How do you recognise good customer service?

Describe what the person did and what the customer got. Praise for being helpful or having a good attitude tells a support agent nothing about which behaviour to repeat, and they receive a great deal of it.

Should customer feedback be shared with the team?

Yes, in their own words. A customer writing “she stayed on the call until it worked” carries more weight than a manager reporting that somebody did well, and it costs nothing to forward.

How do you recognise support work outside the support team?

Post it where the rest of the company reads. Support is structurally invisible to engineering and sales, which means the effort that prevents churn is credited to nobody unless somebody deliberately makes it visible.

What support work usually goes unrecognised?

The preventive kind. Writing the help article that stops a question, spotting a pattern across tickets, telling a customer honestly that a competitor is a better fit. None of it produces a metric that improves, and all of it is worth more than a fast reply.

Do satisfaction scores measure good service?

Partly, and they are easy to misread. An agent with high scores on an easy queue and one with the same scores on the escalation queue are not doing the same job, and recognising them identically tells the second one that difficulty is not noticed.

Recognition messages

Recognising Great Customer Service: 12 Message Examples

Support work is judged by tickets closed and remembered by customers for something no dashboard records.

The dashboard misses the part customers remember

Support work is measured in tickets closed, first response time, satisfaction percentage. Useful numbers, and none of them record the forty minutes somebody spent on a problem that turned out to belong to a different product.

Customers remember that. The dashboard has no column for it, so unless a person says something, it happened to nobody.

Preventive work has no metric at all

An agent who spots the same question three times and writes the article that stops it has just reduced their own ticket count. Measured badly, that looks like doing less.

Naming it out loud is the only correction available, and it decides whether anyone on the team ever does it again.

12 messages you can send

Dani spent forty minutes with a customer who turned out to have a problem in a different product entirely, and helped them anyway. They wrote in to say so.
Manager, going outside scope
The customer’s own reaction is the evidence.
Thank you for how you handled the outage queue on Tuesday. Ninety tickets and not one reply that sounded like a template.
Manager, under pressure
A number and a quality that is hard under load.
Ravi noticed the same question three times in a week, wrote a help article, and the question stopped.
Peer, pattern spotting
Recognises fixing a cause rather than handling symptoms.
You told a customer we’d got it wrong before they’d worked it out themselves. That’s the hard version of this job and you did it well.
Manager, honesty
Names a difficult judgement most people avoid.
Thanks for chasing engineering for eight days on a bug affecting one account. One account is still somebody’s whole week.
Manager, persistence
Defends why a small case deserved the effort.
Sofia turned an angry cancellation into a renewal by asking what had actually gone wrong instead of offering a discount.
Manager, skill
Contrasts two approaches without praising in the abstract.
Thank you for the escalation notes. Engineering picked it up cold at 2am and knew what to do because of how you’d written them.
Peer, cross-team
Credits writing quality with an operational outcome.
You’ve had the highest satisfaction scores on the team for four months and you’ve also had the hardest queue. Both of those at once is unusual.
Manager, with data
Uses a number and then says why it is more impressive than it looks.
Thanks for saying no to the customer who wanted the thing we shouldn’t build. That was the right answer and it was not the easy one.
Manager, boundaries
Recognises a refusal, which support teams rarely get credit for.
Marek stayed with a customer through a two-hour migration on his own time because they were mid-payroll. He did not log it anywhere.
Manager, unlogged work
The last sentence is the point.
Thank you for the tone in the refund thread. The customer was rude and your replies read exactly the same as they always do.
Peer, composure
Praises consistency under provocation.
You closed a ticket by telling the customer a competitor did that better. They came back a month later and upgraded.
Manager, honesty paying off
A story with a result, told without a moral.

What makes one land

Quote the customer where you can. Their words carry more weight than any manager’s summary of the same interaction.
Recognise the cause fixed, not only the tickets closed. Somebody who writes the article that stops a question is doing more than the person answering it forty times.
Name the refusals. Saying no correctly is a support skill and it never shows up in a satisfaction score.
Watch for volume masking quality. High scores on an easy queue and high scores on a brutal one are different achievements.
Say it in a channel the rest of the team reads. Support work is invisible to the rest of the company by default, and a manager posting elsewhere is the only correction.

Questions people ask

How do you recognise good customer service?: Describe what the person did and what the customer got. Praise for being helpful or having a good attitude tells a support agent nothing about which behaviour to repeat, and they receive a great deal of it.
Should customer feedback be shared with the team?: Yes, in their own words. A customer writing “she stayed on the call until it worked” carries more weight than a manager reporting that somebody did well, and it costs nothing to forward.
How do you recognise support work outside the support team?: Post it where the rest of the company reads. Support is structurally invisible to engineering and sales, which means the effort that prevents churn is credited to nobody unless somebody deliberately makes it visible.
What support work usually goes unrecognised?: The preventive kind. Writing the help article that stops a question, spotting a pattern across tickets, telling a customer honestly that a competitor is a better fit. None of it produces a metric that improves, and all of it is worth more than a fast reply.
Do satisfaction scores measure good service?: Partly, and they are easy to misread. An agent with high scores on an easy queue and one with the same scores on the escalation queue are not doing the same job, and recognising them identically tells the second one that difficulty is not noticed.