What type of customer is outside your organization and expects you to provide services or products?

고객 지원 업무의 특성상, 상담사는 다양한 기질의 사람들과 상호작용합니다.

모든 상황을 해결해 줄 고객 서비스의 만능 열쇠는 존재하지 않지만, 고객의 다양한 유형을 알고 이에 준비가 되어 있다면 이는 상담사의 든든한 버팀목이 될 것입니다.

고객의 특정 요구에 최선의 서비스를 하기 위해서는 해당 고객의 유형을 파악하고 이에 따라 접근 방식을 달리해야 합니다. 이 때 도움이 될 고객 유형 몇 가지를 소개해 드리겠습니다.

5가지 고객 유형

1. 신규 고객
2. 충동적인 고객
3. 화난 고객
4. 주장이 강한 고객
5. 충성 고객

1. 신규 고객

신규 고객은 전반적인 운영 방식에 대해 묻는 경우가 많으며, 때로는 어떻게 질문해야 할지 모르기도 합니다.

이들이 헬프 센터를 찾았다면, 분명 마음이 가는 제품은 있을지라도 상담사의 판매 촉진 활동을 기대하는 건 아닐 것입니다.

신규 고객이 필요로 하는 것은 문제 해결에 관한 지침인 경우가 많은데, 이는 상담사의 입장에서는 간단히 해결 가능한 것일지도 모릅니다. 이렇듯 티켓의 난이도가 낮더라도 상담사는 최선을 다해 이들을 지원하는 것이 중요합니다.

신규 고객이 경험한 첫 고객 서비스가 만족스럽다면, 브랜드 충성도가 싹트고 반복 고객이 될 가능성이 매우 커집니다.

유지 고객은 구매가 처음인 고객보다 전환이 수월한데, 이는 이전 구매 과정에서 기업과 이미 신뢰 기반이 형성되었기 때문입니다.

따라서 신규 고객이 겪고 있는 어려움이 해결되도록 차분히 안내하면, 기업이 고객을 진정으로 위하고 있다는 첫인상을 심어주어 기업의 성공에 기여할 수 있습니다. 또한 신규 고객의 티켓 담당을 순환제로 운영하면, 상담사가 복잡한 업무에서 잠시 벗어나 세세한 부분에 얽매이는 상황이 일의 전부가 아니라는 점을 깨달을 수 있습니다.

신규 고객 대응 전략:

• 비교적 간단한 사안 안내
• 온보딩 지원
• 좋은 첫인상

2. 충동적인 고객

충동적인 고객은 마음에 드는 제품이 눈에 띄면 상대적으로 빠르게 구매하는데, 보통 제품 설명을 꼼꼼히 읽지 않곤 합니다. 따라서 구매한 제품이 자신이 생각한 것과 다르면 고객지원팀에 충동적으로 전화를 하게 될 가능성이 높습니다.

충동적인 고객의 지원 내용 역시 때때로 정당한 지원을 요청하는 사안이므로 응대 초반은 여타 티켓처럼 접근해야 합니다.

하지만 이들이 섣불리 지원 부서에 연락했다는 것이 확실해지면, 가능한 빠르게 문의를 담당자에게 돌려야 합니다. 충동적인 고객은 제품 사용 사례나 보증, 반품 정책 관련 질문을 하기 위해 지원 센터에 연락하는 편이므로, 이러한 상황에 대비하여 브랜드 전반을 소개하는 짧은 스크립트를 준비하면 도움이 될 것입니다.

특정 질문에 반응을 보이는 자동 응답 매크로를 활용하면 고객과의 상담을 유지하는 동시에 상담사의 귀중한 시간을 절약할 수 있습니다.

만일 고객이 여러 부서로 재연결되는 것에 불만을 느낀다면 상담사는 이러한 상황에 공감해주되, 권한 밖의 사항은 어떤 것이든 약속하지 않는 편이 좋습니다. 물론 대부분의 고객 상담은 고객관계 유지가 목표지만 만약에 고객이 정말 잘 모르고 구입한 것이 있다면, 그때는 고객이 처한 상황에서 벗어나게 도와주는 것이 상담사의 최우선 임무가 되어야 합니다.

충동적인 고객 대응 전략:

• 제품 사용 사례나 보증, 반품 정책 안내
• 판매 여부를 떠나 진정으로 공감

3. 화난 고객

고객 하루 일진이 좋지 않든지, 같은 문제에 너무 여러 번 시달렸든지 굉장히 불친절한 고객을 응대해야 하는 경우가 있습니다.

이러한 유형의 고객은 다루기가 쉽지 않지만, 이들이 불만을 갖는 데는 그만한 이유가 있다는 것을 기억하는 것이 중요합니다.

상담사가 화난 고객을 상대로 전략적으로 행동하면 크나큰 부작용이 발생할 수 있으므로, 해당 상황에 대해 아직 방법이 없다는 듯한 태도는 금물입니다. 이런 모습에 고객은 더욱 더 불만을 느낄 수 있습니다.

차분하고 분명한 어조로, 고객이 곤경에서 벗어나려면 정확히 어떤 것이 필요한지 조목 조목 알려줘야 합니다.

고객이 무례하거나 상처를 주는 태도를 보이면, 마음에 담아두지 마세요. 그들의 눈에 상담사는 아마 자신을 힘들게 하는 기계의 톱니바퀴처럼 보일지 모릅니다.

공감 능력을 키우면 불만이 많은 고객을 매우 효과적으로 응대할 수 있습니다. 고객의 관점에서 상황을 바라보며 어떻게 지원해줄지 다각도로 생각해볼 수 있기 때문입니다.

하지만 고객이 화났다는 이유로 이들이 규칙의 예외가 되어서는 안 된다는 점도 기억하세요. 고객과의 상담이 막다른 골목에 이르면, 두려워하지 말고 상급자와 대화를 원하는지 물어볼 수 있어야 합니다.

또한 화난 고객으로부터 고객 피드백을 수집하여 개선할 부분을 반영하고 향후 더 나은 고객 경험을 제공할 수 있도록 노력해야 합니다.

화난 고객 대응 전략:

• 공감해주기
• 상담사의 개인 감정을 배제해 고객의 말을 경청하고 내용을 명확하게 전달

응대가 어려운 고객의 유형과 이들을 지원하는 방법

4. 주장이 강한 고객

이번에는 정보를 상당히 많이 알고 있는 고객 유형입니다.

보통 이들은 구매 전에 스스로 많이 따져보고 결정하는 편이며, 고객지원팀에 연락하기 전에 여러 시도를 해봤을 가능성이 높습니다.

주장이 강한 고객을 응대할 때는 상담사에게 더 효율적인 해결 방안이 있다는 사실을 증명하는 것이 중요합니다. 지식창고나 다른 정보 콘텐츠에 쉽게 접근할 수 있다는 점은 이 과정을 확실히 수월하게 해줍니다.

동시에 고객 니즈를 만족시켜주고 영향력을 지닌 고객처럼 느끼도록 정중히 응대하는 것이 필수입니다.

이들은 고객 지원 서비스가 무례하다고 느끼는 경우, 화난 고객으로 바뀔 수 있기 때문입니다.

마케팅 전략 중 하나로 기업의 FAQ 페이지 이용 경험을 공유해주길 요청하는 것도 좋습니다. 이는 고객 중심의 방안으로, 이를 통해 기업은 서비스 사용자인 고객이 생성한 콘텐츠를 지식창고에 추가할 수 있고 고객은 기업이 자신의 의견을 경청하고 있음을 느낄 수 있습니다.

주장이 강한 고객 대응 전략:

• 문제를 더 효과적으로 해결할 방법이 있음을 증명하기
• 정보 전달에 충실하기
• 적극적으로 경청하기

5. 충성 고객

충성 고객은 상담사가 가장 선호하는 유형이라고 볼 수 있지만, 사실 이들은 훨씬 더 높은 수준의 서비스를 기대하고 있을 가능성이 높습니다.

수년간 고객 기반의 일부로 자리잡은 충성 고객은 영업 부서에겐 기쁨 그 자체지만 지원 부서로서는 이들 고객이 필요로 하는 어떤 특이 사항도 인지하고 처리해야 하므로 또 다른 압박감을 느낄 수 있습니다.

이러한 고객은 이미 기업에 대한 충성도가 있기 때문에 소셜 미디어에 고객의 이야기를 공유하게 할 수 있는 경우, 유기적으로 마케팅을 촉진할 수 있습니다.

하지만 이를 위해서는 만족스러운 지원 서비스 경험을 선사해야 합니다. 기업은 고객의 과거 불만 접수 내용, 구매 내역, 연락처 정보 등 개인화된 상담에 필요한 정보를 활용하여 충성 고객을 식별할 수 있습니다.

충성 고객을 위한 서비스로서 선제적 조치도 바람직한 방법입니다. 이는 문제 악화 혹은 문제 발생 이전에 해당 문제를 미리 해결하는 것을 의미합니다.

고객이 겪고 있는 문제가 기업의 잘못만이 아닌 경우에도 약간의 할인이나 충성도 보상을 제공하는 것이 좋습니다. 이를 통해 충성 고객은 더욱 큰 만족감을 느끼고 기업에 대한 호감도가 높아져 다른 잠재 고객에게 좋은 입소문을 낼 수 있습니다.

충성 고객 대응 전략:

• 다른 고객과 다른 특별한 응대
• 사전 예방적 서비스
• 개인화된 서비스

모든 유형의 고객이 공통적으로 원하는 것

고객의 요구는 애로사항의 종류와 그들의 태도, 기업과의 관계에 따라 차이가 나는 경우가 많습니다. 하지만 이번 고객 경험 트렌드 보고서에 따르면, 개별 고객이 기대하는 우수한 고객 경험에는 몇 가지 공통점이 있습니다. 고객이 원하는 우수한 고객 서비스의 요건은 무엇일까요?

• 문제에 대한 답변이 빠름
• 문제 발생 직후 바로 도움을 줌
• 상담사가 친절함
• 고객이 원하는 채널에서 지원 가능
• 개인화된 서비스를 이용할 수 있어 얘기를 반복하지 않아도 됨

자세한 내용은 보고서를 확인하세요.

It doesn’t matter how great your product is: If your customer service is poor, people will complain about it, and you’ll lose customers.

The good news: It’s not impossible to turn things around. Transforming your customer service from mediocre to great won't happen overnight, though. It requires a serious commitment to meaningful change, a team of rockstar support professionals, and work across the entire organization.

What is customer service?

Customer service is the act of providing support to both prospective and existing customers. Customer service professionals commonly answer customer questions through in-person, phone, email, chat, and social media interactions and may also be responsible for creating documentation for self-service support.

Organizations can also create their own definitions of customer service depending on their vaues and the type of support they want to provide. For example, at Help Scout, we define customer service as the act of providing timely, empathetic help that keeps customers’ needs at the forefront of every interaction.

Why is customer service important?

When 86% of customers quit doing business with a company due to a bad experience, it means that businesses must approach every support interaction as an opportunity to acquire, retain, or up-sell.

Good customer service is a revenue generator. It gives customers a complete, cohesive experience that aligns with an organization’s purpose.

According to a variety of studies, U.S. companies lose more than $62 billion annually due to poor customer service, and seven out of 10 consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service.

Understanding that customer service is the cornerstone of your customer experience helps you leverage it as an opportunity to delight customers and engage them in new, exciting ways.

What are the principles of good customer service?

There are four key principles of good customer service: It's personalized, competent, convenient, and proactive. These factors have the biggest influence on the customer experience.

• Personalized: Good customer service always starts with a human touch. Personalized interactions greatly improve customer service and let customers know that your company cares about them and their problems. Instead of thinking of service as a cost, consider it an opportunity to earn your customer’s business all over again.

• Competent: Consumers have identified competency as the element that plays the biggest role in a good customer experience. To be competent, a customer support professional must have a strong knowledge of the company and its products, as well as the power to fix the customer’s problems. The more knowledge they have, the more competent they become.

• Convenient: Customers want to be able to get in touch with a customer service representative through whichever channel is the most convenient for them. Offer support through the channels of communication your customers rely on most, and make it easy for customers to figure out how to contact you.

• Proactive: Customers want companies to be proactive in reaching out to them. If one of your products is backordered or your website is going to experience downtime, proactively reach out to your customers and explain the problem. They may not be happy about the situation, but they will be thankful that you kept them in the loop.

By building your customer service strategy around these four main principles, you'll create a positive, hassle-free customer experience for everyone who deals with your company.

While delivering consistently good customer service requires work and alignment across your entire organization, a good place to start is your support team. It's important to hire people who genuinely want to help your customers succeed — and to pay rates that are attractive to skilled professionals.

Finding the perfect hire for a support team can be challenging. No particular checklist of job experiences and college diplomas adds up to the perfect candidate. Instead, you’re looking for qualities that can’t necessarily be taught.

These folks thrive on one-on-one interactions within their community. They love problem solving. They’re warm, approachable, and great at teaching other people how things work.

Here are the 21 customer service skills that every support professional should seek to develop and every leader should look for when hiring new team members.

1. Problem solving skills

Customers do not always self-diagnose their issues correctly. Often, it’s up to the support rep to take the initiative to reproduce the trouble at hand before navigating a solution. That means they need to intuit not just what went wrong, but also what action the customer was ultimately after.

A great example? If somebody writes in because they’re having trouble resetting their password, that’s ultimately because they want to log into their account.

A good customer service interaction will anticipate that need and might even go the extra mile to manually perform the reset and provide new login details, all while educating the customer on how they can do it for themselves in the future.

In other situations, a problem-solving pro may simply understand how to offer preemptive advice or a solution that the customer doesn’t even realize is an option.

2. Patience

Patience is crucial for customer service professionals. After all, customers who reach out to support are often confused and frustrated. Being listened to and handled with patience goes a long way in helping customers feel like you’re going to alleviate their current frustrations.

It’s not enough to close out interactions with customers as quickly as possible. Your team has to be willing to take the time to listen to and fully understand each customer’s problems and needs.

3. Attentiveness

The ability to truly listen to customers is crucial to providing great service for a number of reasons. Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customers’ experiences, but it’s also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive at large.

For instance, customers may not be saying it outright, but perhaps there is a pervasive feeling that your software’s dashboard isn’t laid out correctly. Customers aren’t likely to say, “Please improve your UX,” but they may say things like, “I can never find the search feature” or “Where is (specific function), again?”

You have to be attentive to pick up on what customers are telling you without directly saying it.

4. Emotional intelligence

A great customer support representative knows how to relate to anybody, but they’re especially good with frustrated people. Instead of taking things personally, they intuitively understand where the other person is coming from and they know to both prioritize and swiftly communicate that empathy.

Think about it: How often have you felt better about a potential grievance simply because you felt immediately heard by the other person involved?

When a support rep is able to demonstrate sincere empathy for a frustrated customer, even just by reiterating the problem at hand, it can help to both placate (the customer feels heard) and actively please (the customer feel validated in their frustration).

5. Clear communication skills

Your customer support team is on the front lines of problem solving for the product itself, and serves as a kind of two-pronged bullhorn.

On one side, they’ll be the voice of your company to your customers. That means they have to have a practiced grasp on how to reduce complex concepts into highly digestible, easily understood terms.

On the other, they’ll represent the needs and thoughts of customers to your company. For example, it doesn’t behoove the customer to receive a long- winded explanation on the ins-and-outs of solving a particular bug.

The ability to communicate clearly when working with customers is a key skill because miscommunications can result in disappointment and frustration. The best customer service professionals know how to keep their communications with customers simple and leave nothing to doubt.

6. Writing skills

Good writing means getting as close to reality as words will allow. Without an ounce of exaggeration, being a good writer is the most overlooked, yet most necessary, skill to look for when it comes to hiring for customer support.

Unlike face-to-face (or even voice-to-voice) interactions, writing requires a unique ability to convey nuance. How a sentence is phrased can make the difference between sounding kind of like a jerk (“You have to log out first”) and sounding like you care (“Logging out should help solve that problem quickly!”).

Good writers also tend to use complete sentences and proper grammar — qualities that subtly gesture toward the security and trustworthiness of your company.

Even if your company offers support primarily over the phone, writing skills are still important. Not only will they enable your team to craft coherent internal documentation, they signify a person who thinks and communicates clearly.

7. Creativity and resourcefulness

Solving the problem is good, but finding clever and fun ways to go the extra mile — and wanting to do so in the first place — is even better.

It takes panache to infuse a typical customer service exchange with memorable warmth and personality, and finding a customer service rep who possesses that natural zeal will take your customer service out of “good enough” territory and straight into “tell all your friends about it” land.

Chase Clemons at Basecamp advises the following:

“You want to have somebody who you don’t have to give a lot of rules and regulations to. You want to have somebody who is talking to a customer and understands ‘Their boss is really yelling at them today. This person is having a really bad day. You know what? I’m going to send them some flowers to brighten things up.’ That’s not really something you can teach. They have to go the extra mile naturally.”

8. Persuasion skills

Oftentimes, support teams get messages from people who aren’t looking for support — they’re considering purchasing your company’s product.

In these situations, it helps to have a team of people with some mastery of persuasion so they can convince interested prospects that your product is right for them (if it truly is).

It’s not about making a sales pitch in each email, but it is about not letting potential customers slip away because you couldn’t create a compelling message that your company’s product is worth purchasing!

9. Ability to use positive language

Effective customer service means having the ability to make minor changes in your conversational patterns. This can truly go a long way in creating happy customers.

Language is a crucial part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create perceptions about you and your company based on the language that you use.

For example, let’s say a customer contacts your team with an interest in a particular product, but that product happens to be back-ordered until next month.

Responding to questions with positive language can greatly affect how the customer hears the response:

• Without positive language: “I can’t get you that product until next month; it is back-ordered and unavailable at this time.”

• With positive language: “That product will be available next month. I can place the order for you right now and make sure that it is sent to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse.”

The first example isn’t negative per se, but the tone it conveys feels abrupt and impersonal and could be taken the wrong way by customers — especially in email support when the perception of written language can skew negative.

Conversely, the second example is stating the same thing (the item is unavailable), but it focuses on when and how the issue will be resolved instead of focusing on the negative.

10. Product knowledge

The best customer service professionals have a deep knowledge of how their companies’ products work. After all, without knowing your product from front to back, they won’t know how to help when customers run into problems.

All new Help Scout employees, for example, are trained on customer support during their first or second week on the job; it’s a critical component of our employee onboarding process.

According to Help Scout's Elyse Roach, “Having that solid product foundation not only ensures you’ve got the best tricks up your sleeve to help customers navigate even the most complex situations, it also helps you build an understanding of their experience so that you can become their strongest advocate.”

Mitigating gaps in product knowledge

It takes time for team members to build up their product knowledge. And if you have a very complex product, it may take your team members years to learn every one of its ins and outs. However, the right customer support tool can help you mitigate those gaps in product knowledge.

For example, with Help Scout, you can:

• Create a database of saved replies that support agents can use to answer frequently asked how-to questions about your product.

• Search your help center articles and insert links to them in responses without ever leaving the conversation view.

• Set up automated workflows that attach helpful internal notes to conversations with instructions on how to reply.

• Search all previously sent responses by keyword, tag, and more to see if someone else on the team has already answered the question.

Whether you're using Help Scout or one of its alternatives, make sure you browse the features available to help your teams deliver exceptional customer service.

11. Acting skills

Sometimes your team is going to come across people who you’ll never be able to make happy.

Situations outside of your control (such as a customer who's having a terrible day) will sometimes creep into your team's usual support routine.

Every great customer service professional needs basic acting skills to maintain their usual cheery persona in spite of dealing with people who are just plain grumpy.

12. Time management skills

On the one hand, it’s good to be patient and spend a little extra time with customers to understand their problems and needs. On the other hand, there is a limit to the amount of time you can dedicate to each customer, so your team needs to be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner.

The best customer service professionals are quick to recognize when they can't help a customer so they can quickly get that customer to someone who can help.

13. Ability to read customers

It's important that your team understands some basic principles of behavioral psychology in order to read customers' current emotional states. As Emily Triplett Lentz writes:

“I rarely use a smiley face in a support email when the customer’s signature includes ‘PhD,’ for example. Not that academics are humorless, it's just that :) isn’t likely to get you taken seriously by someone who spent five years deconstructing utopian undertones in nineteenth-century autobiographical fiction.”

The best support pros know how to watch and listen for subtle clues about a customer's current mood, patience level, personality, etc., which goes a long way in keeping customer interactions positive.

14. Unflappability

There are a lot of metaphors for this type of personality — “keeps their cool,” “staying cool under pressure,” and so on — but it all represents the same thing: The ability some people have to stay calm and even influence others when things get a little hectic.

The best customer service reps know that they can’t let a heated customer force them to lose their cool. In fact, it is their job to try to be the “rock” for customers who think the world is falling apart as a result of their current problems.

15. Goal-oriented focus

Many customer service experts have shown how giving employees unfettered power to “wow” customers doesn’t always generate the returns many businesses expect to see. That’s because it leaves employees without goals, and business goals and customer happiness can work hand-in-hand without resulting in poor service.

Relying on frameworks like the Net Promoter Score can help businesses come up with guidelines for their employees that allow plenty of freedom to handle customers on a case-to-case basis, but also leave them priority solutions and “go-to” fixes for common problems.

16. Ability to handle surprises

Sometimes, customers are going to throw your team curveballs. They'll make a request that isn't covered in your company guidelines or react in a way that no one could have expected.

In these situations, it's good to have a team of people who can think on their feet. Even better, look for people who will take the initiative to create guidelines for everyone to use in these situations moving forward.

17. Tenacity

Call it what you want, but a great work ethic and a willingness to do what needs to be done (and not take shortcuts) is a key skill when providing the kind of service that people talk (positively) about.

The most memorable customer service stories out there — many of which had a huge impact on the business — were created by a single employee who refused to just follow the standard process when it came to helping someone out.

18. Closing ability

Being able to close with a customer as a customer service professional means being able to end the conversation with confirmed customer satisfaction (or as close to it as you can achieve) and with the customer feeling that everything has been taken care of (or will be).

Getting booted before all of their problems have been addressed is the last thing that customers want, so be sure your team knows to take the time to confirm with customers that each and every issue they had was entirely resolved.

19. Empathy

Perhaps empathy — the ability to understand and share the feelings of another — is more of a character trait than a skill. But since empathy can be learned and improved upon, we’d be remiss not to include it here.

In fact, if your organization tests job applicants for customer service aptitude, you’d be hard pressed to look for a more critical skill than empathy.

That’s because even when you can’t tell the customer exactly what they want to hear, a dose of care, concern, and understanding will go a long way. A support rep’s ability to empathize with a customer and craft a message that steers things toward a better outcome can often make all the difference.

20. A methodical approach

In customer service, haste makes waste. Hiring deliberate, detail-oriented people will go a long way in meeting the needs of your customers.

One, they’ll be sure to get to the real heart of a problem before firing off a reply. There’s nothing worse than attempting a “solution,” only to have it miss the mark entirely on solving the actual issue.

Two, they’ll proofread. A thoughtfully written response can lose a lot of its problem-solving luster if it’s riddled with typos.

Three, and this one may be the most important, it means they’ll regularly follow up. There’s nothing more impressive than getting a note from a customer service rep saying, “Hey! Remember that bug you found that I said we were looking into? Well, we fixed it.” That’s a loyal, lifetime customer you’ve just earned.

An important side note: The best hires are able to maintain their methodical grace under regular fire.

Since the support team is often tasked with the tough work of cleaning up other people’s messes, it’s especially important they understand how not to internalize the urgency — and potential ire — of frustrated customers. Instead, they know how to keep a cool head and a steady, guiding hand.

21. Willingness to learn

While this is probably the most general skill on this list, it’s also one of the most important. After all, willingness to learn is the basis for growing skills as a customer service professional.

Your team members have to be willing to learn your product inside and out, willing to learn how to communicate better (and when they're communicating poorly), willing to learn when it’s okay to follow a process — and when it’s more appropriate to choose their own adventures.

Those who don’t seek to improve what they do — whether it’s building products, marketing businesses, or helping customers — will get left behind by the people who are willing to invest in their own skills.

What if someone on your team is lacking these skills?

What if you're leading a team of support professionals who aren't open to improving their approach to customer service? What if they lack the skills above and don't seem to be interested in developing them? Help Scout's Mathew Patterson has a solution:

Often, the root cause of what could be perceived as a lack of skill or unwillingness to learn is the result of a work environment (current or prior) that didn't reward going above and beyond to provide excellent service.

Try providing your team with some clear guidelines for what you expect and some examples of what great customer service looks like at your company in a way that brings to bear all of these skills, and as you do it, make sure that you're celebrating those small wins as you see people starting to use these skills.

Once your team starts to see that their efforts are being acknowledged and rewarded, you'll have people start to get more engaged, and you'll have a clearer picture of whether or not there are actually people on your team who have real skill gaps that you need to work on.

The evolution of customer service

As Seth Godin wrote, customer service means different things to different organizations, but things aren’t going to end well for the companies who simply see customer service as a “cost-cutting race to the bottom.”

Gary Vaynerchuk echoes that sentiment in The Thank You Economy, where he outlines the evidence that there is profit and growth for any company that openly communicates with its customers in an effort to make them feel appreciated and valued.

The bottom line: Great customer service is a growth center, not a cost center. It’s really that simple.

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