Don’t wait for someone else to do it. Hire yourself and start calling the shots.

Get Started Free

What is Customer Service?

Customers need support before, during, and after making a sale. Customer service provides this support through information, assistance, and creating a trusting environment. This support can be delivered through many different media, like phone, email, online chat, social media, text message, and more. Customer service can be a great way to distinguish your business from your competitors.

What Does it Mean to be Customer Service Oriented?

Companies that value their customers and invest in making sure they find the information they seek are seen as customer service oriented. To be customer service oriented, a company must have a great customer service training program, and staff who are proud of the work they do.

Why is Customer Service Important to a Company?

Customer Service has many different roles in a company but the most important role they have is being an informant for the company and to the company. But what does this mean?

  • Front of House: Customer Service agents represent the company to prospects and customers alike. The way they portray the company will help customers in their decision to do business with the customer. Therefore agents must be courteous and informative, while also answering questions correctly.
  • Defuse Situations: Customer Service deals mostly with negativity and the need to find a way to turn this into positivity in order to make the customer happy. Negativity could mean a faulty product or confusing instructions, but regardless of the issue, the role of customer service is to calm the customer down and provide information that will please them.
  • Customer Oriented = Customer Experience: When a customer is looking for a product and more than one vendor can provide a high-quality product at a good price customer service can be the deciding factor. Customer Service agents that go above and beyond to make a sale possible can be the reason a customer spends more to buy from that company.
  • Reputation Management: Customer Service agents are normally the first to hear about faults in products and can alert departments to issues before they are even aware of them themselves. This ability to relay information in real-time can save your business thousands in reputation management costs as you can fix problems, issue press releases, and pull products off shelves before things get worse.
  • Real-Time Reviews: On the flip side of reputation management, customer service departments receive positive reviews of the business on a daily basis. These reviews can be showcased on your website, social media, and anywhere else where people can see them. Building a good communication structure into your business so your customer service department can provide feedback to the right department quickly is so important to the long-term success of your business.


Examples of Good Customer Service

Good customer service can be hard to define as it depends on the individual and what they expect, but there are a few examples of skills that make a good customer service department even better. If you want to know what’s an example of good customer service these skills will be involved.

  • Don’t be a Salesperson: Although some call center and customer service departments are sales orientated, it is important to not have this mindset when trying to talk to someone. It can be frustrating talking to someone about an issue, especially if their main goal is to upsell you something else. Being customer service oriented is more important than making a sale when a customer has an issue.
  • Be Honest to Your Customers: If you don’t know the answer say so and try to find the answer for them. This could mean taking their number and calling them when you have found the information, or you could transfer the person to the right department. Providing accurate information to a customer is more important than getting them off the phone.
  • Provide Great Product Training: Answering customer questions all day is one of the hardest jobs in the world but schooling your customer service representatives on your product and ensuring that they know it inside out will mean they have experience with it and can give better insight to customers when they have questions and issues.
  • Be Approachable and Friendly: A customer service department that is friendly can talk volumes about your business. We have all rang a customer service department only to get through to a demotivated person who does not want to help. Preach the importance of your agents being approachable and quick to answer questions so that you leave a lasting positive impression in your customer’s mind.

Want to Learn More?