How to Improve Customer Service: A Step-By-Step Guide

Celia Cerdeira at Talkdesk discusses how to improve customer service, what technologies to lean on, and how to plan a pathway to service success.

In today’s digital world, exceptional customer service is more than a value-add – it’s a key driver of business success.

When businesses consistently meet expectations, they build trust and an emotional connection with their customers. However, when expectations aren’t met, frustration creeps in and customers begin exploring alternatives.

That’s why it’s essential for companies to continuously optimize and elevate the customer experience. So, what defines great service? How can a business ensure it’s delivering the kind of experience that keeps customers coming back?

What Is Customer Service?

Customer service is the support a business offers its customers throughout their journey – before purchase, during the buying process, and after they start using the service or product. At its core, it’s about delivering personalized, seamless interactions that make customers feel seen, heard, and valued.

Today’s customer service goes far beyond issue resolution. It shapes the entire customer experience. Modern consumers expect fast, proactive support on their terms – whenever they need it, and through the channels they prefer.

To keep up, organizations need to embrace an omnichannel customer service model that meets customers where they are and delivers consistent, high-quality experiences at every touchpoint.

Why Is Great Customer Service Important?

Great customer service is the difference between fostering loyalty and long-lasting customer relationships and losing out to competitors with better offers.

Providing an exceptional experience can make all the difference. Reports show that poor customer service risks nearly $3.7 trillion in global sales.

Businesses associated with poor customer service can find it hard to shake their reputation. In today’s market, where online reviews and discourse are so prominent, word of a poor customer experience spreads easily and can deter both new and existing customers.

Strong service, meanwhile, builds a reputation that spreads online just as easily. When customers know their problems are likely to be solved quickly and effectively, they’re more inclined to support a business.

Beyond retaining customers, great service delivers other benefits too, including:

• Employee retention – Employees want to be associated with and work for companies with good reputations. Teams that feel they are delivering something worthwhile are more inclined to stay or recommend their workplace to others.
• Attracts new customers – Existing customers who’ve had a great experience with a business are more likely to become brand advocates, telling their friends and family about the fantastic service an organization provides.
• Increase customer lifetime value (CLV) – When an organization retains customers, those customers tend to spend again in the future. Plus, repeat customers are easier to attract than new ones.
• Addresses customer issues – Anticipating customer needs means providing proactive support. This forward-thinking approach shows that a business is committed to improving its products and services.
• Streamlines processes – Providing good customer service isn’t possible without having a streamlined internal process. Cohesive, efficient processes emerge as a result of focusing on delivering for customers.

So, what does it take for an organization to revamp its customer service approach? It’s not just about making a few tweaks; it requires a coordinated effort across multiple fronts.

Delivering a truly comprehensive customer experience depends on the synergy between three key elements: skilled agents, strategic leadership, and the right technology.

Improving Customer Service Strategy: Strategies For Representatives

Customer service representatives, especially those agents who man the many channels of a contact centre, are the foundation of the customer experience.

As the frontline of support, their performance directly shapes how customers perceive the quality of service, for better or worse.

Check out these customer service improvement strategies for representatives:

1. Improve Average Handle Times

Efficient customer service is a fine balance between handling problems quickly and handling them well. Improving average handle time (AHT) involves streamlining processes to make it quicker and easier for agents to provide a quality experience.

Fast handling times are achievable with the right operational support and training:

• Train agents to provide fast support and accurate answers to customer queries.
• Map the existing customer journey to identify pre-existing problems, hold-ups, and inefficiencies. Solving these roadblocks can go a long way to speeding up handling times.
• Choose supportive technology that assists agents with delivering a quality service at a rapid pace.
• Turn to automation to handle administrative tasks, like after-call note-taking, to relieve the burden on overworked agents and enable them to focus on the next customer call.
• Build a rich knowledge base that agents can turn to for immediate answers, information, or guidance when dealing with customer queries.

2. Empathize With Customer Issues

Powerful human connection starts with empathy, and customer service is no exception. When agents acknowledge a customer’s concerns, it makes people feel heard and valued. A sincere apology and understanding tone can go a long way in setting the stage for resolution.

Truly exceptional agents take it a step further by delivering personalized service. Sometimes, that’s as simple as using a customer’s name or referencing their order history.

With the help of contact centre technologies, like AI agents and natural language processing, agents can tap into real-time context and tailor interactions to each customer.

3. Maintain a Solutions-Focused Mindset

Dealing with frustrated customers comes with the territory in contact centres. When someone’s upset on the line, it’s important to stay focused on solutions rather than absorbing their emotions.

Agents should approach issues with a solution-focused mindset. Stay resilient and help shift a customer from frustration to fulfillment. A positive attitude goes a long way, especially when moving from problems to solutions.

4. Seek Out Continuous Education Opportunities

Customer needs are constantly changing, and agents need to keep up. Seeking out continuous education and a willingness to improve make agents even more effective in their jobs. This might mean training on new technology or how to use existing tools more effectively.

Here are a few ways agents can upskill and improve their performance:

• Understand customer trends – Seek education on new trends, customer preferences, or common problems with new products to get a head start on potential customer issues.
• Coaching – Seeking guidance from more experienced staff members or external coaches can boost agent confidence and clarity on their roles.
• Use interaction analytics – Lean on customer interaction analytics tools to glean valuable insights on customer sentiments and commonly occurring topics and keywords.
• Share best practices – Upskill the whole department by fostering a culture of knowledge sharing. Have top-performing agents share their best practices or insights with other agents to help build a stronger team.

5. Ask Customers for Feedback

Customer feedback is one of the best ways to learn how customers respond to interactions. In their own words, customers describe what they enjoyed about an organization’s customer service processes, what they did not enjoy, and where the organization could improve.

Short customer feedback surveys can be sent immediately after an interaction to collect fresh data on communication after it happens. Use surveys to track important customer service metrics, like agent performance.

Here are some examples of good customer service survey questions:

On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our company to a friend or colleague?

• How easy was it to complete your purchase with us?
• How easy was it to get your issue resolved by our customer service team?
• What did you like most about your experience with us?
• What did you like least about your experience with us?
• What can we do to improve our services?
• How would you rate your overall satisfaction with our product/service?
• How would you rate your satisfaction with our customer service team?
• How well did our product/service meet your needs?

Gathering customer feedback is one thing, but actioning it is another. Implementing suggestions ensures that a business’s service offerings are constantly evolving and meeting customer needs.

Improving Customer Service Strategy: Strategies for Leadership

Leadership’s chief duty is creating an environment that empowers its agents to provide the best customer service possible. A variety of factors go into fostering a culture of success. Let’s take a look at what those are.

1. Define Important Customer Service KPIs and Study Results

While accurately measuring customer experience (CX) can be challenging, it’s a crucial step for business success. Leadership teams need to settle on the most important KPIs worth tracking to drive meaningful improvement.

Monitoring these essential customer metrics can help businesses take steps towards success:

• Net promoter score (NPS) – Measures customer loyalty by asking how likely customers are to recommend an organization to others. The NPS range might look like -100 to +100, with higher scores indicating stronger loyalty and satisfaction.
• Customer satisfaction score (CSAT) – Evaluates how satisfied customers are with specific interactions, products, or services through targeted surveys. CSAT is typically measured on a scale of 1-5 or 1-10.
• Customer effort score (CES) – Gauges how much effort customers must expend to resolve issues or complete tasks. Lower effort scores mean easier processes and usually correlate with higher customer satisfaction.
• First contact resolution (FCR) – Tracks the percentage of customer issues resolved during the first interaction, eliminating the need for follow-ups or callbacks.
• Average handle time (AHT) – Measures the average duration of customer service interactions, including hold time, talk time, and after-call work.
• Customer churn rate – Calculates the percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company during a specific timeframe.
• Quality assurance (QA) scores – Evaluates agent performance against established standards through monitoring and interaction reviews.

Regularly reviewing these KPIs provides the leadership team with insights to guide operational optimizations, allocate resources effectively, and identify training needs.

Without consistent measurement, organizations operate blindly and may miss chances to make improvements for their customers.

2. Implement Workforce Management Technology

Workforce management tools use AI to optimize staff scheduling and resource allocation based on real-time data.

Modern AI-powered workforce engagement management (WEM) platforms go beyond basic scheduling to provide comprehensive solutions for contact centre optimization.

Advanced workforce management tools can help leadership improve customer service by:

• Forecasting busier periods with greater accuracy using AI algorithms that analyze seasonal and historical data.
• Creating optimal schedules that align staffing levels with expected customer demand.
• Identifying skill gaps and training opportunities through performance analytics.
• Enabling flexible scheduling options that improve work-life balance.
• Reducing operational costs by eliminating overstaffing while maintaining quality.

The technology provides leaders with the data and tools needed to make informed decisions about resource allocation, training investments, and operational improvements.

3. Use Customer Service Automation technology.

Leadership can turn to automation technology to ease the administrative burden on their agents. Customer service automation is technology that handles routine customer interactions without the need for human intervention.

Automation technology also delivers substantial benefits, including faster resolution times, consistent service quality, and reduced operational costs. The key is finding the right balance between automated efficiency and human connection.

Many customers still prefer to interact with a human agent, so organizations should give customers the option to talk to a live agent during any automated interaction.

Routine processes like password resets, order status checks, and appointment scheduling can often be automated with minimal customer friction. Meanwhile, more complex or emotionally charged situations should remain with human agents.

4. Let Customers Answer Their Own Questions

Self-service options empower customers to solve their own problems. To help customers solve their problems, an organization might deploy:

• Knowledge bases with searchable articles and FAQs.
• Video tutorials for visual instruction.
• Community forums where customers can help each other.
• AI-powered chatbots that can understand and respond to natural language queries.

Virtual agents like this provide particular value by offering 24/7 support, instantly answering common questions, and transferring to human agents when necessary.

The key is ensuring these tools genuinely solve customer problems rather than adding unnecessary steps to the customer journey.

Regular analysis of self-service usage patterns helps identify opportunities for continuous improvement or new stages for deployment.

5. Create an Omnichannel Customer Journey

All customer interactions are part of a much wider journey, from discovery to purchase. Defining how this customer journey looks and how a customer interacts with an organization across the various touchpoints is essential to providing quality customer service.

Crafting an omnichannel customer journey is a key responsibility of leadership. Unlike multichannel approaches that treat each channel as separate, omnichannel strategies ensure customers can start an interaction in one channel and continue it in another without losing context.

Creating an effective omnichannel customer journey requires:

• Access to customer data across all channels.
• Consistent brand voice and messaging across touchpoints.
• Seamless handoffs between digital and human interactions.
• Personalization based on customer history and preferences.
• Channel-appropriate response strategies that honor customer choices.

The goal is to create interactions that feel continuous to customers, regardless of how they choose to engage. For example, a customer should be able to contact an agent over email and pick up the same problem with a different agent over the phone.

Using AI for Customer Service

For modern contact centres, AI is the leading technology driving optimizations in how businesses create and provide quality customer interactions.

By using AI in customer service, contact centres can move beyond reactive customer service models to more proactive approaches.

Implementing new AI tools can enhance customer service by:

Integrating With Other Technologies

AI systems seamlessly integrate with existing technologies, like CRM platforms and knowledge bases, to create a cohesive system that can help with agents’ productivity and customer service.

Discerning Customer Sentiment

Algorithms analyze customer communications to identify emotional states, tones, and urgency levels. This knowledge helps agents respond appropriately to different customer needs.

Routing Customers to the Right Resources

Intelligent call routing evaluates customer queries, history, and agent expertise to direct interactions to the most qualified representative or self-service option for faster resolution.

Collecting Customer Experience Metrics

AI tools gather, analyze, and visualize customer satisfaction data across channels, providing insights without the need for leadership to sift through data manually.

Adding Auto-Generated Answers to a Knowledge Base

Machine learning algorithms identify common questions and create draft responses that, once reviewed, expand the knowledge base to address customer needs more comprehensively.

AI helps standardize customer interactions, ensuring consistent treatment across the board. Customers come to expect, and get, a standard level of service on the low-stakes problems AI can solve. This transparent, ethical delivery helps define what customers expect when interacting with an organization.

Creating a Four-Step Customer Service Improvement Roadmap

Many organizations struggle to translate customer service goals into tangible results. To do so requires a clear understanding of what improvements customers want and expect to see.

A comprehensive roadmap provides a clear picture of what the goals are and the steps needed to achieve them. Below, we’ve put together a four-step roadmap that provides a structured approach for companies seeking measurable improvements in their customer service operations.

1. Use the Right Customer Service Technology

To improve customer service, a business needs the right technology. Deploying AI-powered, cloud-based software can fast-track change, eliminate departmental silos, and equip agents with the tools to deliver better results.

Some of the technologies a business might implement include:

• AI-powered tools that make customer service smarter, like task automation or feedback gathering.
• Tools that can connect different customer service solutions, such as a CRM system, communication tools, and knowledge bases, so organizations are better able to understand and cater to their customers’ needs.
• Tools that help manage the team, including scheduling, forecasting, and tracking performance.

2. Train Customer Service Reps in CX Best Practices

Regular training equips agents with the skills and knowledge they need to provide the best customer service experience. Lots of information can be drawn into training programs, including:

• Mentoring and coaching from more experienced colleagues.
• Best practice methods.
• New technology or product walkthroughs.
• Training inspired by recent experiences or customer feedback.

Training is where an audience can pull on their customer service experience metrics. By analyzing the data, businesses can identify gaps in service or knowledge and plan accordingly for upskilling that closes these gaps.

3. Create a Personalized Customer Experience

Any contact centre looking to improve must meet modern customer expectations around personalization. Any improvement plan must outline how a business is going to achieve this.

Hyper-personalization transforms regular customer interactions into experiences that drive engagement and loyalty. Here’s how:

• Use customer data to understand individual preferences, purchase history, and previous interactions.
• Develop customer personas and personalization strategies for each distinct group.
• Use contextual information to anticipate needs before customers express them.
• Empower representatives with customer insights that enable more relevant recommendations.
• Create personalized self-service experiences that adapt to customer preferences.
• Ensure consistent experiences across different touchpoints and channels.
• Balance personalization with respect for privacy and data protection regulations.

The most effective personalization feels natural rather than intrusive. Businesses should focus on using data to solve customer problems rather than simply gathering information on their market.

4. Learn From the Data You Collect

Data becomes valuable only when transformed into actionable insights. Decide how to turn gathered data into measurable improvements. To do this, a business needs to:

• Establish regular reviews of key performance indicators, like CSAT or NPS.
• Implement customer experience dashboards that visualize trends and patterns for easier understanding.
• Create multi-department reviews, where customer feedback can be used to improve technical solutions or product marketing.
• Analyze existing customer journey data to identify recurring problems or bottlenecks.
• Compare performance across different channels or audience groups.

Reviewed by: Rachael Trickey