What is customer service? Definition, types, and expert tips

Customer service definition: Customer service, sometimes called customer care, is the support and assistance a company provides to customers before, during, and after a purchase or other interaction with its product, service, or brand.

What is the definition of customer service?

In practice, customer service is the help a business gives customers across the entire customer journey, and it’s more than magic phrases and professional words. It involves:

• Answering customer questions
• Resolving customer issues
• Building customer satisfaction with the overall experience

Effective customer service aims to create positive customer interactions, build trust, and foster long-term relationships.

That’s the textbook view of customer service, but what is the true meaning of customer service? What ultimately matters is what the customer perceives. Customer service expert Shep Hyken outlines four definitions the public gives for “customer service.”

1. “Customer service is a group of people who help me when I have a problem or complaint.”
2. “Customer service is the way people treat me.”
3. “Customer service is a friendly experience.”
4. “Customer service is easy and convenient.”

Customer service vs. customer support vs. customer experience

Many organizations use these terms interchangeably, but the difference is scope:

Term	What it covers	Example
Customer service	Help across the entire customer journey	Answering a pricing question
Customer support	Fixing specific problems, often technical issues	Troubleshooting a login error
Customer experience	Every interaction with your brand, from marketing to billing	How easy your product is to buy and use

Customer support typically focuses on solving a problem, while customer service focuses on the whole relationship. Customer experience covers every interaction, including ones that never involve a service rep. Hyken explains customer service vs. customer experience in the video above.

But why is customer service important, and what does good customer service look like?

Why is customer service important?

Customer service shapes a business’s brand reputation, customer loyalty, and customer retention. Exceptional customer service involves being responsive, empathetic, and attentive, exceeding customer expectations and leaving a positive impression.

Many leaders see customer service as a cost of doing business, but great service keeps existing customers coming back, and that pays off. According to Harvard Business Review, depending on the study and the industry, acquiring a new customer is anywhere from five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

A 2022 Verint survey of 2,000 U.S. shoppers at mass market retailers found:

• 88% are likely to make a repeat purchase after an excellent customer experience
• 82% are likely to recommend the retailer to friends and family after an excellent customer experience
• 62% would stop buying from a retailer if a customer service issue isn’t resolved in a single attempt
• Regular customers spend more, with 83% of those who shop at their favorite mass market retailer at least monthly spending $50 or more on average

Satisfied customers buy more and market your business through word of mouth and online reviews. Poor customer service does the opposite, because unresolved customer concerns lead to customer churn.

As Hyken puts it, “We cannot determine if we give good customer service. Only our customers can… The customer acts as the judge and jury.”

Read more: 4 Customer Service Characteristics that Drive ROI

Types of Customer Service

The main types of customer service are defined by channel, and most businesses support customers on multiple channels at once:

• AI agents and chatbots that handle routine inquiries
• Email support
• In-person interactions
• Live chat support, often using live chat scripts
• Phone calls and call centers
• Self-service portals and knowledge bases
• Social media support

Customers increasingly expect omnichannel customer service, in which your organization maintains the same experience across those disparate channels.

7 ways to provide great customer service

Great customer service exceeds basic customer expectations and depends on customer service skills such as active listening and problem solving. It includes:

1. Personalization: Providing personalized service that meets individual customer needs, so each customer feels valued.
2. Proactiveness: Anticipating customer needs before they become issues.
3. Responsiveness: Replying promptly to customer concerns, showing that the business values the customer’s time.
4. Empathy: Showing real understanding of the customer’s situation, so they feel heard.
5. Efficiency: Solving customer problems quickly and effectively.
6. Consistency: Delivering reliable service across all customer interactions, which builds customer trust.
7. Going the extra mile: Doing more than expected to delight customers, which often leads to customer loyalty and word-of-mouth referrals.

Great customer service leaves the customer feeling valued, heard, and pleasantly surprised, which builds lasting relationships and a positive reputation.

16 customer service best practices

What defines good customer service? As Shep says, “Customers have their definitions, and yours doesn’t really matter.”

According to Shep, the bottom line is that the customer always wants to be happy.

6 things customers want from customer service

He outlines six things that drive customer satisfaction in a customer service experience:

1. Friendly and knowledgeable employees
2. Excellent customer support when there’s a problem
3. A simple, convenient experience
4. Not having to wait
5. Fast response times
6. Employees who have empathy when it’s needed

One way to reduce customer response times is to use a text automation tool like TextExpander, which can store and quickly retrieve solutions and empathetic responses for your customer support team. Support teams at companies such as SketchUp, Fullscript, and Amwell use it to share approved replies across their teams.

We preach personalization in all of our channels. We want it to be personal to the agent so it does not feel robotic. They have the agency to set it up in a way that works for them.

Mikayla Cunningham, Support Trainer, Fullscript

Agents reuse the parts of an answer that stay the same, such as a return policy, and apply their own judgment to the rest. Fill-ins prompt for details like a customer’s name, and updating a shared Snippet once gives every customer service representative the current version.

Why self-service matters

Even better, help customers avoid reaching out at all. One of Amazon’s keys to success is Bill Price’s philosophy of “the best service is no service.” You rarely have to interact with the company to request a return or find out when your order is shipping.

Adrian Swinscoe, a customer experience expert who has consulted for Apple, Olympus, HarperCollins, and Nespresso and hosts the Punk CX podcast, says most people don’t want to contact customer service. They would rather help themselves but can’t. Around 60% of all customer service contacts happen because the customer couldn’t find the right information on the company website.

7 behaviors of high-performing service teams

Customer service expert John Sills, author of The Human Experience, outlines seven customer experience behaviors essential to high-functional customer service teams:

1. Accessible: Is your company easy for customers to contact?
2. Consistent: Is the experience the same across channels and true to your brand promises?
3. Flexible: Will you bend the rules to give customers a great experience?
4. Proactive: Do you solve problems before customers have to ask? (See Sills’s three steps below.)
5. Respectful: Do you respect the customer and their time, and demonstrate humility?
6. Responsible: Do you take ownership and go to bat to solve your customer’s problems?
7. Straightforward: Do you communicate clearly, without jargon, and tell customers what will happen and when?

3 steps to get ahead of problems

Sills outlines three steps in being proactive:

1. Doing the work for your customers.
2. Identifying potential problems and solving them before they become problems.
3. Anticipating the next question a customer may have.

16 methods to improve customer service ROI

In The Human Experience, Sills offers three methods for improving ROI through customer experience:

1. Improve overall customer sentiment with a great customer experience.
2. Work proactively to prevent unnecessary customer complaints and resolve customer issues quickly to improve overall efficiency.
3. Consider lost opportunities that bad customer experience generates.

Read more: Customer Experience ROI: Is It a Myth?

During his talk at our Work Smarter Virtual Summit, Adrian Swinscoe outlined 13 customer experience characteristics that drive ROI:

1. They are clear on their experience, vision, and strategy and how it connects to business objectives.
2. They really know their customers.
3. They take an experience-first, data-second, tech-third approach.
4. They are brilliant at the basics.
5. They are relentless at the identification and removal of “grit.”
6. They make things as simple as possible, inside and out.
7. They focus as much on their employees as they do on their customers.
8. They understand where loyalty is earned.
9. They strike the right balance of technology and the human touch.
10. They are proactive by nature.
11. They personalize everything about their experience, not just their marketing, and they do it in a non-“creepy” way.
12. They have the right sort of leaders and leadership.
13. They strike a balance between present and future demands.

The ninth characteristic matters more as support teams add AI agents. Customers still want to know a person is there when it counts.

In this world of AI, it’s more important than ever that when our customers reach out to us, whether that’s on the phone or by chat, they know that they’re talking to actual people. We are an actual team of real, living human beings. And I wanted to make sure that even when we introduce an efficiency tool, that we’re holding onto that authenticity.

Amy-Lynn Taylor, Customer Insights and Enablement Expert, Jane

Generative AI helps when a situation needs a new answer. When your team already knows what a good answer looks like, reusing that approved wording keeps each customer service interaction accurate.

Customer service jargon

Here are some common customer service terms and what they mean, including the customer service metrics most teams track:

Call Center: A central facility where customer service representatives handle incoming and outgoing calls.

Cancellation Policy: Rules for canceling a subscription or service.

Cross-selling: Recommending related products based on a customer’s purchase or needs.

Customer Feedback: Opinions customers share about their experience with a product or service.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT): A measure of customer satisfaction with a product, service, or customer service interaction, usually from a short survey.

Customer Support: Help that addresses customers’ questions, issues, or complaints, often about using the product.

Escalation: Passing an issue to a manager or specialized team for resolution.

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions): A list of common questions and answers about a product or service.

First Call Resolution (FCR): The percentage of issues resolved during the first interaction with customer support.

Help Desk: A team or tool customer service representatives use to answer technical or non-technical questions.

Live Chat: Real-time online messaging between a customer and a customer service representative.

Loyalty Program: A program that rewards repeat business to strengthen customer loyalty.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): A measure of customer loyalty based on how likely customers are to recommend a company, on a 0 to 10 scale.

Onboarding: Helping new customers get started with a product or service.

Resolution Time: How long it takes to resolve a customer’s problem, often tracked as average resolution time.

Return Policy: Rules for returning or exchanging a purchased product.

RMA (Return Merchandise Authorization): Authorization a customer gets to return a product for repair, replacement, or refund.

Service Level Agreement (SLA): A contract that defines the agreed level of service, including response and resolution times.

Ticketing System: Software for tracking and managing customer inquiries.

Upselling: Offering additional or upgraded products during a purchase or support interaction.

What does customer service mean to you?

What do you imagine when you hear “customer service”? Maybe you dread being put on hold for a simple issue. Or maybe you think of it as the cost of keeping happy customers returning.

Exceptional customer service drives repeat purchases and referrals and builds brand equity. It’s not a cost center but a profit center, and every interaction is a chance to earn customer loyalty.