9 Customer Service Blogs Every Support Pro Should Follow
One of the best ways to stay current with trends and customer needs is by following customer service blogs. Reading about the tools and techniques that other companies are using to provide excellent experiences helps inform your team and strategy on doing the same.
Below are nine customer service blogs we love, with breakdowns of what content you can expect to find on them and details on why they're so amazing.
1. Bill Quiseng
Bill Quiseng is a well-known influencer in the customer service space. Beyond producing written content, he also has a very active Twitter feed and frequently hosts podcasts. Bill's experience is unique, at least in the tech world, in that he started his career in luxury resorts and hotel management.
Similar to Ritz-Carlton's perspective on customer service, Bill Quiseng brings a hyper-defined focus to customer experience. His blog reflects that throughout and offers a ton of different ways for readers to engage.
For instance, if reading blogs isn't most effective for you or members of your team, Bill also offers recordings and materials for his workshops, a reading list, and references to videos and audio recordings that you can listen to.
There are a few notable things about Bill's blog that can help you discern if this is a good follow for you:
2. ClientSuccess
ClientSuccess is a product that supports individuals working in the customer success field. Rather than a blog devoted to its product, ClientSuccess focuses heavily on creating knowledge around the why of customer success rather than the how.
ClientSuccess also offers many resources for individuals with different learning preferences outside of blogs.
The thing that sets ClientSuccess apart from other customer service blogs is that it is mainly directed toward management and team leadership. On the ClientSuccess blog, you can expect to see topics like:
Top Mistakes Leaders Make When Building a Customer Success Organization
5 Keys for Coaching CSMs to Have Strategic Customer Conversations
They are on a weekly publishing cadence, so users who subscribe to this blog or their content will not be bombarded with notifications super frequently and can instead expect to see one well-researched, in-depth blog per week.
If you're curious about this blog and want to explore more to see if it's for you, here are some resources you can use to decide:
Aggregated "toolkits" of paired blog posts, webinars, and ebooks
ClientSuccess is an excellent read for anyone in customer success or client management leadership — or for folks who would someday like to be in charge of their team.
3. Customer Bliss
Jeanne Bliss, author of Customer Bliss, is a prolific writer in the customer service space. She's written several books, has multiple themed weekly articles on her site, and produces a regular podcast.
The thing that sets Customer Bliss apart is, as much as it is a customer service blog, it also focuses on keeping you and your team healthy. Rather than create outstanding teams at the expense of sanity and health, Bliss strives to help companies build with integrity.
Her books — like "Would You Do That To Your Mother?" — take a unique perspective on customer service that is both profoundly human as well as aspirational, and that's what you can expect from the rest of her content as well.
When you navigate to the Customer Bliss blog, there are tons of alternatives to select from. The categories currently include:
CCO role
Customer listening path
Customers as assets
Daily dose of optimism
Daily dose of reality
Experience reliability & innovation
Guest posts
One-company leadership
As you can tell, Jeanne's blog is excellent for leadership guidance but has helpful information for anyone in a customer-facing role. She even has a quiz on her site to see what your customers will remember you for, and she offers customized content based on your results.
Along with the posts mentioned above, she usually shares one longer-form blog post each month and supplements it with her Twitter presence and podcast. If you're keen to see if Customer Bliss might be a good fit for you, you can see the tone and content here:
4. Fonolo
Fonolo is a platform that offers call-back systems, conversation scheduling, and visual IVR.
However, outside of their product, they also provide an excellent customer service blog. They break out their content into a few different segments, making it easy to head directly to what you're interested in:
Customer Service
Customer Experience
Call Center
Contact Center
Industry News
If you use an RSS reader, Fonolo's blog includes a feed link, or you can you can subscribe via email to receive their latest content as soon as it is published. That happens twice a week.
Fonolo's blog posts are typically aimed at leaders in call centers, but also provide useful content for support professionals at all levels. This is an excellent blog to follow if you are starting in your career in support or as an individual contributor or team lead.
Fonolo also offers several other resources if blog posts aren't your preferred way of learning, for example:
Many of these additional resources are linked directly to (or work in tandem with) the blog posts that Fonolo produces, so if you subscribe to their blog, Fonolo will also inform you of relevant extra content.
5. Forrester
While Forrester isn't a traditional customer service blog like some others on the list, it is one of the best research-driven blogs on the internet.
If you subscribe to this blog, the company will serve you some content that is not directly related to customer service but may still help you or your team. For instance, blog posts like:
It's Time For The Infosec Industry To Address Gender Bias And Bullying Head On
Post-Pandemic In-Store Shopping: Consumers Reconsider The Value Of The Store
It's immediately evident that these can't be directly applied to the day-to-day work being done by your customer service team on the ground. However, taking perspectives on customer experience from industries outside of your own can be a great way to glean unique ideas on approaching your customer service strategies.
Forrester publishes a large number of posts every week, so if you do subscribe, expect to spend some time combing through the pieces that are useful for you.
Along with customer service, they also write a lot about marketing, sales, and business logistics. Helpfully, they've created curated sections on their site for the different audiences that may read Forrester and have one designated explicitly for Customer Experience.
6. HubSpot
HubSpot's blog covers every subject that a SaaS business could ever be concerned about. They are a one-stop shop for any function across your business.
That said, their customer service blog is top tier. Not only do they have tons of contributors from within HubSpot and externally at world-renowned companies, but they also do a great job of organizing content to make discovery easy.
When you navigate to HubSpot's customer service blog, you can see any top or trending content, new content, and individual categories organized in an easy-to-navigate way. Unlike some of the other blogs on this list, HubSpot offers subscribers the option to subscribe to specific topics.
HubSpot has a regular publishing cadence of content like webinars, blog posts, white papers, and ebooks. All of these are included in the email roundup that they send.
The most impactful aspect of HubSpot's blog posts is that they almost always consider a cross-functional perspective. So unlike some other blogs, you'll see a lot of content about customer service teams working with sales or marketing and how that impacts the scope of customer service as a whole.
This is an excellent blog for anyone in customer service, from working in the queue up to the VP of Customer Experience.
7. Gainsight
Gainsight is a product built to operationalize customer success, and their blog does a great job of coaching individuals on how to do precisely that.
If you're looking for content about how to build a team, what best practices to put in place, or even template processes, Gainsight's blog is a great place to subscribe to for constant inspiration.
Unlike some of the other blogs on this list, Gainsight provides more tactical, strategic reads. You won't find anything about how to minimize response times, but you will find a ton of information about things like appropriate metrics to use, figuring out usage data, and analyzing things like your team's fiscal impact.
In terms of audience, Gainsight's blog is likely best suited to leaders in a director position or above. Here are four blog posts that are indicative of the type of content you can expect:
As you can see, the content may be a bit much for individuals just starting to learn about customer service and customer experience. However, for more experienced team members, this can be extremely helpful when considering your team's strategy as you grow.
Beyond their blog, Gainsight has several excellent resources that readers can also subscribe to:
Gainsight's blog is a great place to elevate your perspectives and strategies around customer experience.
8. Totango
Like Gainsight, Totango is software designed to help customer success teams operationalize and automate their processes. Their blog emphasizes that, with tons of content on how to use their product.
While some blog posts center around the philosophy behind why to do things this way, more often than not, Totango's blog focuses on the steps a team should take to get to a specific outcome. For instance:
Many of these posts require minimal reading time — 3 to 5 minutes for most — so it's a perfect blog to subscribe to for quick bites of knowledge. They strive to make their content easily consumable while still being impactful. They also provide many more in-depth posts that do a deeper dive on a single topic.
Beyond their blog, Totango also offers other means of self-education. For instance, you can watch a webinar or video recording with a CS expert or read white papers and reports. No matter what way you prefer to learn, Totango has you covered.
9. Shep Hyken
Like Bill Quiseng and Jeanne Bliss, Shep Hyken is a longtime professional in customer service.
While he has a ton of really unique blog content that readers can subscribe to, the thing that sets his blog apart from the rest is that he does a weekly roundup of the content that he found most meaningful over the past week. This level of signal boosting is admirable in a blogger and serves to highlight more minor writers and content.
Outside of his signal boosting in the form of roundups and guest posts, Hyken has a lot to say from his own experience. His blog posts are very accessible, with titles such as "Customer Service vs. Customer Experience...What is the Difference?"
This blog would be a good subscribe for an individual looking to get a base level understanding of customer experience and service or regularly refresh themselves on critical concepts.
Hyken designates between blog posts and articles; while his blog posts are generally short and sweet, his articles are more in-depth.
With a subscription to Hyken’s blog, you’ll receive a weekly roundup of all of his content. That includes:
White papers
Blog posts
Articles
Podcasts
Webinars
Guest posts
Rather than just subscribing to a blog, you stay in the loop with all of Hyken’s content when you subscribe to this site.
We're sure there are some great blogs that we've missed or just failed to mention — after all, our own blog is widely known as an excellent source for customer service tips. You can subscribe to it via RSS using an RSS reader like Feedly or sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter.
What are some of the customer service blogs or Twitter feeds that you follow to stay up-to-date on the world of customer experience? How do you continue to educate yourself toward career development and a super-effective team? Tweet at us at @helpscout and let us know!
Mercer Smith
