Here at Leapfrogg, we have a panel of more than 800 premium retail consumers that we engage with on a regular basis to help us understand customer needs and expectations from the brands and retailers they buy from.

Every month, we question them on a range of areas from buying behaviours and brand opinion, to emotional purchase triggers and their recent shopping experiences.

The Insight Edit is our weekly bite size edit of the insight we gain from our panel in our search to truly understand the mind of the premium customer.

With our survey last month revealing that customer service was the most important aspect of a good customer experience, we decided to further explore what our panel felt were the key aspects of receiving a great customer service.

We asked our panel to rate a number of aspects of customer service according to how important they were to the overall service they received.

The results show that our panel felt the most important aspect of customer service was ‘good old fashioned politeness’ with 85% stating that it is “very important” and all others stating it as“slightly important.”

A close second came ‘helpfulness’ with 81% viewing it as “very important” to good customer service and the rest as “slightly important.”

Speed was the next most important factor with 82% citing the ability to rectify a problem quickly as “very important” and 78% thinking the same for the speed of response.

Availability by email was deemed more important than receiving customer service by social media, phone and least importantly live chat.

Our key takeaway from this survey is that the way in which any of your customer service representatives communicate with your customer and are able to quickly rectify an issue is more important than offering a wide range of customer service channels.

Therefore, communication training for your customer service representatives no matter what channel they engage through is of high importance. Ensure they are polite and helpful at all times and react as quickly as possible to queries. If you pick one key channel to focus on to deliver customer service then make sure it is email.