What is customer service?

Customer service is the way in which brands help their customers have a positive experience when buying a product or service, as well as ongoing customer needs after purchase. Keeping customers happy at every stage of the customer relationship is the essence of good customer service. And bad customer service can put off a customer for life—so getting customer service right from the start is key.

But what is customer service these days? With the rise of AI, companies are now able to provide personalised service, and that’s changing the game. So here’s how to keep up and make sure you offer great customer service that’s a perfect blend of AI and human focused. Discover why customer service matters and the essential skills you and your team will need to succeed, along with examples of customer service software put into practice—with stunning results.

More in this guide:

• Customer service definition
• Benefits of customer service
• Types of customer service channels
• Top customer service skills for every agent
• How do you offer excellent customer service?
• Customer service examples to learn from
• Frequently asked questions
• Deliver great customer service with Zendesk

Customer service definition

Customer service is the support you offer your customers, from the moment they first contact your business to the months and years afterwards. Whether human or AI, customer service is all about being a reliable partner to your customers, going beyond the basics to help them troubleshoot, use and make informed decisions about your product

Benefits of good customer service

Customer service is important because it is the embodiment of how well you treat your customers through building relationships, solving problems, and supporting them at every step of their journey with you. Good customer service offers clear benefits like customer loyalty and retention, cost savings and increased profits, and competitive advantage.

Word spreads, as Zendesk CX Trends 2024 highlights, 73% of consumers will switch to a competitor after a bad experience, which can tarnish a good reputation, create poor feelings about a brand, and ultimately affect sales. Both good and bad customer service examples live on, through reviews online and in-person.

Customer service is made to keep the fire alive between you and your customers. Customer loyalty is cost-effective as keeping a customer is better for your bottom line than acquiring a new one. According to CX Trends, 66% of consumers who believe a business cares about their emotional state are likely to become repeat customers.

As customer service statistics show, customer service reputation can be the difference in a competitive marketplace. CX Trends reveals that 80% of companies are planning to increase their level of investment in CX, so keeping up is a non-negotiable these days.

Types of customer service channels

Today, we have more customer service management options than ever. Some of the most popular channels include:

• In-person: classic customer service that’s direct, face-to-face, and inherently personal.
• Phone: in real-time, personal voice chat that’s ideal for trickier, complex issues.
• Email: recorded, written interactions that are great for detailed, non-urgent enquiries.
• Live chat and messaging: text-based support that’s perfect for quick questions and immediate assistance.
• Social media: public or private interactions that engage a broad audience quickly.
• Self-service: web-based FAQs, knowledge bases, and forums that allow customers to find solutions independently.
• Omnichannel: a holistic approach that integrates multiple channels for seamless, consistent support.
• AI-powered support: chatbots, virtual assistants, and AI agents—an advanced AI chatbot that’s built for customer service—that provide automated, 24/7 help for routine tasks.

Top customer service skills for every agent

People make the best customer service what it is. So, making sure your customer service team has the right customer service skills prepared for what today’s customer needs is everything.

1. Empathy

Empathy is putting yourself in your customer’s shoes and understanding how they feel. Often in customer service examples, agents are interacting with a frustrated customer from the off. Plenty of empathy helps smooth the waters. Try actively listening to their concerns, giving them space and acknowledging their emotions. Empathetic language can also help show you’re there with them—phrases like ‘I understand’, ‘I can see what you mean’, and ‘I hadn’t thought of that’—to show you relate to the customer on a human level.

2. Clear communication

Building on this empathetic baseline, good communication is key to building rapport and resolving issues calmly, whether verbal or written. Make sure your tone of voice is on brand in every interaction. Agents should clearly explain solutions in a way the customer easily understands, asking clarifying questions to pinpoint any problems and tailoring their communication style to each customer.

3. Speed

It’s a fast-moving world out there—and CX is no different. People don’t have time to hang around, so customer service teams should prioritise speed while balancing other things like accuracy, empathy, and good humour. This combination of hard and soft skills creates well-rounded agents with the agility to help people swiftly. Never rushing or minimising the customer’s needs, agents should aim to resolve issues promptly without sacrificing quality.

4. Adaptability

Every customer is different. So agents need to adapt their approach according to channel demographics, customer personality, and customer needs. A specific situation might need a unique solution, so being ready to chop and change when needed is part of the modern customer service agent’s job description.

5. Collaboration

Customer service agents don’t work in a vacuum. Collaboration is the unsung hero of customer service, especially on the employee experience side. Busy agents ultimately need support to deliver great CX.

For trickier queries, they might need further insight and assistance from other colleagues or departments. That could mean technical teams preloading knowledge bases with quick answers, topic experts jumping in when needed, or managers stepping in to make the final call.

6. Product knowledge

Being into the product and knowing it from every angle means customer service agents are ready to educate and inform customers. Often, customers are getting in touch about an issue that needs fixing, so a customer service agent that doesn’t know their stuff can aggravate the situation further. By keeping knowledge bases up-to-date, participating in ongoing training, and sharing departmental expertise, agents can ensure they have good product knowledge.

7. Tech savviness

More than ever, tech savviness is all-important in today’s customer service. Being comfortable with technology, tools, and channels—like generative AI, chatbots, and the latest automation technology—means that agents can work smoothly and quickly for the customer, effectively troubleshooting as needed. Keeping up to date with the rapidly changing world of CX is not a one-and-done deal, but an ongoing process of applied learning and adapting as you go.

How do you offer excellent customer service?

Excellent customer service is understanding what your customers need and then exceeding their expectations. Being a product expert, actively listening to their concerns and resolving issues efficiently with a positive and empathetic attitude is vital. By setting clear customer service objectives that deliver on this, you can ensure tens across the board.

There are plenty of customer service tips out there to tailor your approach, but here’s our super seven for starters.

1. Evaluate your customer service channels

The best brands know their customers and where to meet them. A customer service channel audit is the best way to find out where your customers are interacting with you over a given period. Focus on the macro (month/week/day) and the micro (hour/minute/second) to get an accurate picture of your customer service channel ebb and flow. Then, use AI-powered reporting functionality to show patterns, changes, or issues that might need work presented in a digestible format that can be easily understood.

Analyse, then adjust your course accordingly. Look forward to new channels and shifts in consumer behaviour, while staying true to your brand. No one wants to see awkward attempts to keep up with TikTok trends if it doesn’t feel genuine.

2. Personalise service

Personalisation has been a major trend in customer service for a while now. Technological innovation with more data and insight means we know our customers’ better than ever before. Now, we can tailor communication, campaigns, and offers to individual customers.

Whether this is automated in emails, messaging, and social media, or by phone and in-person, personalisation is brilliant for making a customer feel heard. In fact, customers now expect a certain level of personalisation. For a complicated multi-stage query, customer service teams accessing interaction history takes the burden off the customer to note everything down.

Not only can we tailor campaigns and offers to customers, we can also ensure they never have to repeat themselves and agents are always informed of their situation. This approach ensures they receive deeply personalised service that reflects their individual customer needs, aligning with the preferences, and connecting people further with the brand in a useful, real way.

3. Offer quick support

Quick but not rushed. Response times are an important customer service KPI. Quicker response times show customers that you value them and their time. Prompt assistance also helps address issues before they escalate, avoiding frustration and improving the overall customer experience.

Fast response times ultimately mean problems are resolved more quickly. And when issues are dealt with quickly, they require less back-and-forth communication, reducing the workload on your support teams and ensuring smoother interactions.

4. Use automation and AI

AI-powered CX software has changed the game. Responsive, 24/7 chatbots powered by NLP respond using relatable, everyday language, generative AI that learns as it goes, AI agents that help in a nanosecond, automatic QA that keeps standards high, and everything in-between. Enterprise-grade AI software, like Zendesk Advanced AI, lets you tap into this intelligence in minutes, not months. A game-changing prospect as your customers can get rapid, 24/7 answers whatever the channel, accompanied by the tailored tone, context, and incentives that encourage repeat business.

Today’s AI goes beyond basic automation. Now, it can be combined with prediction and personalisation to shift interactions customer-by-customer. As analysing past interactions to predict customer needs is becoming the industry standard, AI personalises the customer journey by analysing data and suggesting relevant products or content. Now, this indispensable intelligence is at your customer service teams’ fingertips, along with easy-to-use tools that assist every agent in giving customers what they need when they need it.

5. Train and engage your agents

Keeping agents on the same page and fully engaged is key to delivering great customer service. Fortunately, there’s so much experience out there to learn from. Systematically working through a customer service training guide is useful practice to see where you’re hitting the mark and where you need to put in some work.

When it comes to training, there’s technology out there that’ll do the tracking for you. Comprehensive workforce engagement management (WEM) software can follow agents’ movements, training achievements and monitor resourcing requirements. Workforce management (WFM) software makes staff scheduling easy, allowing you to set up shifts in no time. Use it together with customer service quality assurance (QA) data to help you pinpoint which staff are delivering and who might need more training and support.

6. Harness data-driven insights

Data is the big win from recent CX technological leaps. All this automation means bags of data, offering insight and analysis of your customers and customer service team activity. WEM tools can shed light on pain points, bottlenecks, and ineffective processes for continuous improvement.

By analysing call recordings, texts, emails, and even social media mentions, WEM software can identify trends and patterns in customer behaviour and how agents respond. It can even highlight strengths, showcasing successful interactions and top-performing agents.

7. Prioritise trust and security

Trust and security must underpin the customer service experience. Transparency is a good start—keeping customers in the loop about how data is used and any security protocols in place, along with how sensitive information is protected. Every level of the customer service funnel needs to be held to the same high standard, whether people or technology.

In the UK and across Europe, ensuring any customer interaction meets GDPR compliance legislation is a must. Respecting data privacy by following these regulations not only gives customers control over their personal information, but also demonstrates your commitment to customer wellbeing.

Customer service examples to learn from

Standing on the shoulders of the CX great and good. Here are some dynamic customer service examples that have solved real-world problems with outstanding customer service systems. They provide real insight into how the right customer service software can work for your organisation too.

Stanley Black & Decker: omnichannel customer service

Global power tool brand Stanley Black & Decker has call centres in Turkey, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil handling an average of 10,000 tickets each month, which weren’t joined up across various channels. That’s where Zendesk came in, with an omnichannel solution that covered email ticketing, phone, live chat, and an internal knowledge base to field everyday queries.

Clearly, best-in-class toolmakers like Stanley Black & Decker recognise great tools when they see them. By adopting a bespoke suite of Zendesk multilingual products like Support, Talk, Chat, and Guide, Stanley Black and Decker were able to smash their SLA one-hour response time, often closer to 30 minutes, and reach CSAT scores between 85–90%.

Lush: empathetic customer service

Beauty giant Lush is built on ethical foundations, so its customer service needed to mirror this compassionate approach. Lush consciously prioritised customer service and employee experience as two sides of the same coin, instead of a them-versus-us mentality. For example, any positive comments are passed on to staff, and customers know this.

As a home-grown ethical retailer, Lush was less focused on speed and more concerned with the right brand feeling. Using Zendesk for Retail saw the company’s CSAT scores hit over 90%, even during multiple UK lockdowns—well above other retailer averages.

NHS Digital: fast customer service

Scaling from 800k users to 10 million is no mean feat. NHS Digital needed Zendesk help as the NHS App became the first point of contact for patients and the NHS during the pandemic.

Zendesk customer self-service capabilities were key here. NHS Digital used Answer Bot to field simple queries, added 600 knowledge articles that are automatically surfaced when specific keywords are used, as well as reduced response and resolution times for what are often complicated medical enquiries.

Liberty: AI-powered customer service

Iconic London department store Liberty harnessed Zendesk AI to manage customer flow and personalise the digital Liberty experience, as 50% of sales shifted to online. Liberty’s customer service needed to match the luxury experience of their high-end in-store brands.

Liberty used Zendesk AI to analyse the customer intent, sentiment and language of incoming messages, routing and prioritising them for the most efficient ticket flow and resolution times. This yielded impressive stats, as Liberty’s average first-reply time plummeted by 73% and ticket resolution time fell by 11%.

Frequently asked questions

Deliver great customer service with Zendesk

Delivering great customer service all depends on the people and processes at play. The best customer service examples are when people and technology come together for a seamless CX. You could have the kindest, most empathetic agents in the world but undermine all this good work by your CX solution letting you down. If your customer service software is inefficient, inaccurate or unwieldy to use then today’s tech-savvy customers won’t come back for more. And you might not get a second chance to win them over.

Using a comprehensive customer service solution like Zendesk is a great idea for great customer service. With a swathe of products specifically developed with customer service teams like yours in mind, it’s got everything you need to deliver award-winning CX. Zendesk works right out of the box, scales easily, and is designed to create shiny happy employees and customers.