11 ways to deliver good customer service

We’ve all had a memorable customer service experience. Maybe it was a barista who knew your name and just how you liked your latte. Or, perhaps it was that time you called customer support, and the agent sympathized with you and went out of their way to fix the issue.

Good customer service can change customers’ perceptions of a company. It can make customers feel appreciated, help you develop relationships with them, and facilitate business growth. This guide covers 11 ways to deliver excellent customer service and create an outstanding customer experience (CX).

More in this guide:

• 11 ways to deliver great customer service
• Frequently asked questions
• Deliver excellent customer service with Zendesk

11 ways to deliver great customer service

Bad customer service can sink a business—but for many companies, good customer service just isn’t enough. Here are 11 customer service tips to take your service from good to truly excellent.

1. Leverage AI and automation

AI is emerging as a non-negotiable for effective customer service. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2025, 90 percent of CX Trendsetters—businesses that have fully integrated AI technologies into their customer service—think AI will resolve 8 in 10 customer issues without a human within the next few years. Not only that, but 70 percent of consumers believe a clear gap exists between companies that leverage AI effectively in customer service and those that don’t.

By blending AI with your customer service—also known as an intelligent customer experience (ICX)—you can drastically enhance your CX. For example, advanced chatbots like AI agents can deliver instant, 24/7 support to your customers. They can connect directly to your back-end systems to autonomously handle issues from start to finish, like password resets, order returns, account updates, and more. When a human support rep is needed, they can transfer the ticket to the right support agent with the full context of the situation.

2. Meet your customers where they are

Customers want to connect with you on the same channels they use daily. According to Zendesk Benchmark data, 30 percent of consumers rank the phone as the top preferred channel for complex and nuanced problems, followed by email (14 percent) and in-person (13 percent). As you can see, it’s a mixed bag, meaning you should have a presence in multiple mediums.

Embrace an omnichannel approach to customer service—one that creates connected and consistent customer interactions across all touchpoints, from online customer service to phone calls. This allows you to meet your customers where they are and deliver personalized customer service, no matter the software.

3. Have empathy

Showing empathy is one of the most important customer service skills businesses must master. This means engaging in active listening and fully understanding your customers and their problems—not seeing them as an annoyance to handle but as the hero of your story.

Empathy plays a crucial role in building customer relationships and de-escalating tense situations. Customer service agents need empathy and a good customer service voice to collaborate with customers and find quality solutions to their problems. Empathy is becoming even more important in the age of AI customer service. If your organization embraces this technology, use tools trained on real customer interactions and prioritize human needs, like Zendesk AI.

4. Put customers at the center of your decision-making

Organizations need to embrace customer orientation to elevate their customer service. This means putting customers at the center of organizational decision-making rather than focusing purely on products or profits. An example of this could be collecting customer feedback in every channel and sharing that information across the company to help guide business decisions. When organizations use their customer as their North Star, they can effortlessly deliver an outstanding CX.

5. Be proactive

Proactive customer service occurs when a business takes the initiative to help a customer before the customer contacts them for help. It means anticipating their needs to avoid issues from sprouting and, if necessary, trying to resolve problems at the first sign of trouble.

There are big benefits to delivering proactive customer service:

• You can often prevent problems before they start. Instead of waiting for a customer complaint, you’re doing something to help them now.

• If you can use customer data to learn about their preferences, an agent can recommend products in real time.

Waiting to solve issues after customers complain is like watering your plants once they’ve started to turn brown. Cultivate a healthy relationship by being proactive instead.

6. Personalize the experience

Most customers today expect personalization when interacting with a business. They want a company to know who they are, what they’ve purchased in the past, and their preferences. They also expect you to remember all this information—they don’t want to have to repeat themselves.

With the help of AI, you can meet customer expectations and offer personalized service whenever possible. This can include AI arming your support reps with key customer details to better tailor requests or an AI agent offering relevant product suggestions based on a customer’s past purchase in a support conversation.

7. Provide quick customer service

Exceeding customer expectations means keeping pace with customers and providing quick service and speedy first reply times (FRT). That might entail creating an automated response notifying the customer you received their query and are working on their problem. It could also mean quickly calling back a customer who left a message on your customer service line.

Here are other ways you can deliver fast customer service:

• Leverage AI: According to Zendesk benchmark data, AI-driven insights and recommendations can accelerate customer resolutions by 300 percent. Consider implementing AI in as many touchpoints as possible to improve your CX.
• Invest in agent training: Give your help desk a customer service training guide that sets them up for success. They should know your products well, have access to a robust knowledge base, and be able to handle challenging customer issues.
• Improve processes: It is critical to get tickets to the right teams as quickly as possible. One way to do this is to create a “customer service triage” team to manage each ticket, especially if you receive a lot of complex questions.

8. Help customers help themselves

Customers don’t always want to ask someone for help; sometimes, excellent customer service means letting people help themselves. You can invest in customer self-service methods like knowledge bases, FAQ pages, or community forums. This can lead to faster customer resolutions while also taking pressure off your support team.

Consider these tips to automate and streamline self-service:

• Use an AI agent: Customers want to solve problems themselves, and they’re open to AI if that means fast, efficient resolutions to their issues. With Zendesk AI, for example, you can build a bot in minutes by having it leverage your knowledge base articles to create conversation flows. This can help your customers help themselves by providing instant answers and surfacing helpful articles.
• Generate content on the fly: AI-powered tools like Zendesk can turn a few bullet points into a complete article, enabling you to write knowledge base content at scale.
• Update articles with the help of AI: AI can identify and flag when your help center content doesn’t address common customer questions. This empowers your team to identify and fill content gaps.

By embracing these techniques, you’ll create happier customers and support agents.

9. Empower your agents

A good customer experience and employee experience (EX) are interlinked. Supporting your team members means equipping them with the tools and processes they need to do their jobs well. Here are a few ways businesses can do this:

• Equip agents with a unified workspace so they have customer context at their fingertips and don’t need to toggle between different tools to help customers.
• Improve agents’ workflows by automatically routing tickets to the agents with the right skills and providing them with prepared answers so they don’t have to type out your reimbursement policy.
• Assign repetitive requests to an AI agent so human agents can focus on the more engaging parts of their job.
• Invest in workforce management (WFM) and quality assurance (QA) tools so you can boost productivity, identify coaching areas, and develop employee skills.

Per Zendesk Benchmark data, when asking agents what would help them do their job better, three of the top five answers were: a single view of a customer’s interactions across all channels, having access to data that allows them to personalize interactions, and utilizing AI tools. So, our research backs up our suggestions as well.

10. Prioritize customer data protection

On one hand, customers want businesses to use their information to provide personalized experiences (as long as businesses are transparent about data collection). On the other, customers are concerned about how their data gets used and how you will protect it from cybersecurity threats.

Per Zendesk Benchmark data, 70 percent of consumers won’t purchase a product or service from a company they view as having lackluster security measures. Customer data privacy is a rising trend, and you must prioritize security to ensure your private data stays private and consumers feel safe.

11. Monitor data and trends to improve

To keep up with customer needs, support teams need analytics software that gives them instant access to customer insights across channels in one place. This enables them to be agile because they can go beyond capturing data and focus on understanding and reacting to it.

Look for customer service software that offers real-time and historical analytics to help your team take action on what’s happening today while understanding past trends. This can identify areas of development, help you learn how customers interact with your business, and boost your overall customer experience.

Frequently asked questions

Deliver excellent customer service with Zendesk

Good customer service can change businesses for the better. Organizations that prioritize their customers are more likely to build long-term relationships with them and boost profits. But it’s not enough to deliver good customer service—you need to provide excellent customer service, which we are experts in at Zendesk.

Zendesk service empowers you to scale your offerings, stay flexible through change, and create meaningful connections with your customers. With features ranging from ticket routing to performance reporting and everything in between, Zendesk can help you offer an outstanding CX.

Learn how the Zendesk customer service solution can make a difference for you.