A single bad customer service experience can tarnish a customer’s perception of your brand indefinitely. Conversely, consistently excellent customer service can transform casual customers into loyal brand advocates who passionately endorse your business.
The Power of Customer Loyalty
Loyal customers can be invaluable to your brand. Statistics reveal that 72% of global customers feel a strong sense of loyalty to at least one brand or company. In the United States, the average consumer is part of 16.7 loyalty programs. So, how can your brand cultivate this kind of loyalty?
To answer this, we’ve curated examples from top B2B and B2C brands that have mastered the art of delivering exceptional customer service. But before we delve into these examples, let’s establish what “good” customer service really means.
Table of Contents
- What is Good Customer Service?
- Benefits of Good Customer Service
- How to Provide Great Customer Service
- The Principles of Great Customer Service
- Good Customer Service Examples
What is Good Customer Service?
Good customer service is all about building meaningful relationships with your customers. This includes rapid response times, addressing all customer feedback (positive or negative), offering self-service help options, and creating seamless processes for customers to reach your support team.
Caleb King, Senior Inbound Consultant at HubSpot, describes good customer service as active listening and proactive problem-solving. “For complex issues, good service involves asking discovery questions like, ‘What troubleshooting have you already done?’ and restating the problem to ensure mutual understanding before offering a solution.”
Here are six key characteristics of a good customer service team
- Rapid Response Times
Customers value their time, with 66% stating that quick resolution is the most critical factor in good service. Focus on efficiency by adopting tools that streamline your support operations. - Customer Feedback Collection and Analysis
The best customer service teams don’t assume they know what customers want—they ask. By gathering feedback through surveys and interviews, you can tailor your offerings to meet specific customer needs. - Customer Self-Service
Today’s customers often prefer to solve problems on their own. Providing resources like knowledge bases and FAQs empowers them to find solutions independently, enhancing their satisfaction. - Omni-Channel Support
Your customers should be able to contact you through their preferred channels, whether by phone, email, social media, or live chat. Ensuring accessibility across multiple platforms reduces stress and improves customer interactions. - Emotional Intelligence
The ability to understand and respond to customers’ emotions is invaluable. Emotional intelligence helps defuse difficult situations and can prevent potential customer churn, which represents $35.3 billion in avoidable losses. - Creative Problem Solving
The best customer service teams go beyond the script to find unique solutions to customer issues. Sometimes, this means bending the rules to ensure customer satisfaction, as illustrated in the examples below.