How To Provide World-Class Customer Service: 8 Tips

• What is world-class customer service?
• 8 best tips and strategies for delivering world-class customer service
• Examples of world-class customer service by industry
• The future of world-class customer service
• How customer service software can help improve your customer service

World-class customer service describes a level of service that exceeds customer expectations. While many companies offer good customer service, world-class service goes the extra step to put the customer first, focusing on their needs and preferences. Teams that provide world-class customer service prioritize providing an exceptional customer service experience every time a consumer interacts with the company.

Delivering world-class customer service is a tall order, but the right strategy and tools can help. Here are eight tips for creating an exceptional customer service experience.

Top-tier customer service starts with the people you hire. Hire team members who are ready to adapt and learn and set them up for success by:

• Providing training and resources: Your customer service team must have a solid understanding of your industry, brand positioning, and products so they can help customers easily. Give access to training and certification resources and encourage team members to sharpen their skills. Salesforce's Trailhead Academy offers industry, product, and role-based courses. Encourage your team to join the Serviceblazer on Slack Community where they can learn world-class customer service best practices from fellow pros.
• Investing in the right technology: Technology such as customer service management software, AI agents, and knowledge management tools can support service reps in their jobs while helping them deliver better, faster results. For instance, autonomous AI agents like Agentforce can offer 24/7 assistance, resolving both routine and complex cases swiftly and accurately with answers grounded in trusted data and within the guardrails your business has set. This allows your service reps to focus on more strategic work.
• Ensuring soft-skills development: World-class customer service depends on empathy — understanding your customers and what they're going through. Soft skills like patience and active listening are crucial to making customers feel seen and heard. Trailhead, Salesforce’s free online learning platform, is a great resource for your customer service team to hone their soft skills. To build rapport with customers, Agentforce uses natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and contextual understanding to have intelligent, conversational, and personalized interactions.

A key feature of world-class customer service is helping customers quickly but without sacrificing accuracy. Our research finds that 69% of customer service reps say balancing speed and quality is a challenge. A well-built knowledge base is a powerful tool for helping AI agents, customer service reps, and potentially customers find the information they need. To make the most out of your knowledge management solution, integrate Data Cloud to ensure that every agent action and service rep response, automation, and insight is powered by the right trusted data from any source.

• Make it comprehensive: Create high-quality knowledge base articles that cover the most important information about your products. Make sure your team knows how to access your knowledge base and encourage them to add and update these resources regularly.
• Prioritize accessibility and ease of use: Look for knowledge management software that includes organizational features — such as categories and keyword tags — powerful search functionality, and AI technology that provides accurate content suggestions and automated responses.

Our research finds that customer self-service solves an estimated 54% of customer issues, on average, at organizations that use it. Agentforce intelligently supports your customers by processing incoming cases and autonomously resolving both common and complex inquiries around the clock in any time zone. Your customers can get world-class customer service whenever they need it, freeing up your reps to focus on strategic work and helping to reduce burnout.

Your knowledge base can support your customers, service reps, and agents for self-service. Make your knowledge base articles searchable on your website, customer portal, or help desk to ensure easy access. Additionally, pair your knowledge base with generative AI for your service team to create accurate, personalized responses for customers using information from your company's knowledge base. Always have a human review to ensure accuracy and maintain trust.

One of the best ways to elevate your customer service is by attempting to solve problems before they impact your customers — or if possible, avoiding problems altogether. Some steps to practice more proactive customer service include:

• Monitor data to spot potential problems: If there’s an issue with a product, it’s best to discover it before customers bring it to your attention. Use technology like Agentforce, which monitors all customer and product data to detect early signs of problems, anticipate customer needs, and offer timely, personalized solutions before issues escalate.
• Practice issue/resolution transparency: When you've identified a problem, let customers know about it as soon as possible. Being transparent about issues that may affect customers can increase their trust in your brand and avoid the frustration of encountering the problem without warning. This also builds trust and reinforces your commitment to delivering world-class customer service.

The combination of proactive customer service and self-service options goes a long way toward reducing how often customers reach out to your service team. Even so, customers will always need regular assistance. Make it easy for them to reach the right person by:

• Providing multiple contact options: Let customers choose their preferred customer service channel whether that's email, WhatsApp, voice, SMS, or chat.
• Using efficient routing technology: Whether your customer service team operates in a call or contact center, it's important to choose software that can automatically route cases to the right rep based on their skill set and availability or AI agent. This ensures faster resolution and better customer experiences.

Our research finds that 81% of service pros say customers expect a personal touch more than they used to. Personalization can build trust and loyalty, showing customers you see them as individuals. To create more personal customer service experiences, every rep and agent should have access to current customer information every time they interact with them in real time.

Customer relationship management (CRM) data helps service teams provide better experiences by giving everyone access to a customer's entire history with the company. Their profile might include purchase history, past interactions, and other details that help reps connect with customers more effectively. When an AI agent escalates an interaction to a rep, it can include the case details to make the handoff seamless. The more your reps know about your customers, the better equipped they are to tailor the experience to their needs.

Speed matters in customer service. Some of the best ways to ensure fast response and resolution times are offering self-service options, creating a strong knowledge base, and using AI agents to provide accurate, personalized answers.

Overall, make efficiency part of your company culture. Let employees know that fast resolutions are a priority — as long as they're not at the cost of quality. Look for opportunities to automate routine or time-consuming processes to give reps more time in the day. Solicit employee feedback for ways to improve workflows.

A customer service approach that looks great on paper may not work as well in practice. Recognize where processes are falling short and adapt as needed. To continually work toward better results:

• Listen to feedback: Collect and process all customer feedback, run surveys to get more intel, and monitor what people say on social media and review sites like G2. Also pay attention to employee feedback to learn what's working with your current processes, tools, and resources. Analyze all available feedback, looking for insights you can use to improve.
• Review analytics: Look for trends in your customer service analytics that identify where there's room for improvement. For instance, if the resolution times for one product are slower than others, you may want to strengthen your training and knowledge resources.

To help you put these tips into practice, here are some examples of what world-class customer service looks like in action:

A medical manufacturer is struggling to provide its B2B customers with quick, reliable, and personalized answers, leading to long wait times, misinformation, and strained relationships. Agentforce can accurately address both common and complex issues independently — allowing customers to get self-service anytime and anywhere, helping to improve customer satisfaction (CSAT).

A software company detects that a product feature isn't working properly. In addition to putting a notice within the software, they automatically contact all users through their preferred communication channels alerting them to the issue with an apology and an estimated timeline for correction.

A customer is having trouble installing a new appliance. They call customer service and reach a representative on the first try. The rep talks them through the steps for fixing the issue and texts the customer a video tutorial for additional guidance. The next day, the company sends the customer a follow-up text checking that the problem was resolved and everything is working properly.

An automotive company discovers an issue with a part on one of their models. They contact all affected customers to let them know about the problem and explain how to get it fixed for free. They also send along a discount offer for their next maintenance visit to make up for the trouble.

When it comes to delivering world-class customer service, certain best practices will remain consistent — such as actively listening and demonstrating empathy. But other aspects of exceptional customer service will evolve, especially as technology does.

AI is already making a big difference in the service industry. Our research finds that 93% of service professionals at organizations that already use AI, say it saves them time on the job. As such, the future of customer service is likely to lean more heavily into automation and AI to better support teams and satisfy customers. For example:

• Automation: As customer service software makes automation more available and easy to use, organizations are likely to develop even more workflow automations for low-level tasks — allowing reps to work faster without sacrificing service quality.
• AI: As AI technology continues to advance, Agentforce AI agents will play a bigger role in customer service. With the ability to build and customize autonomous AI agents for different applications — such as 24/7 support for customer inquiries or customer engagement — reps can concentrate on more strategic work. AI can also help to reduce burnout for customer service reps.

The right customer service management software can make it easier to deliver world-class customer service. Service Cloud, for example, has tools and features that aim to set up your customer service team for success, including:

• Knowledge base features: Ensure all your product content is easy to find with user-friendly organizational features and AI-powered article recommendations.
• AI-powered service console: Give reps everything they need to manage customer interactions in an intuitive workspace. From intelligent recommendations to automated case wrap-ups, teams can use real-time insights to handle customers expertly.
• Self-service technology: Create an intuitive self-service customer portal that lets people help themselves search and find relevant information and articles instantly.
• AI agents: Build custom AI agents with Agentforce to provide conversational, personalized answers to both routine and complex customer questions quickly and accurately. This helps reduce the load on customer service reps so they can attend to higher-priority issues that require more critical thinking.

Hiring skilled people for your team and investing in their training is a crucial first step in providing world-class customer service. Then, implement the right tools and technology, such as Service Cloud and Agentforce, to support them and your customers. When developing and refining your customer service strategy, consider what will help you make a lasting impression. Prioritize personalization, empathy, speed, accuracy, and convenience to deliver an exceptional experience and gain satisfied and loyal customers.