What Is Customer Service? Help Scouts Weigh In

I’ve always worked in customer service. I’ve worked the box office at a San Francisco tourist attraction, handled front-line and escalation support for a consumer electronics brand, worked in knowledge management, and now I help produce content at a company that makes customer support software.

Over the years, I’ve spent a decent amount of time thinking about support and what kind of experience I’m providing customers. How can I simplify the troubleshooting steps in this saved reply? Am I doing a good enough job of empowering customers to self-serve? Is this blog post useful and relatable? How can I get these folks from Australia to Alcatraz short of rowing them there myself?

Lots of important questions there, especially if you’re afraid of open water. However, one question I’ve never really considered is “What is customer service?” 

At first glance, it seems like a simple question with an obvious answer.

But I think we can all agree that customer service is about a lot more than answering a phone call, providing troubleshooting steps, or processing a return.

At Help Scout, we think customer service is pretty important, but there is still a lot of variance in what customer service means to each of us. In this post, we’ll explore what members of the team think customer service is, why support is important, and how customer care impacts your business.

Customer service aids in product adoption and reduces churn

Have you ever bought something, gotten it home, and couldn’t make it work? Maybe you fiddled with it a bit on your own, leafed through the instruction manual, or asked a family member for help. Eventually, you probably took to the internet to (hopefully) find an answer in the company’s help center or on their YouTube channel.

In a situation like this, if you can quickly find help, be it through a well-designed knowledge base, a thoughtfully implemented chatbot, or a quick exchange with the customer service team, chances are you’ll forgive the initial negative experience and keep the product. But if you can’t find an answer, contact information is hidden or missing altogether, or you wind up trapped in an ugly tango with a bad IVR system, what are you going to do?

That item is heading right back to the store or, at a bare minimum, to a very dark corner of your garage, never to be seen again.

The job of customer service is to make it easy and delightful for customers to use your product or service.

Chrissy Chavez

Technical Support Specialist

Some business leaders might think that support quality and customer experience isn’t as important as your product or service; however, 80% of customers say otherwise. While it’s true that a more intuitive product would help the most in a situation like the one above, good service in the form of self-service options or a good recovery strategy could not only negate the impact of a bad experience but even help build brand loyalty.

Customer service is everyone’s responsibility

On the other hand, poor service can have a lasting effect. A 2023 survey found that 73% of customers will abandon a brand after just one instance of subpar service. This shows that support’s impact on a customer’s overall experience with — and opinion of — a brand is substantial.

If you want to provide your customers with the best experience possible, customer service must be seen as an all-hands-on-deck operation requiring cooperation across every department.

I think about ‘customer service’ in the broadest sense of the term — every touchpoint is an opportunity to give the customer a seamless, enjoyable experience buying, using, or troubleshooting a product or service.

That encompasses much more than just support when there’s a problem or question. It’s how well your website tells your story and gets users where they want to go, the brand values and personality customers get to experience in your communications, and how easy it is to interact with your company during both positive and negative moments.

Hillary Noble

Director of Content

At Help Scout, the Marketing team always gives our Customers team — our name for support — a heads-up when we have an email scheduled to be sent to customers, are preparing to publicly announce a new feature, or are making a change to the website.

Similarly, our developers give the team a shout before rolling out a release or if they notice a performance issue with the platform. This allows the Customers team to prepare for questions, be on the lookout for related issues, and react more quickly if something goes wrong.

We also consider customer service during the design process for both the Help Scout product and our marketing site. We use Beacons — our embeddable web widget — to provide access to our support team’s contact form from within the customer experience. We also link to helpful resources like live classes and our blog in the website’s nav bar for easy access.

It’s the entire company’s job to help our customers feel supported and have a positive experience with Help Scout, and we’re always looking for ways to improve.

Customer service is about empowering customers

Making sure customers don’t encounter barriers to customer service is important, but if we’re being honest, a customer’s ideal scenario is not having to talk to your support team at all. For simple issues, customers would rather help themselves.

Customer service to me is that feeling where you're about to ask a question or raise a complaint, and someone passes you the solution at that moment. They've anticipated what you need and have solved it for you without you needing to ask or get your input.

Tom Rayner

SEO Strategist

When you think of self-service, you probably imagine a well-organized knowledge base, an AI-powered chatbot providing 24/7 support, and huge cost savings for your business. And while yes, self-service can provide a good customer experience and fewer tickets in the queue, it isn’t free.

Behind every successful self-service strategy is a dedicated team, digging into customer questions and concerns and finding the best way to proactively present information so that customers are set up for success.

For me, the first thing that comes to mind is helping people help themselves. It shouldn’t be just about giving the customer an answer and sending them on their way. Instead, good customer service should first get to the root of the problem by asking well-crafted questions and then empowering the customer, not only with the solution, but also helping them solve similar problems in the future.

Tamara Zuk

Senior Engineer

In fact, knowledge management teams are even more critical in today's world of AI enthusiasm. After all, AI tools are only as good as the information they are fed, which means that investing in your support team is just as — if not more — important as it was before ChatGPT came on the scene.

As we start to build AI features into our product, the team is putting extra effort into our own documentation and examining how we can help our customers create AI-friendly Docs sites that will lead to a better self-serve experience for their customers, too.

Customer service is a career that requires skill

Customer service is often just seen as a stepping stone in a career — a role where you can get your foot in the door and then move on to something better. However, this is usually the view of someone who has never held a support position. Customer service is a profession that requires a tremendous amount of skill, and not everyone can do it well.

People who have a knack for support are beneficial to companies in a number of different ways. Of course, there’s the obvious — they’re experts at getting customers back on track quickly. However, they can also have a significant impact on the product or service itself.

[Customer] interactions can also help shape the product even if the customer didn’t directly share feedback when reaching out. Great customer service [teams] can read between the lines and share that information with the Product team.

Tamara Zuk

Senior Engineer

Support teams do more than just answer questions. They can see past the specific ask of the customer and use their product knowledge to identify and offer creative solutions. They also use these interactions to advocate for product improvements that reduce friction and improve customer experience.

Customer service deserves a seat at the table

As mentioned above, customer conversations are full of valuable information. However, getting that customer feedback to the broader company is often a challenge.

One way to keep everyone in the company up to speed is by giving support a seat at the table. Your support leaders should present at all-hands meetings on a regular basis, providing concrete data and feedback from real customers. Of course, visibility doesn’t need to stop at the leadership level; every support team member has something worthwhile to contribute.

Customer service not only informs customers but also acts as a vital channel for companies to consistently gauge customer sentiment and preferences.

Wendy Chen

Assistant Controller

At Help Scout, members of the customers team are provided with several different ways to share the knowledge gained from their work with customers. One example is the option to work on “mini teams,” which are small squads dedicated to a specific feature or product launch. They are responsible for things like product testing, creating related documentation, answering any questions that come in from customers and teammates on the topic, and directly passing customer and support team feedback to the associated product manager.

Customer service is often an underutilized resource, especially at the agent level. Companies that provide exceptional service know that and ensure that support is always involved with any initiative that has customer impact.

Customer service provides space for human connection

While it’s nice to have a customer advocate in the room, it’s no substitute for actually rolling up your sleeves and answering customer questions. At Help Scout, the entire company gets into the queue regularly to stay in touch with customer sentiment. It helps us increase product knowledge while building curiosity and empathy.

It’s also good for the customer. Customer service is a way for us to build relationships and connect with customers on a personal level. According to Heidi Harris, a member of our People team, sometimes that’s exactly what a customer needs.

My first job out of college was working in customer service for a car finance company. I was in a regional office and most of the phone calls I received were from folks who called the 1-800 number, sat on hold for about two hours, and then were finally transferred to us. Most of them were not happy when I picked up the phone, so my approach was to bring as much kindness and empathy as possible to every conversation — even when I was frustrated.

There is one call in particular I’ll never forget. A customer needed financial relief for her car payment — and to keep her car. Her daughter had cancer and needed to be driven several hours away a few times a week for treatment. We reduced her payments for several months, and she was so grateful. She told me about her daughter, the challenges they were facing, and how she was hopeful. She not only needed help with her car payments, she needed someone to listen.

For me, this is customer service. It’s about the human connection. Whether you’re working with someone over chat or email, calling a company about an issue, or spending two minutes with a checker in the grocery line, it’s remembering that there is a human being on the other side and finding small ways to make their day just a little bit better.

Heidi Harris

Lead People Business Partner

Whether you’re a support rep or a customer, it can be easy to forget that the one on the other end of the phone is a real person. Good customer service is all about tapping into each other’s humanity, finding a solution to a problem, and building trust that spans beyond a single interaction.

Customer service is a reflection of your company’s values

As I wrote this post, I thought a lot about what I believe customer service is. While I can point to specific features of good customer service, like proactive support or delivering a good customer experience, I’ve been thinking more about what customer service says about a company’s values.

Everyone knows about the great support that Chewy, the pet supply ecommerce business, provides. They do the typical support stuff well — fast refunds, easy returns, etc. But they’re also well known for delivering unexpected delight in the form of birthday cards and surprise pet paintings, as well as compassion and empathy when a customer’s pet passes away.

These actions aren’t just good service; they’re decisions and practices that reflect what’s important to the brand, like being customer-first, delivering results, earning trust, and thinking big.

Customer-first values: How we work at Help Scout

While the connection between values and service is well executed in the example above, it's not true for every business. In the past, I'd usually find a list of values and statements on vision and mission in an employee handbook on my first day at a new company. I'd hear all about them while training, then never again.

They were out of my mind before I even finished my new hire paperwork.

At Help Scout, we have four guiding values that help define how we work. They aren't just concepts that live in an onboarding slide deck, but rather something that we live and talk about every day. In meetings, in performance discussions, in giving each other a shout out for a job well done — our values are thoroughly embedded in our company culture.

If you’re interested, you can dive further into what each value means and how we defined them in this article, but for now, let’s take a moment to look at how our values show up in the experience and service we provide our customers.

Happy to Help

Given that help is in our name, it’s probably not surprising that one of our values centers around helping both our customers and each other. Our team is made up of some of the most friendly, empathetic, and kind people I’ve ever worked with and everyone is always willing to jump in and lend a hand.

In terms of service, all of us have a:

• Commitment to the practice of whole company support.

• Willingness to go above and beyond and provide creative solutions to customer problems.

• Dedication to providing proactive support and education through documentation, live classes, and helpful content to ensure that our customers feel well supported and confident in our product.

Craft over Convention

At Help Scout, we feel it’s important to get things right, even if it goes against what is expected or what our competition is doing. We are given room to be ambitious and hold our work and each other to high standards.

In terms of customer experience, we

• Remain customer-first in an industry that is often obsessed with the next new thing.

• Don’t aim for feature parity. If a feature isn’t good enough for our own customers or won’t provide a good customer experience, we don’t release it. 

• Consistently train and sharpen our team’s product knowledge and troubleshooting skills to ensure that our customers always receive the best support possible.

Progress not Perfection

We ship our best effort, listen, iterate, and repeat, operating with a CANI (constant and never-ending improvement) mindset. The Help Scout team does our best to embrace vulnerability, welcome feedback, and stay curious and humble.

Our team:

• Values customer feedback and uses it to inform feature improvements and the product roadmap.

• Knows that the work in the queue is never “done” and that there’s always room for improvement.

• Believes that there’s no such thing as a dumb question. Our support pros know that it’s impossible to know everything about our product and they aren’t afraid to ask each other for advice to ensure that a customer gets the best answer possible.

Own the Outcome

We know that the work we do each day has a direct impact on our teammates and customers. We believe in ownership, thinking before you act, and that trust and integrity are non-negotiables.

Help Scout:

• Empowers our support team to make decisions.

• Encourages all employees to consider impact when taking action that could affect a customer’s experience with our team or product.

• Takes a thoughtful approach to new technology, as we are ultimately responsible for the experience our customers receive.

• Values our customers’ success above all and are always honest if we don’t think we’re the best fit for a customer’s business or use case.

Remember: How your business supports its customers shows them who you are; it’s up to you to decide who that is.

What does customer service mean to you?

Do our team's definitions of customer service resonate with you? Have one of your own? Drop us a note — we’d love to learn more about what customer service means to you.