High-quality customer service creates loyal customers and the path to that objective starts with a human touch. So, 1st pillar of outstanding customer service is personalization. Personalized interactions greatly improve customer service and are essential for building trust. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose. The right way to strengthen that trust is to let customers know that your company cares about them and their problems. How? Educate and train customer service agents to ensure with every interaction that all information provided is reliable, accurate, and consistent. Another important activity towards trust is active listening. Active listening and the ability to ask the right questions will help in better fulfillment of customers’ needs. With simple steps like appreciating customers’ time, a pleasant and warm attitude, and providing knowledgeable and correct information the company is taking steps to exceeding customers’ expectations rather than just to meet them. This is also the right way to build and retrain a customers’ loyalty.

Competence as 2nd pillar on a path to outstanding customer service is the most important one for creating customer experience. Customers rely on your service to fix their problems fast and effectively. The more time and education you invest in your team the more knowledge they will have and the more knowledge they have, the more competent they become. 66 % of people believe that appreciate their time is the most important thing in any online customer experience and competence is a speed booster. Problem-solving skills and attitude are a must for a customer service agent and with the right training and team support, these skills can be mastered.

At your disposal is not just a courtesy talk when it comes to amazing your customers. Customers want their problems to be solved when most convenient for them. Diversity of channels and options on how to contact customer support is pillar no.3 on the how to be the best list. Make the technical part as easy and user-friendly as possible. Include the cross-department collaboration with IT and UX experts and utilize the internal resources to deliver the best customer experience. Besides making it easy for customers to contact you make sure that your team has the right technology and support needed for them to be fast and effective. Investing in the channels and technology means that you are following the trends and industry developments and staying ahead of your competition, listening, and understanding the customers’ needs, and responding to them accordingly.

Providing great customer service will grow your business and all the pillars above combined are to produce the best customer service, make your team productive and satisfied and boost customer loyalty.