Mike Gaudreau

4 Fundamentals Of Excellent Customer Service

customer service

Excellent customer service is a side of the business that demands lots of focus and attention. Effectively, it encompasses everything to do with your customer relationships and how you interact with customers. Excellent customer service means you interact with clients well, and they appreciate this. The relationship between the two of you is strong, leading to repeat business time and time again. 

Poor customer service will do the opposite. Your customer interactions are terrible, leading to a bad relationship. In turn, this stops you from getting repeat business and can prevent you from gaining new customers. After all, unsatisfied customers will always leave negative reviews to dissuade others from making the same mistake as them. 

Considering all of this, how can you provide excellent customer service? Regardless of your business, there are some fundamentals you can follow that will ensure you give your clients what they deserve!


1 – Speed Is Excellent Customer Service

Excellent customer service needs to be speedy. Consumers have very short attention spans, and they want to get the answers to problems right away. The last thing anyone wants is to ask a question and wait a few days to receive the answer. Unfortunately, small businesses make this mistake all the time. Someone may call or email, and you’re so busy and understaffed that you don’t get round to replying until a day or two later. By then, the consumer has lost interest and might have taken their money elsewhere. 

A swift response is always needed, and you can achieve this by either hiring more staff or outsourcing. Many companies outsource to call centres, but companies like VHQ have also become popular options. Here, you can pay for virtual receptionists that manage your phone and email remotely. It’s an affordable alternative to hiring a receptionist, ensuring small businesses can be prompt in their customer service. 

2 – Convenience

Following on from the above, customer service must also be convenient. Yes, speedy customer service is convenient, but it extends beyond this. For example, you need to make it easy for customers to get in touch with you. Having one method of communication won’t do this as it means people are forced to either call or email you, which might not be convenient for them. 

Instead, you need multiple avenues for people to use to get in touch with your business. A FAQ page is a prime example of ultra-convenient customer service; it’s a page where people can find the answers to questions without needing to contact anyone. In essence, their problems are solved before they even need to message or call. The more methods you have in place, the more convenient and accessible your customer service will be. 

3 – Clarity

Many times, businesses can have very swift and convenient forms of customer service. You need to contact the company about something, and there are quick and simple ways of doing just that. Unfortunately, they let themselves down by offering no clarity at all. 

Clarity refers to the messages and the communication given by your company to the customer. When the contact ends, your customer should be left with absolutely no doubt in their mind what to do to solve their query. In fact, the best customer service will be swift and clear because you understand the problem and provide the solution right away. Thus, you need to work on listening to the customer, identifying their main issues, then providing the perfect solution for them. 

4- Consistency

Lastly, one of the hallmarks of excellent customer service is consistency. To put it simply, the best businesses will provide all of the above on a consistent basis. Your communication is clear, offering great clarity to the customer. You have convenient and speedy ways for people to get in touch with you. Now, you do all of this over and over again across all of your customer service channels with everyone that contacts you. 

It’s not good enough to provide decent customer service 50% of the time – you must be consistent in how you deal with every customer interaction. No matter how big or small the problem is, you must treat it the same to deliver consistent customer service.


These are the fundamentals of excellent customer service, leaving your customers in a much happier state. One final thing to add is that you should get feedback from your customers after interacting with them. What did they think of the whole customer service interaction? Listen to their positive and negative feedback to learn what needs to be done to further improve your business on this front.

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