Best and Worst Customer Service: Insights for Improved Strategies

With an impact on the customer experience that spans satisfactory problem-solving to positive, memorable interactions, the customer service experience a brand provides its customers is a major determinant of online reputation and brand loyalty. While this truth is proven again and again, unfortunately, some brands still fall short of expectations.

Understanding what divides the best customer service and the worst customer service is the first step toward ensuring your business is on the right path. Here I’ll take a brief look at the best and worst customer service approaches and discuss how they’ll help or hinder customer satisfaction.

Why Does Customer Service Need to Be a Priority

Your customer service team is your main connection to your customers. How your CS team performs creates the strongest impression in your customers' minds, hence, it should carefully behave following your company’s stated values, which should include a commitment to exemplary customer care.

A customer service experience that remains in the customer’s mind – for the right reasons – strengthens customer trust, which improves retention and leads to credible word-of-mouth recommendations that bring on board new customers.

What Consumers Want: The Core of Good Customer Service

All customer service endeavors need to be framed by a customer-centric mindset. From the perspective of the consumer, a satisfactory customer service experience will provide:

Acknowledgment and empathy

Customers who make the effort to reach out want their time to be respected. Such respect is given by listening, understanding, reflecting on the customer’s issue, and having a genuine intent to solve the problem.

A prompt response that gets straight to it

A quick answer goes a long way to setting the tone of a customer service interaction. A response in the shortest timeframe suggests to the customer that their inquiry is taken seriously. Combined with the efficiency of a first contact resolution – this is what generates satisfied customers.

Knowledge and autonomy

CS agents that know the product, are clued in on company processes, and, crucially, can take unilateral action to resolve an issue, will communicate clearly, and confidently, and provide solutions efficiently. Remove the frustration of being passed between representatives, and you eliminate one of the top causes of customer service disappointment.

Overlooking these fundamentals of good customer service will cause problems at some point. As a PissedConsumer survey with a list of the best and worst customer service shows, unaddressed issues, tedious waiting times, lack of expertise, and communication failures are behind many customer complaints.

How to Ensure Solid Customer Support

Good outcomes aren’t just the result of chance, high customer service satisfaction is built through effort and the application of tested improvement strategies:

Invest in your customer service team

Customer communication skills, product and process knowledge, and sufficient scenario training give customer service agents the confidence and problem-solving capability to address customer issues swiftly and smoothly.

Smart incorporation of automation

Chatbots and other AI services can address common, easily attended inquiries that don’t require a human touch, allowing a larger number of inquiries to be processed.

Encourage feedback

Actively solicit customer reviews on your product and service. Many unknowns are brought to light this way and can often be the source of the greatest ideas for advancement.

The Ripple Effect of Poor Customer Service

The unhappy customer now has many outlets with wide audiences from which they can share their experience. One negative review can turn off multiple of potential customers, so your brand needs to ensure customer trust by being the first and last point of contact regarding whatever issue they have.