BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

5 Steps To Offer Incredible Customer Support

This article is more than 9 years old.

I recently went to Pret, a go-to lunch spot, and found that they had no bread rolls to go along with my salad. So I asked if I could have a cookie instead. The cashier called her manager to see if this was possible and he responded, “What do you think is best for the customer?” I left with a cookie in hand, impressed.

Pret is a popular place, and a lot has to do with how they treat their customers. Indeed, customer service is a strong foundation of any organization’s success. Having a great product is wonderful, but if you don’t treat your customers right, you’re not going to get very far. At my company, Imagine Easy Solutions, customer service is an especially important part of our business, and we are always trying to improve how we serve our customers. Here are five steps to create a great customer support foundation. Feel free to tweet me @tapneal for your thoughts!

1. Make the perfect first hire

The first employee of any department is an extremely important investment. When it comes to customer service, he or she is going to define your company’s relationship with its customers, which is the cornerstone of any good business. Success is, after all, largely about perception.

Dana Killian, Eventbrite’s VP of Customer Service, brought the company incredible niche success by creating and building out a very personalized customer service arsenal. She explains that the most important consideration in hiring your first customer support employee is that his or her vision is “personally and professionally aligned” with that of the founders. From there, they must possess a perfect balance of operations and people skills, because they’ll have to build both the CRM and call data systems and be the point person for frustrated customers.

 2. Balance structure and flexibility

The best customer service programs (and companies, really) are able to balance structure and flexibility. This means that there should be expectations and a general format in dealing with customers, but employees should be given some room for creativity in their interactions and in continuing to develop the structure. Not only is every customer different, but in a world with constantly changing technology and competition, it’s imperative that your employees are given the freedom to react.

A part of this is ensuring that your customer service department is fully integrated with the rest of the firm. If the central tenet of customer support is offering the customer the best experience possible, agents must be able to access the relevant sources of knowledge as quickly as possible. Our customer service team, for example, will join our daily developer standup meetings to better communicate technical issues.

 3. Be memorable (in all the right ways)

People don’t just remember products--they remember interactions. Your customer service agents are responsible for those interactions, and so it’s vital that they emphasize kindness, humor, and patience during the parts of the interactions that are most memorable. We tend to remember the beginning and end of conversations best, so be sure to be extra great during those times.

The “beginning” of the interaction may not even start with the agent, though--sometimes a potential customer’s first impression is your webpage or a LinkedIn profile. Make sure those parts of your company are attractive, user-friendly, and professional. Be fast in your responses and willing to apologize whenever something goes wrong. If nothing else, humility goes a long way.

4. Spice it up a bit

Even more that just their own interactions, people really remember stories. So if you get the chance to do something really special for a customer (especially if you can play with sympathies), you’ll leave an impressions that won’t be forgotten. My favorite example is of British grocery chain Sainsbury’s’ reaction to a three-and-a-half-year-old girl, Lily, who was confused by a type of bread called “tiger bread.” She argued that it actually looked more like a giraffe. So what did the customer service reps do?

Customer support manager Chris King wrote back to Lily, explaining the “silly” history of tiger bread. She wasn’t quite satisfied and decided to write back, and so began an adorable correspondence. In the end, the company re-named the bread, and the company received tremendous publicity.

 There are tons of examples of these stories, each more heartwarming than the next. Empower your team to respond creatively and humanely.

 5. Stop Calling It Customer Support

Our writing product, EasyBib, which has over 40 million users, is used in almost every middle and high school. Needless to say, we get a lot of inquiries from students and teachers.

We don’t consider our responses to them as customer support. Instead, we think about it as customer success. We want to empower every user of our site to be successful. When you have this mindset, you’ll find the success of your customers translates into the success of your business.