What Do the Best Customer Service Departments Have in Common?

Few departments impact a company’s good standing and chances of success as much as customer support. After all, brusque or incompetent support will have dissatisfied customers looking elsewhere, even if your product is the best on the market while it works.

So, how do you build and support an outstanding CS team? Start by learning from the standouts and adopting some of their proven best practices.

Communication Skills and Empathy Are Prioritized During Hiring 

By default, people who’ve reached the point of needing to contact CS are dissatisfied at the very least. Some will inevitably be angry or belligerent, and no amount of scripted responses or technical explanations may be enough to diffuse the tense situation.

Genuine empathy and the ability to communicate clearly under pressure are the basis on which every exceptional CS team is formed. Becoming an expert on specific products and services is relatively straightforward. Meanwhile, it takes a specific kind of person to demonstrate they genuinely understand and want to help.

Active listening is key. Agents who hone it let customers express their grievances and can then tailor their approach to the solution so it satisfies the customer’s needs the best.

High Agent Autonomy and Authority

The faster tickets get resolved in ways customers find acceptable, the more trust and loyalty the CS team helps build. Bottlenecks happen when agents have to clear resolution steps with supervisors while customers experience delays.

Top CS team leads sidestep such problems by empowering their agents. This means that an agent has the authority to resolve certain disputes how they see fit. Maybe they can expedite a refund by turning it into store credit, or they can bump a late order up to priority shipping. Either way, both agents and customers have more options, making favorable resolutions faster and likelier.

Expertise Development

Empathy might shape CS agents' approach, but they still need impeccable product expertise to fully solve problems. On the one hand, this means the department has to develop comprehensive onboarding procedures that give new hires all the technical knowledge they need to do their work competently.

On the other, building expertise involves continuous improvement. This can take the form of regular training sessions where reps familiarize themselves with the latest products and features.

However, capitalizing on the insight gained through real interactions is also important. Customers may ask fringe questions that require obscure answers. If these become part of your knowledge base, agents will be quick to provide help next time.

Leveraging AI’s Full Potential

Customer support is among the first fields to have embraced and been transformed by artificial intelligence. However, average teams make the mistake of only implementing AI chatbots for rote tasks like providing answers to FAQs or helping customers with simple troubleshooting.

While this certainly takes a load off, it's not until human and AI agents synergize that CS teams start to see the biggest improvements. Here, knowing agentic AI use cases will do you a favor — AI agents can act as timely helpers and force multipliers. They actively enhance customer interaction by summarizing ticket histories or pulling up knowledge articles to assist in problem-solving.

AI is also helpful for identifying high-priority customers and gauging sentiment, allowing human CS agents to adjust their approach accordingly. It’s also indispensable for updating CRM entries, sending follow-up emails, and updating knowledge bases with solutions to unusual customer issues.

Continuous Support Across Channels

Some issues take time and multiple follow-ups to resolve. Customers might reach out via social media first. They may then want to continue the conversation through email or on the phone when it's convenient. Naturally, they wouldn't want to – and shouldn’t need to – repeat their problems or keep track of the steps already taken.

Omnichannel support is a must for providing a consistent customer experience. It lets agents pull up past conversations and check ticket statuses on-the-fly so they get up to speed and can continue the process more efficiently.

Investment in Tools that Enable Reliable Work from Anywhere

CS teams should no longer be tied to a single physical office. If anything, companies with a global presence benefit from remote and distributed teams that offer 24/7 support with better coverage and response times. Meeting customer needs in such a dynamic environment is only possible if these teams have all the tools necessary for uninterrupted work.

These fall into two categories. The first are cloud-based tools directly tied to the work itself. For example, CRMs, ticketing systems, knowledge bases, or secure communication platforms.

The second are tools which act as communication enablers. They provide connection redundancy and security, ensuring that agents can maintain stable, reliable access to core systems. These include mobile hotspots and eSIMs, which provide reliable connectivity even if Wi-Fi fails. While eSIM subscriptions can get pricey, Saily discount codes can help bring the cost down for your team.

Alignment with Outcome-Focused Metrics 

Finally, a CS team may only claim excellence if its work can be meaningfully quantified. Response times are a viable indicator, but imprecise and even detrimental if you prioritize them over everything else.

Comprehensive performance assessment also accounts for customer satisfaction, the likelihood of them recommending your company or product, and the time it takes to resolve an issue completely.