Say a long-time client reaches out with a critical issue, and instead of seamless support, they’re bounced between agents, repeating the same details each time. Frustration builds, and trust erodes.
Now, imagine the opposite—a single point of contact with instant access to their history, offering precise solutions without delay. The difference? A brand’s commitment to excellent customer service. If you provide great support through customer service, 86% of your one-time clients can become loyal brand advocates.
While stellar service builds trust and loyalty, poor service can drive customers straight to your competition.
Fret not! The right customer service tool with the right features can set you apart, and this blog will show you how.
What is Customer service?
Customer service is the support and assistance customers receive from your company before, during, and after purchasing your product or service.
More than merely troubleshooting, customer service’s meaning truly lies in the trust and reliability the customer interactions build for your brand. You may think of customer service as a compass guiding customers in the right direction with clarity — whether they’re unsure about making a purchase decision, navigating a problem with your product or service, or understanding the value of your offerings.
What customer service is not: People often confuse customer service with customer experience. While the terms are related, they refer to different concepts in business. Customer service is just a subset of customer experience, addressing a specific need. Customer experience, on the other hand, is the overall experience a customer forms right from the beginning and continues over time with your brand.
Read also: Customer Service vs Customer Experience: Difference
Why is Customer service important?
66% of consumers switch brands because of poor customer service. The benefits of customer service drive the most popular brands in the market today as it helps to:
- Create brand advocates: Good customer service provides customer satisfaction, and satisfaction leads to loyal customers who will act as word-of-mouth advertisers. A solid reputation always fetches you new opportunities.
- Increase revenue: Loyal customers mean recurring revenue. Additionally, their advocacy brings in more customers, which is directly proportional to revenue growth in the business.
- Drive brand differentiation: Good customer service gives you a significant edge in the market by differentiating your brand. Outdo your competitor’s customer service and watch out for how customers prefer your brand for the same offerings.
- Increase customer lifetime value (CLTV): When you provide personalized support, customers keep returning to you for more purchases, contributing to a better CLTV (revenue a customer brings over time).
Common challenges in providing good customer service
Customer service is easier said than done (but we’ve got you!). Challenges are common; we just need a perfect fix to eradicate them. Here’s the drill.
Missing the mark with customers
Today’s customers like to have a seamless customer support experience without any discontinuity in context when switching across multiple channels. Despite this omnipresence, they do not like repeating themselves.
Use a central Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and maintain a seamless customer conversation history, regardless of the channel (mobile app, website, or messaging app). This allows agents to see all previous interactions and contexts to stay proactive and ensure customer satisfaction is one step ahead.
Meeting customer needs and satisfaction
When your team falls back on copy-paste responses or speeds through conversations, it feels obvious to customers that they’re just another ticket in the queue. Customers want a solution that is quick, simple, and sleek.
Train your agents to carefully understand the customer’s needs and promptly provide relevant solutions. Go one step further in delivering satisfaction by offering discounts for errors caused. Ease their mood and turn a negative experience into a positive one.
When “ASAP” isn’t fast enough
Five years ago, getting back to customers within 24 hours was fine. Now? That’s way too slow. Support teams with basic ticketing setups struggle to keep up with today’s customer demands — they need immediate response.
Slow response times often steer customers away from the brand. With automated ticket handling and a real-time operations dashboard, you can effortlessly route service cases to the right team based on priority. This facilitates your team with tools to resolve issues “ASAP.”
Answering without guesswork
Support agents can’t play the guessing game with customer problems. When someone reaches out for help, they count on your team as the experts with real answers, not maybes and what-ifs. It’s frustrating when agents have to dig through scattered documents or rely on memory to solve issues — that’s where customers start losing faith.
Use AI-powered knowledgebase to bypass this challenge, as the agents get instant access to detailed and accurate information, eliminating their guesswork even in the trickiest situations.
Handling high call and query volumes efficiently
No matter how skilled your agents are, a sudden surge in tickets can overwhelm even the best support setup.
Simply put, your customer service team could face a surge in queries following the launch of a significant feature update. The challenge is expected; high volumes of calls and queries often lead to inefficiencies in providing satisfactory customer service.
Here, flexible queues can sort and group client issues using a built-in backlog line. When this feature is combined with the auto-assignment of tickets to available agents, all client requests get efficiently routed and addressed. This ensures tasks only go to those present and capable of dealing with them, preventing bottlenecks and unnecessary delays.
Delivering Seamless Service Across Platforms
Your customers switch between Instagram DMs, emails, and live chat like they’re channel surfing. When these conversations get scattered across different platforms, it’s tough to keep track of who said what and when. Without the right setup, agents juggle different platforms and miss crucial context.
With an omnichannel ticketing dashboard and easy integration of existing tools and social media, your business can unify multiple communications mediums into one dashboard. With this, you provide consistent solutions across every channel.
How to deliver exceptional customer service in 2025 and beyond (with AI)
Forbes reports that bad customer service costs businesses $3.7 trillion annually. But you need not worry. Whether you’re starting fresh or fine-tuning your support team, these key insights will help you offer great customer service and not just build a loyal customer base but also drive revenue. .
Meeting demand without downtime
Customer needs don’t follow a 9-to-5 schedule. Whether it’s late at night, on weekends, or during holidays, customers expect help when they need it. It comes down to providing reliable support around the clock without exhausting your team or breaking your budget.
Here’s where modern AI Chatbots make a world of difference. With advanced AI, bots, and automation, companies achieve a 4.3 CSAT, improving overall efficiency. Bots solve problems — answer product questions, guide customers through troubleshooting, and even handle complete setup processes. And when something truly needs human attention, they know exactly when to loop in your on-call team.
When companies get this right, they see impressive results:
- Customers get instant help any time of day (or night)
- Support teams come back to fewer urgent tickets in the morning
- Routine inquiries get resolved automatically
- Your support quality stays strong 24/7 across every time zone
Train agents and stay ahead of customer needs
Most support teams today are totally swamped — there are new product updates to learn, changing customer problems to solve, and a constant need to keep the team’s skills fresh. It’s tough to figure out what training your team actually needs when you’re dealing with hundreds of conversations every day.
But today, AI advanced analytics and real-time operations dashboards transform how agents are trained and developed. The smart dashboard monitors all customer interactions and tells exactly where your team needs help. Need to know which product features are confusing customers? Want to see which answers work best? The AI spots these trends and reforms strategies to help you build training that matters.
Look at what successful support teams are doing differently with AI analytics:
- They let AI identify the trickiest customer issues their team faces
- Training focuses on real problems, not theoretical stuff
- New product features get rolled into training right away
- Every win gets documented so the whole team learns from it
Turn service into a team sport
Complex customer problems often need more than just a support agent’s help. They need quick input from product experts, developers, or finance teams. But when teams work in silos, getting that help can turn into a frustrating back-and-forth that leaves customers waiting. Companies are leveraging AI to bridge this gap with tools like Agent Workspace here.
With much of an internal transformation, a centralized agent workspace brings your entire company’s expertise into one place. Support agents can instantly connect with experts from any team — developers jump in to explain technical issues, finance quickly clarifies billing questions, and every solution gets documented for future use.
Companies that break down these walls see real results. How?
- Customers get answers in minutes, not days
- Solutions are more accurate (because they come straight from the experts)
- New agents learn from experts across the company.
- And most importantly, customers feel the difference when they get help from a truly collaborative team.
Expand accessibility with multi-language and machine translation support
Customers worldwide want in-language assistance, but it’s difficult and expensive to establish dedicated support teams for every language. Customers often feel excluded when they cannot receive assistance in the language of their choice. That is why smart businesses are incorporating translation capabilities driven by AI into help dashboards.
With the help of AI-powered machine translation and multi-language support, support teams can now chat with customers in any language, achieving a 21.3% TTFR reduction. The AI handles the translation in real time. Even better, it learns from every conversation to become more accurate with industry-specific terms.
And what happens when smart companies use AI translation tools?
- Every agent can help any customer, no matter what language they speak
- Customer feedback gets translated accurately, so no insights get lost in translation
- Support articles and FAQs automatically show up in the customer’s language
- Teams can expand globally without hiring separate language specialists
Take it from the help desk to the revenue desk
Every support interaction could go beyond just fixing issues — companies that realize this are turning support teams into revenue generators. Think about how many support chats your team handles every day. Each one is a chance to show customers something they might find valuable. But most support teams are so focused on closing tickets that they miss these opportunities.
AI-driven tools are now smart enough to spot sales opportunities during support conversations. AI-driven upscaling and cross-selling analyze customer data, past purchases, and current issues to suggest relevant upgrades or premium products. And because these suggestions come while helping solve a problem, customers see them as helpful advice rather than pushy sales tactics.
Here’s how these tools help bring more revenue to the business:
- Customers receive personalized product recommendations that actually solve their problems
- Every support interaction has the potential to boost your bottom line
Ditch old-school metrics—It’s time for a real upgrade
Looking at the number of tickets closed each day doesn’t tell you much about whether customers are actually satisfied with the service. You need deeper insights to deliver the service that keeps customers returning.
AI-powered tools give you instant visibility into your team’s effectiveness through real-time performance metrics. The AI analyzes team performance trends, compares how different agents handle similar issues and even picks up on customer sentiments — things that conventional metrics don’t catch.
And when your teams get smarter with metrics, you will see:
- CSAT scores go up because every interaction helps train the system to be smarter
- Analytics give insights on FAQ deflection, searches, and user feedback
- Support quality stays consistently high across all channels
- Teams catch and fix problems before they affect more customers
These tactics not only help you tackle customer support but also drive your business forward. Now comes the most-heard phrase:
“Great customer support should be everywhere.”
Let’s see how.
Types of Customer Service Channels
Customers want convenience when they seek support – requiring you to be present on their preferred channel anytime!
Research shows that 76% of customers believe consistent experiences on different platforms are necessary for their satisfaction. An omnichannel customer service approach is your ally here. Serve across all channels, such as:
- Phone: Despite the diversity in communication channels, 54% of customers prefer traditional phone calls to seek customer support. With CRM integrations and AI, you can automate real-time call transcription and use it for records and post-interaction insights.
- Mobile messaging: The open rate is 99% when companies respond within the first 90 seconds of a customer query. Automate responses to text messages or when someone raises a query to let customers know you care(on time).
- Social media: With 5.22 billion, or 63.8% of the global population, on social media, you can’t miss providing support on these channels. Publicly engaging your customers on social media to resolve concerns showcases transparency and flaunts your dedication to delivering satisfaction.
- Email: Email is one of the traditional methods of formal and documented communication. Allow your customers and customer service representatives to articulate their thoughts well with relevant record information.
- Chatbots: If there was a wait time before speaking with an agent, almost 82% of survey respondents would use a chatbot. Companies may use AI-powered chatbots to answer routine questions instantly, freeing up human agents for more difficult challenges.
- Self-service: Offering self-help experiences, such as customer portals, help centers, and customer communities, can benefit customers from quick answers, leaving no more for frustrations, even by chance.
Customer Service Skills That Keep ’Em Coming Back
You can’t replace skills with technology while betting on providing high-quality customer service. In addition to all the customer service tools we’ve mentioned above, agents need skills that speak on their behalf.
- Empathy that’s real: Customers want to be heard more than just solutions. Listening and showing empathy in customer service helps build meaningful interactions and long-term customer relationships.
- Quick thinking: You can only solve customer problems on the fly if you’ve got a knack for keeping situations under control with a smooth, stress-free mindset, even under pressure.
- Product mastery: When agents are trained with sharp product knowledge, customers’ expectations of them as experts become a reality.
- Patience under pressure: A calm and cool demeanor, even when the case gets tough, or the volumes are high, keeps the interaction positive while reassuring the customers.
- Adaptability: Skilled agents who can roll with the punches know how to handle all situations, whether it’s about switching between different channels or guiding through something unexpected.
Round it all off with the right customer service platform, which effectively equips your team with these skills and helps them do their best work.
Examples of Good Customer Service
Here is a glimpse of companies that incorporated the optimal solutions and witnessed significant results.
1. In-game Support for Subway Surfers
SYBO, the creators of Subway Surfers, found that their email-based support system negatively impacted player retention, with a low deflection rate of 10% and an automation success rate below 50%. With Helpshift’s SDK implementation, they enabled in-game issue reporting with smart intent routing, AI-powered language support, and QuickSearch bot deflection.
Results: Improved deflection rates by 95%, increased agent productivity by 80%, refined CSAT score from 3.8 to 4.3, and reduced email workload from 100% to 10% with $333K in savings.
2. Global Support for Critter Crew
AIDIS, a prominent game publisher headquartered in Japan, sought a solution for Critter Crew to support a global player base of 123 regions and nine languages. Helpshift’s multi-language and machine translation tools helped them automate 96% of queries in under a year.
Results: 90% FAQ deflection, 93% in-game inquiries, faster response times, and a 4.5 CSAT score.
3. 24/7 Pet Care Support for VCA CareClub
VCA Animals Hospital aimed to introduce 24/7, accessible veterinary support to improve care and reduce pet owner’s stress. With Helpshift’s smart intent routing and automation, the VCA CareClub app personalized round-the-clock support with existing medical database integration.
Results: Chats were answered in 30 seconds, exceeding the 40-second SLA, a 15x increase in user engagement since the app’s launch, and an improved 4.85 CSAT score.
Get Started with HelpShift – Best AI-powered Customer Service software
Promising customer service needs the best software to streamline support workflow across all applications. With a solution like Helpshift, you empower your brand with AI-first, omnichannel, and cross-platform service, helping agents provide prompt customer assistance. Helpshift’s unique features include(but are not limited to):
- Smart Intent Recognition
- Sentiment Analysis
- Language Translation AI
- Agent Copilot
Helpshift allows for the resolution of 70% of queries with AI self-service and significantly minimizes wait times. When required, it swiftly navigates complex queries to human agents using a unified dashboard of customer data and communication history.
Get a 30-day free trial to try Helpshift and see how it can help your customer service team provide improved support and industry-leading customer experience journey. Request a demo for a personalized walkthrough for your industry-specific use cases.
FAQs
1. How Can a Customer Service Chatbot Improve My Support Process?
Customer service chatbots use AI to instantly resolve routine queries like troubleshooting or product guidance, cutting response times and improving efficiency. They work 24/7 and free up human agents for more complex tasks.
2. How does improved customer service drive business growth?
Consistently delivering high-quality customer service uplifts a company’s reputation for reliability and responsiveness. This leads to increased customer retention with organic growth.
3. Which customer service software drives success?
Customer service software with flexible switching options, seamless integration capabilities, transparent pricing, and scalable solutions often promises business success. This guide will help you make an informed decision.
