questions (e.g. "Where is my parcel? "Why haven't I received a confirmation email? ") can be solved very simply by a procedure established beforehand and explained to the customer.

At the same time, you can rely on customer service software. These management tools enable you to track and manage requests and incidents reported to customer service or technical support.

They offer a wide range of functions, including

• centralising and managing customer requests from various channels (chat, email, telephone, etc.) ;
• allocating and forwarding requests to the appropriate person;
• a knowledge base;
• analyses and reports on customer service activities.

⚒️ For example, with Salesforce's Service Cloud multi-channel platform, you get a 360° view of all interactions with your customers. Each request is then contextualised, with the aim of providing the most personalised response. Thanks to the Workflow and Approvals functionality, your processes can be automated to the maximum, for greater responsiveness. Finally, you can set up knowledge bases, FAQs and customer areas, so that consumers can quickly and independently find the right solution to their problem.

☝️ And if Service Cloud doesn't work for you, don't worry! There are many and varied customer service tools. You're bound to find one that suits your needs, your environment and your budget. To help you, here's an overview of 4 other tools.

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Customer service quality: in a nutshell!

Quality customer service is vital to a company's health and long-term survival.

To create or boost your own, you can act on various levers (training, knowledge of the company, diversification of communication tools, etc.) and prioritise certain attitudes such as listening to customers, empathy, patience and responsiveness.

You can also use specialised software to make it easier to manage your customer requests and monitor them accurately.