Creating a Customer Service Philosophy You'll Actually Use
Eleanor Shellstrop — recently deceased and shocked to find herself in the Good Place — sends your team a support request for a refund she definitely doesn’t deserve. Will she get it? What’s the right thing to do? And how will her ethics professor friend Chidi explain your customer service philosophy to her later? Perhaps you don’t think you have one… but you do. Every team does, but only some have really thought about it.
To find out why a customer service philosophy is worth the effort, to learn how to go about making one, and to see some example philosophies you can blatantly steal or take inspiration from, keep scrolling.
What’s the point of a customer service philosophy?
A philosophy might sound pretentious when you’re being taught at by a moral philosophy professor literally killed by indecision, but it can be entirely practical.
A shared customer service philosophy guides the 100 small decisions that support pros make every shift. How should I respond to this angry person? Which ticket should I answer first? Should I bend the refund policy for this tiny Arizona dirtbag?
Without a shared team philosophy, you’re playing help desk bingo, where Eleanor’s refund depends on the individual philosophy of whoever picks up her question. Changing how your team serves people is the mark of success.
Philosophy vs. marketing slogan vs. mission statement
So your company put some set of words on its website — or the ugly corporate t-shirt that you only keep as emergency pajamas. Is that a slogan, or a mission statement, or a philosophy? The lines between them are more blurred than a Monet, but here are a couple of quick identification tips:
Who is it for? A slogan is advertising to an external audience, but a philosophy is usually aimed at staff. A mission statement can have it both ways.
What is it for? Is it to help sell products? That’s probably a slogan. Is it to inspire people to run at a big impressive goal? That’s probably a mission statement. A philosophy is about shaping daily actions.
If you think you’ve spotted a philosophy, though, here’s the real test:
Is it opposable? (The flip test)
Consider “We care about customers!” or “Your call is important to us!”: these are platitudes that no company will take the other side on (at least in public). A philosophy, on the other hand, has an opposite that other companies might choose. For example, “whoever answers the customer owns the conversation until it’s resolved” vs. “anyone in the queue can help resolve the issue.”
Philosophies come at a cost — a single conversation owner may slow down resolution, while having multiple people helping around the clock can result in customers having to repeat themselves.
A philosophy should be something that the person helping Eleanor could apply when considering a refund. “We care about customers!” could be used to justify any decision. “We believe customers, accepting that some people will take advantage” guides the agent toward a refund, and acknowledges the cost.
Real-world examples of customer service philosophies
If you’re looking for inspiration, there are plenty of customer service philosophies published on the web. Not all of them would meet the definition in this article, though; test them against the questions above to see why.
Customer service philosophies that pass the test
Even though these examples aren’t all labeled as philosophies, they all pass the flip test and have clear tradeoffs. We’re only quoting small sections here, so click through for the full details.
| Company | What they say | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
Barn2 (WordPress plugins) | “If a metric discourages the right behavior or creates a conflict (for example speed vs. quality), we must fix the metric rather than lowering the standard.” | Speed, and a simple dashboard |
PostHog (analytics software) | “We solve problems ourselves rather than passing them along.” | Speed when a conversation is waiting for owner |
Pest Management Solutions (pest control) | “(We will) Allow you to ultimately choose the treatment criteria you desire, even if your final selections differ from our recommendations.” | Control over the final treatment chosen |
We Can Fix That! (leather and vinyl repair) | “After we have done everything in our power to satisfy the customer, we refund the money for services performed and try to help the customer find someone who can satisfy them.” | The money they refund and the customer sent to a competitor |
Some examples that are not philosophies
By contrast, some of these examples are labeled as philosophies, but wouldn’t meet our definition in this article. That doesn’t mean they aren’t real beliefs, just that they aren’t actionable in the same way.
| Company | What they say | What it costs |
|---|---|---|
Chameleon-i (software) | “Treat you as we would like to be treated.” | No clear cost (nobody would choose the opposite) |
Wickstrom Lincoln (car dealership) | “We do everything possible to earn your business every day.” | Unclear. The rest of the page is about services and financing |
Josko Services (home services) | “Customer Service is not what we do, it’s who WE are!” | More of a slogan, and doesn’t name a cost |
How to write a customer service philosophy
A blank page can be intimidating, but remember that you already have a philosophy in practice, so you’re not inventing a new one as much as writing down what you already do at your best. A great place to start is by sharing the examples above with your team: Which ones resonate with them, and which do they disagree with? Those reactions will point you toward your shared views.
Making your philosophy useful
Start with the times when the answer isn’t obvious, those moments of tension when a great support team could land on either side of the question:
Is fast and pretty good better than thorough but much slower?
Is consistency of responses more important than flexibility, which allows for more mistakes?
Should policies apply to every customer so they are always fair, or should there be room to maneuver in certain situations if the agent sees a need?
Does efficient service trump relationship building, or are relationships worth the cost of time and labor?
Do we believe customers, knowing some of them (looking at you, Eleanor) will take advantage?
Will we fire an abusive customer to protect an agent, even at a high financial cost?
These are not simple decisions. Each one is a tradeoff, and that’s the point. The tradeoffs you willingly make are your philosophy in action.
Come up with your own list of situations your team finds themselves discussing, then do the work to land on one side or the other. Of course, no list of decisions like this could ever encompass a day in the actual queue, so your philosophy has to be wider than that.
The Agile Manifesto uses an X over Y format for its four core values, pitching them at a higher level than individual situations:
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
That’s a format you could borrow to define your team’s philosophy. Using some of the questions above, you might end up with:
Fixing it properly over closing it fast
Room to maneuver over one rule for everyone
Trusting customers over preventing a few from cheating
Protecting our people over keeping every customer
As the manifesto says: “While there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more,” and the same goes for the support version. Another team might flip those items around and still have a brilliant support org.
Disney addresses the hierarchy of its values by numbering them, with the most important first. That helps settle conflicts between three or more values, which a simple pair cannot do.
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What don’t you do?
Another way to define your customer service philosophy is to be clear about what you don’t do. That could be the customers or industries you won’t accept or the actions you won’t take (such as passing a customer between agents). In the real estate industry, high commissions and excessive advertising costs are the norm, but some realtors define themselves by doing the opposite. Is there an equivalent “accepted practice” in your own industry that you can commit to not doing? Build it into your philosophy.
5 ways to write a bad customer service philosophy
Promise tradeoffs you never pay: If you are never tempted to do the opposite of your philosophy, it fails the flip test.
Make it unmeasurable: Either so vague as to be meaningless, or misaligned from what you actually measure your team on.
Have it written by outsiders: People who’ve never picked up a support ticket shouldn’t be defining your philosophy.
Create a marketing statement: You want words that live in daily actions instead of on a shirt or a billboard.
Make everything important: Your team needs a way to consistently choose between values which might be in tension with each other.
Testing your philosophy
If your philosophy doesn’t pass the flip test above, it might be a platitude, the “live, laugh, love” of the corporate world. Cut it.
Amelia Friedman shares five useful questions in her 2018 article, How to Establish Values on a Small Team. Let’s take Eleanor’s refund request and test the value “Trusting customers over preventing a few from cheating”:
What does this value mean to us? → We’re OK with losing a bit of money if it means customers feeling respected.
What does it look like in action? → Agents can process a refund under $75 without demanding Eleanor provide evidence.
How might it be misinterpreted? → Agents might ignore even obvious abuse or fail to check Eleanor’s customer history and offer refunds rather than alerting their manager.
How will we evaluate adherence to it? → Monitor refund levels, and don’t blame the agent even if Eleanor does turn out to be cheating. Back them up.
How will it change our relationships or our interactions? → Fewer customers waiting for a manager, a few more losses, more job satisfaction for support staff. Eleanor sticks around as a customer once she has learned to behave better.
So Eleanor might well be running one more scam, but if her request is under the threshold she should get her refund, absent explicit evidence.
Take each of your own values and answer the same questions with real customers in mind. “We care about customers” doesn’t help support pros to take specific actions, but “Trusting customers over preventing a few from cheating” does.
AI and customer service philosophy
Humans are no longer the only active participants in most support conversations. AI tools powered by large language models may be directing customers to your knowledge base and answering questions directly. They are the not-a-robot Janet of this increasingly stretched Good Place metaphor.
Just like your human team has a philosophy even if you never wrote one, your AI bots follow a philosophy of sorts. It’s not theirs; it’s an expression of the AI vendor’s training and whatever help documents and conversational history you’ve given them.
So your AI-generated answers won’t necessarily match the philosophy you’ve set for your team. If your philosophy is vague and unactionable, it will be equally as unhelpful to AI bots as it is to people. However, if you’ve written out some X over Y values, give them to your AI as instructions. It’s not a guarantee, but it will nudge AI behavior closer to your intended outcome.
Where you allow AI to work, and which places you reserve for human interaction, should be guided by your service philosophy too. Consider how “a human whenever you want one over instant answers” or “a fast, solid answer over a thorough, slow one” might shape your AI deployment plans.
Will you let AI make a decision on all refunds or only on the ones under a dollar limit, or will you direct it to escalate all refund requests to people?
Try it on Eleanor. We decided agents could refund her up to $75 without asking for evidence because we value trusting customers over catching the few who cheat. Would you let Janet make that same call for a hundred customers a month without supervision? If yes, put it in her instructions. If you’re feeling tense right now, that suggests you’ll still want human judgment involved.
Either way, AI isn’t a way to avoid tradeoffs. It will apply the ones you chose, or failed to choose, with undeserved confidence on every conversation it touches.
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Customer service philosophies in action
A philosophy gets tested in the queue when an individual customer interacts with your support team. Would your customer be able to tell which side of an “X over Y” value your company chose just from their own experience?
Southwest Airlines has an employee promise that in part reads “I will show my Servant’s Heart by delivering Legendary Customer Service and treating others with respect.” A pilot put that promise into action by holding a plane, and losing an on-time departure, so a passenger could see his dying grandson.
Often customers experience the opposite of a company’s claimed approach. Comcast, responding to Ryan Block’s terrible experience trying to cancel a plan, said in a leaked memo that “Respecting our customers is fundamental” while also saying its agent was doing what he was trained, and paid, to do. Comcast was not willing to pay the cost of its own value.
Most service situations aren’t going to make national news, to the relief of every support team, but if you read enough customer reviews, you will be able to reverse-engineer how a company thinks about service. Philosophies are visible in daily actions, as Eleanor will eventually learn.
A philosophy untested is pointless
In the Good Place, the system deciding who goes where is eventually revealed to be a rigid points system without a real philosophy attached (spoiler!). Nobody has made it to the Good Place in centuries. It’s what can happen to any customer service team that has procedures and policies but no coherent philosophy. You end up with service that might be consistent but is also inexplicable and often infuriating.
Deliberately crafting your customer service philosophy as a team gives you a chance to decide what matters to you — and which tradeoffs you’re willing to make. Then, you can test those decisions against real-world customer situations and learn from the outcomes.
You won’t always deliver on your philosophy, and you probably won’t get it right the first time, but testing, learning, and trying again is a natural fit for people in support. It’s also the system ultimately adopted in the Good Place, so you’ll be in good company.
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Mathew Patterson
A veteran support leader, Mat spent years teaching online support at Help Scout before founding More Human Content. He also runs People-First Jobs. Subscribe to The Supportive or find Mat on LinkedIn.
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