Deliver customer service excellence: Best practices and strategies

It’s more important now than ever before to deliver customer service in ways that leave your customers delighted with your brand. Top-quality customer service creates brand loyalists, and establishes a shining reputation for your company.

But how can businesses achieve this customer service excellence in practice?

We’ll explore this topic at length below, starting with a quick breakdown of the current state of customer service delivery.

What is customer service delivery and how has it changed in the digital age?

Customer service delivery, in short, is the process of providing a great experience to all customers who interact with your business.

While the principles of customer service delivery haven’t changed—the goal is still to make customers as happy as possible while ensuring you’ve answered any questions they might have—the practical experience of delivering customer service has had to adapt to today’s digital era.

This is because customers can now experience your brand in new ways. That means you’ve got to be sure to provide an excellent digital customer experience.

How to provide good customer service: The broadest strategies and aspects to consider

The digital age has had a major impact on what it means to deliver the service your customers expect. This leads to important questions about how to deliver excellent customer service in practice.

We’ll be breaking down the top tips you can use to influence your customer service delivery strategies on a broad scale. After that, we’ll show you the best practices that will help you go from delivering good to stellar customer service.

Understanding customer needs

The basis of any good customer service strategy is understanding. If you don’t truly understand your customers or their needs, you’ll always have a harder time connecting with them. And without that connection, there can be no good customer service.

On top of that, businesses that understand customer needs will have an easier time with customer retention. That’s because they’ll know what they need to do to keep customers coming back to them.

Customer needs vary by industry. For example, businesses in the fashion industry will often find that customer needs centre on fit, function, comfort, colour, and/or silhouette. Those same customers will also often seek out companies with robust, flexible return and exchange policies, so they can order items in various sizes without worrying about being left with clothes they can’t wear.

Returns would not, on the other hand, be as big of a concern to customers of software companies, or other companies selling services rather than physical items.

Developing a customer-centric culture

Another crucial item on the agenda for any business wanting to provide the best possible experience for their customers is to arrange the company’s culture around those customers.

Or, in other words, to put customers first by default.

This is about more than simply saying “we value our customers”. After all, anyone can claim as much—the key is to find ways to show and prove it.

Let’s consider our fashion industry example again for context. A customer-centric fashion company would simplify the returns process to the extent that customers aren’t afraid to order one item in three different sizes to find their perfect fit, because that company values the customer experience over the need to sell the item three times.

Your company should place customer satisfaction at the top of its list of priorities, then reflect that fact in all business processes. You can do this by making sure that every internal process contributes in some way to optimising the experience for your customers.

For example, if you’re creating new marketing plans, your main goal should be to ensure that these are delightful to your customers (and leads). This ensures your plans are customer-centric and thereby prioritise customers and their needs.

Measuring and assessing progress

It’s difficult to concretely say whether you’ve improved if you don’t have the data to back up your claim. This is why gathering data on the extent to which you’ve made your customers happy is vital if you’re looking to achieve customer service excellence.

In order to measure customer satisfaction, companies typically implement surveys and questionnaires into their customer service approach. These let you ask customers for their feedback after or during any interactions.

You can then turn that feedback into data, and that data into actionable insights.

On top of improving your customer experience, this also lets your customers know that you’re using their feedback to shape your service approach.

Dialpad's AI-powered customer engagement platform makes gathering this useful feedback as easy as possible. You can create CSAT surveys with a matter of a few clicks, and the Ai CSAT feature gives you insights into satisfaction levels—even when customers don’t complete a survey:

Taking an omnichannel approach

Omnichannel customer service is a must when it comes to serving modern-day customers.

An omnichannel approach involves providing the same high standard of customer service across all platforms, creating a seamless experience for anyone reaching out to your business. In an age when consumers have multiple platforms and channels to choose from, it’s crucial to make them equally happy regardless of the platform they’re using to communicate with you.

Also, an omnichannel approach lets you guarantee that any improvements you make to your customer service strategy impact all customers, instead of only the ones communicating via a specific channel. This lets you make holistic improvements.

Tips and ways of managing the delivery of customer service to move from good to excellent

The above practices are intended to help you start to deliver excellent customer service, but what do you do after that?

Perhaps the most important best practice in customer service delivery is to make sure you’re continuously improving. That necessitates constant active effort.

The following list combining well-practised and innovative ideas for customer service delivery will help you guarantee that your customer service quality never stagnates. Because once you’ve ensured you’re doing a good job, it’s time to start doing a great one.

Hiring and training

Customer service excellence begins with brilliant customer service agents. That’s why your strategy for boosting the quality of service you provide must necessarily take hiring and training into account.

Firstly, there’s the hiring process. You’ll want to be sure to screen for candidates that are keen to forge a deep understanding of customers’ needs and respond accordingly.

Often, that means they’ll have experience in handling complex customer queries, though of course, it’s always worth taking a chance on someone with limited experience but an amazing attitude.

Essentially, you’ll want to be sure to search for candidates with the kinds of qualities you can’t teach. Experience with your products, for instance, can be gained later on, whereas a can-do attitude and cheerful demeanour is much harder to acquire if someone doesn’t have it already.

Training is at least as important, if not more so.

Your customer service agents need to know exactly how to provide the experience you want to deliver to your customers. Leave nothing to chance. Cover every important topic, then quiz agents to be sure they properly understood all the information you gave them.

One great thing about training is that you can keep doing it. There’s always going to be a set of initial training for new recruits, but there’s no reason to stop there. Keep developing your agents’ skills by delivering new training modules on a continuous basis.

Solutions like Dialpad can help customer service teams build ongoing training and coaching into day-to-day operations, too. Features like the Real-Time Assist (RTA) cards help agents learn and deliver the right answers to tricky questions, live on calls:

This ensures both that the present customer is well served, and that your agent knows how to answer a similar question in future.

Personalisation and customisation

An unmissable tenet of providing excellent customer service is to make sure your customers all feel valued and respected as individuals. You can begin to achieve this through personalisation and customisation.

To properly personalise the customer experience, you’ve got to be sure to show customers they’re not just a number on a list to you. For example, agents might address them by name instead of with honourifics like “sir” or “ma’am”. This proves that your agents are treating them as the individuals they are, rather than as another faceless person.

As for customisation, you can achieve this by tailoring the experience to each customer’s unique preferences.

We mentioned omnichannel service already, so let’s look at that example again. By offering plenty of channels for customers to reach you on, you’re allowing them to adjust their experience to their personal preferences.

Whether they prefer to speak to someone over the phone, via video call, or over a text-based channel, these choices don’t impact the quality of service they receive.

Empowering employees with the right skills and tools

We’ve already touched on the power that training can have in crafting the ideal customer experience. This leads to the topic of skills and tools.

Customer service employees work with lots of different types of people each day, meaning their communication skills have to be sharp. They’ll also want more specific skills, such as the ability to help de-escalate a tense situation with a customer or re-engage someone who seems disinterested in your products.

These skills can always be taught or improved via seminars, coaching sessions, one-on-one mentorship, or targeted group activities. The result is more skilled employees that are better equipped to make customers happy.

Likewise, well-suited tools are incredibly useful in creating the ultimate customer experience. You’ll want to use a customer engagement or collaboration platform that brings all your communication channels together to provide a seamless omnichannel experience to customers and make life easier for your employees at the same time.

Using artificial intelligence to support your teams

On the subject of tools, AI in customer service has the power to revolutionise your customer service delivery.

Whether it’s by collecting customer data, automatically transcribing conversations, or providing live coaching tips, AI technology like that built into Dialpad can intelligently support customer service agents in creating the best possible experience for their customers.

Artificial intelligence is also great at saving time by eliminating the need for humans to complete repetitive tasks. This leaves human agents with more room in their daily schedules to really dedicate those extra minutes to providing the best possible experience in every interaction they have with customers.

Setting a high standard

Your customer service delivery standards determine everything about the quality of service you end up offering in practice. That’s because you’ll always be comparing your real services to the standards you’ve set.

This is why it’s essential to never get complacent. Striving to be better can only benefit your company and customers alike. As long as you aim high, you’ll be able to keep providing the best possible care to your customers, since your agents will know just what to strive for.

Adopting a continuous growth mindset

The process of crafting the optimal customer experience doesn’t come with a fixed end point.

This is partly because there’s always room for improvement. When your customer service is good, it can be great; when it’s great, it can be excellent, and so on. By thinking in terms of set end points, you’ll limit the potential of your customer service teams and the heights they can reach.

Additionally, the digital world is constantly evolving. What’s a cutting-edge solution now might be the standard by next year. This means that there’s always going to be new tech to incorporate and new approaches to try out where customer service is concerned.

So, in short, it’s absolutely essential to shift your mindset. You’re not aiming to reach an achievement milestone that then lets you forget about improving your customer service delivery. Rather, you’re changing your whole approach to customer service to instead focus on constantly improving your delivery.

By writing this continuous growth mindset into your company’s DNA, you can ensure you’ll keep getting better as time goes by, and that you’ll never get complacent.

Proving you’re acting on feedback

Customers will often appreciate being asked for their thoughts and opinions, as this gives them a chance to let their voices be heard.

That is, as long as you can show that you’re not just gathering the feedback, but also using it to guide your actions.

Companies that want to provide good customer service simply collect customer feedback, then make changes based on it. This is a solid step in the right direction, as it shows that you’re valuing the literal voice of the customer and centring their preferences in your strategy.

However, it’s always good to push the envelope. In this case, you can do that by directly showing customers that you’ve taken their words to heart and made adjustments accordingly.

For example, let’s look at the fashion industry again. If customers seem to be returning a particular item and citing a specific flaw, you can really impress them by improving on that flaw and then calling attention to this in your product description.

Let’s say, for instance, that customers keep complaining that a pair of sandals doesn’t allow them to adjust its straps and therefore fits uncomfortably. You can then release a new version of the sandal that comes with adjustable straps, and mention in the description that you’ve made changes based directly on the feedback left by customers.

This shows that you’re committed to delivering an excellent experience even beyond the actual interactions you have with customers. They’ll know that your brand is worth interacting with, because you’re proving your dedication to improving every aspect of the service they receive from you.

Some real-life examples of delivering excellent customer service

To show you the power of putting our tips into practice, let’s explore some real-life examples of delivering excellent customer service:

Superior

We’ve touched on the importance of continually measuring and improving customer satisfaction This is exactly what treasury solutions company Superior does to provide the best possible service to their customers.

In fact, with the help of Dialpad's AI-powered customer engagement platform, Superior has achieved a CSAT score of 94%, meaning their customers are overwhelmingly happy with the service their team provides. Since they’re able to put a number to this happiness, Superior can quantify it and therefore find ways to keep improving on even such a high score.

Five Iron Golf

A crucial part of providing an amazing experience to your customers with great consistency is to make sure your contact centres operate as a cohesive unit. This is especially important when you have multiple locations or offices around the country (or even around the world).

Five Iron Golf, for example, has 16 contact centres, and needed to unify all of them, so it uses Dialpad's platform to create one holistic customer service experience, regardless of which centre a customer reaches when they get in touch.

Deliver customer service that helps you stand out from the crowd

If you keep just one thing in mind, let it be this: The quest to improve customer experience should be an ongoing one.

Being able to deliver good customer service is only half the struggle. You’re always able to improve and deliver customer service that delights your customers, regardless of new developments in your sector.

In other words, you’ve got to be able to keep getting better.

The tips we’ve shared will help you on that journey. Since new technology and approaches will keep developing as time goes by, it’s important to keep looking for new strategies that can help you. That way, you can guarantee you’re always providing the best possible experience to all your customers.