7 Best Customer Service Companies in 2021 (With Actionable Learnings) | #customersupport #supporticket

Every company has to offer exceptional customer service to carve a niche for themselves in an aggressive market. While it’s a given that companies need to keep their customer service unique and add a personal touch, they can always take a leaf out of companies that deliver the best customer service.

The best customer service companies don’t get recognized just for a stroke of brilliance in handling certain moments with the customers. Their strength lies in the imitable support processes and customer-centric culture. Let’s look at some prime examples of companies that get customer service right.

7 best customer service companies and what you can learn from them

#1 Six Harbors Brewing Company

There was little that companies could do to ramp up their business when the pandemic struck in 2020. They needed to be agile and innovative to get back on their feet when the economy gradually picked up. But one brewery in New York had it all figured out.

Meet Buddy and Barley, two adorable golden retrievers who turned the tide for the Six Harbors Brewing Company. Amidst fears of social distancing, the owners trained both their pets to personally deliver beers to the patrons’ homes. This made for an endearing experience for the customers who got their fine brew delivered and also got to pet and play with their customer happiness agents, Buddy and Barley, who seemed to love their job more than anything else.

Key takeaway: Stand out in your niche by creating unique customer experiences.

#2 Trader Joe’s 

Customers who frequent the Trader Joe’s supermarkets feel that it’s the place where they’ve seen the happiest employees. The work culture of Trader Joe’s encourages employees to bring their authentic selves to work and prioritize customer happiness over everything else.

Every employee tries to cultivate personal relationships with customers by remembering things about them and their preferences. This infectious energy rubs off on the customers who want to keep coming back for the empathetic customer service experiences they get. To get a gist of why Trader Joe’s customers remain most loyal to them, watch this video where their employees break into a dance gig to entertain a kid throwing tantrums at one of their stores.

Key takeaway: Focus on keeping your customer service team happy since happy employees make happy customers.

#3 Ikea 

Boasting over 75 years of loyal customers and patronage, world-renowned furniture brand Ikea keeps reinventing itself. Not just to keep up with customer expectations but also to define them with an integrated customer experience.

Cafes and recreation areas inside their sprawling showrooms make customers feel at home. But it doesn’t stop there. Ikea updated its mobile app with augmented reality so that customers could see how the furniture would fit in at their homes. The AR also makes furniture recommendations based on the look and feel of your home.

Key takeaway: Leverage technology to bridge the gap between online and offline experiences.

#4 Starbucks

Starbucks delivers hyper-personalized experiences on its mobile app, making it a fan and a personal favorite for customer service.

What elevated my existing love for Starbucks is how they had my usual order ready before I even reached the outlet. I flipped my mobile screen on as I entered Starbucks to notice that I had received an “order ready” notification sometime before I reached. Even the reward points are catered to the drinks and snacks that I usually treat myself to.

With data and some human touch, Starbucks continues to sweep me and many other fans off our feet.

Key takeaway: Offer personalized customer experiences. They go a long way in improving customer satisfaction.

#5 Freshworks

Apart from offering a suite of intuitive CX products, Freshworks is also known for the technical competence of its support teams and customer success managers.

Customer-facing teams at Freshworks go all out to fulfill customization requests and take on complex technical requirements with grace, even after the sale has been completed.

Here’s some customer feedback that reflects Freshworks’ commitment to delivering stellar customer service:

Key takeaway: Invest in improving technical knowledge, a key factor in strengthening customer relationships.

#6 Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic’s curry story is quite popular. When a customer wrote a witty, disgruntled review about the quality of food served in their Heathrow to Mumbai flight, no one would have guessed that the passenger would actually end up on Virgin Atlantic’s food advisory board!

A picture of the underwhelming curry mentioned in the tongue-in-cheek feedback

This was only possible because, instead of giving out a templated, appeasing response, Richard Branson ended up seeking the help of the passenger and F&B experts to improve their menu across different flight routes.

Key takeaway: Take customer feedback seriously; it contains valuable information that can help you meet your customers’ needs.

#7 The Ritz-Carlton

The Ritz-Carlton is a hotel-chain renowned for its bespoke luxury and incredible hospitality experiences. Hotel staff and customers both have access to technology to make lives easier.

While the hotel staff uses chatbots to ask feedback questions and offer personalized services, customers get access to smartphone-connected rooms and services that also remember guests’ preferences.

Key takeaway: Adopting the right technology can help with delivering good customer service throughout the customer journey.

Understand the factors that set the best customer service companies up for success

Grand gestures or single moments of ‘wow’ do translate into great customer service stories. However, the key learning is that delighting customers should not be reduced to a few one-off efforts.

The best customer service companies are all about building a service culture with an underlying principle of unifying all teams towards the common goal of enhancing customer service with well-informed, customer-first decisions.

If you’re on the mission to be recognized for the customer service you deliver, then here’s how you can get started:

• Focus on empathy and product expertise: Train your employees to develop compassion and a deeper understanding of customer problems right from onboarding. Maintain a knowledge library and host product walkthroughs to make your support agents technically competent.
• Respond to customers like clockwork: Leverage workflow automations and service level agreements to get your support processes operating like a well-oiled machine. With streamlined internal processes, agents can continually respond to and resolve customer issues assigned to them in a timely manner.
• Offer self service: Enable customers to find readily available answers for simple queries. 76% of consumers globally prefer to first try to solve issues on their own before contacting support. So, it’s on your company to make sure customers are empowered with a comprehensive knowledge base, an AI-enabled chatbot, and user communities. A parallel win from self-service is that it can take some workload off your support agents.
• Provide omnichannel customer service: Make omnichannel support available by bringing all the customer engagement channels together, including social media, live chat, and messaging apps, into a single, unified inbox. This way, support agents can easily offer contextual assistance by accessing the consolidated view of customer service interactions across channels.
• Work as a team to resolve customer issues: Create a work culture that encourages team collaboration. It increases accountability by indulging all teams in the customer support process. Most of the customer service examples we see are backed by teams working towards a common goal of delighting customers.

Lastly, but most importantly, the secret sauce that’s common across all of the best customer service companies is the customer service software that allows them to interact with customers and offer solutions.

If you’re looking for the right tool for your team, try Freshdesk, an omnichannel customer service software that enables over 50,000 businesses to effortlessly deliver delightful support. With Freshdesk, you’re going to be on your way to joining the world’s best customer service companies.