What's your weekday morning routine?
When I get into the office, I drink an iced almond milk latte, crank up the 2002-era tunes on Spotify, and spend some time in my inbox. Specifically, reading the newsletter subscription emails I get every morning from my favorite customer service blogs.
![→ Access Now: 50 Customer Service Email Templates [Free Resource]](https://no-cache.hubspot.com/cta/default/53/9a8328ad-9a07-4f92-aa9c-468dc3a4a9d7.png)
If you're eager to learn more about the customer service space too, I've compiled a list of outlets you can follow and subscribe to in order to keep your education current — and keep your morning routine interesting.
20 Best Customer Service Blogs to Start Reading Today
Finding the right industry blog to hold your interest can be a chore. To save you time, we’ve compiled some of our favorites below. To learn more, read about how marketing and customer service can better collaborate.
1. HubSpot
This very blog you're reading — the HubSpot Service Blog — features original research, tactical strategy, and thought leadership content about all aspects of customer service, support, experience, and success. We advocate for investing in customer happiness and retention as a sustainable way to grow your business, so your happy customers will recommend your brand to their networks.
Top Pick: The State of Customer Service Report
Why We Chose It
HubSpot’s Service Hub is one of the top service software platforms on the market so it’s fitting their blog delivers top-tier guides and insights to match. Get real-world strategies you can implement to accomplish your brand’s customer success goals.
2. Totango
The Totango blog is all about the customer journey, and the blog shares helpful resources for customer-facing practitioners and team leaders alike.
Top Pick: The Vital Role of Customer Success Operations
Why We Chose It
This is an excellent blog for all of your SaaS related interests. Get the latest industry insights and trends to help better serve your customers.
3. Zendesk
Zendesk's content community is chock-full of blog posts, podcasts, and professionals to connect with about how to make customer service about relationships — not transactions.
Top Pick: Improving the customer experience: why UX writers and customer service should team up
Why We Chose It
As one of the largest customer service platforms on the market, Zendesk delivers content on everything from how-to guides to the latest app integrations and trends. Newbies and seasoned service professionals will find this blog useful.
4. ClientSuccess
The ClientSuccess Blog is a great resource for customer success leaders looking to build an effective team and a strong organizational culture.
Top Pick: Is Faster Customer Onboarding Always the Answer?
Why We Chose It
ClientSuccess is the go-to blog for expert advice on seamless customer onboarding. Additionally, it provides a sizable portion of content dedicated to analyzing success metrics.
5. Nicereply
If you are looking for a place where you can find useful templates, step-by-step guides, interviews with support leaders, and "how to" tricks & tips blog posts, the Nicereply blog is a great source for all of your customer service needs. It's written by experienced support managers who share their customer service advice on how to build strong and meaningful relationships with your customers.
Top Pick: The Art of Saying Sorry – How to Apologize in Customer Service
Why We Chose It
Nicereply provides tons of tips with real-life experiences that take learnings and show you how to apply them to your practices.
6. SixteenVentures
SixteenVentures is written by Lincoln Murphy, one of the pioneers of customer success as a concept and as a business function. This blog is a must-read, whether you’ve been working in customer success for years or it’s your first day on the job — Lincoln is the authoritative source for new concepts and best practices.
Top Pick: Customer Growth: The Difference between Sales and Expansion
Why We Chose It
Reading Lincoln’s blog is like taking a masterclass on customer success for free.
7. Intercom
Intercom's blog shares valuable insights and tips for a wide audience — customer success professionals and leaders will find a home here, but the blog shares content about management, career building, and product development stories and best practices.
Top Pick: Want your support team to drive revenue? Go real-time
Why We Chose It
Intercom’s well-rounded approach to producing customer success content ensures readers will find it interesting and informative no matter where they are along their career journey.
8. Tomasz Tunguz
Tomasz Tunguz is a venture capitalist who writes excellent blog posts about growing and building a successful startup. Not all of his blog posts pertain to customer success professionals, but most posts are focused on the SaaS business model, making the customer success content on the blog highly relevant for customer success managers and leaders.
Top Pick: Pipeline Supply Shocks in SaaS Sales
Why We Chose It
Tunguz’s no-frills blog delivers short, skimmable content that gets right to the point. It’s perfect for service professionals pressed for time.
9. Customer Success Box
Customer Success Box is a platform focused on enabling successful outcomes at all stages of the customer lifecycle. It’s no surprise then that its blog hits all the touchpoints a service professional could need — complete with plenty of guides and templates.
Top Pick: Important KPIs to Track for High Touch SaaS
Why We Chose It
Customer Success Box provides a wide range of materials on its blog from webinars to ebooks. Whatever your preferred method for content consumption is, they’ve got you covered.
10. Shep Hyken
Shep Hyken is one the customer service industry’s most well-known speakers, and his blog shares not only his own excellent content, but the content he’s reading to keep informed about the customer success world, too. (Read about our interview with Shep in this post.)
Top Pick: Three C's of Customer Service Success
Why We Chose It
Hyken’s blog delivers a double dose of expertise by including not only his insights, but tips and materials from his favorite industry professionals.
11. CX Journey
CX Journey is written by the organization’s CEO — which stands for ‘Chief Experience Officer.’ This blog is dedicated to helping companies and leaders build an exceptional customer experience by capturing the voice of the customer (VoC), and it includes both tactical strategies for growth and big-picture ideas about where the customer success industry is headed.
Top Pick: Leaders: Are You In Love With Your Own Ideas?
Why We Chose It
CX Journey allows readers to get industry insights on a macro level or drill down into more tactical success strategies for those further along in their careers.
12. CustomerThink
CustomerThink is a community of writers and customer-facing professionals who contribute blog posts about a variety of topics — including leadership, technology, sales, analytics, and tactical content for anything and everything customer.
Why We Chose It
CustomerThink is a one-stop shop for all of your customer related needs written by a team of respected industry experts.
13. Help Scout
Help Scout's blog covers a lot of different topics in the areas of customer loyalty and service, featuring quirky custom illustrations and detailed case studies to educate their readers.
Top Pick: How a Shared Inbox Can Improve Efficiency, Transparency, and Collaboration
Why We Chose It
Help Scout is an excellent source for industry newbies with a wide variety of guides and how-to articles. They also don’t shy away from more controversial topics, like the use of A.I to eliminate service rep accents.
14. Support Driven
Support Driven is a community of customer support professionals that connect via a Slack group, a podcast, conferences, and a blog. It offers a ton of resources for new and experienced professionals in the industry, and its blog offers in-depth articles, event and podcast recaps, and thought leadership.
Top Pick: How did you know or discover that you wanted to build a career in Support?
Why We Chose It
Support Driven is a blog for support professionals created by support professionals. Similar to sites like Reddit, it’s an excellent place to ask questions and crowdsource feedback from customer service professionals who have experienced similar challenges.
15. Planhat
Planhat's blog features in-depth articles and interviews with industry leaders about customer success and customer experience (like this interview with Michael Redbord).
Top Pick: How To Get Started With Your Customer Advocacy Program
Why We Chose It
Firsthand accounts from industry professionals are excellent learning tools. Planthat delivers a reading experience you simply can’t get from a basic how-to guide.
16. ChurnZero
ChurnZero's blog is dedicated to content about churn reduction via customer engagement and retention, and the actionable tips and best practices are extremely valuable.
Top Pick: Why Customer Success and Customer Education Are Your BFFs In Uncertain Times
Why We Chose It
If tackling customer churn is your main priority, this should be your go-to blog. They take cumbersome topics and break them down into smaller actionable tasks you can adapt for your team.
17. Fonolo
Fonolo's customer service and experience blog offers a ton of valuable resources for reps working on the front lines with customers, day-in and day-out.
Top Pick: 3 Ways to Drive Inclusive Agent Engagement
Why We Chose It
Unlike some of the other options on this list, Fonolo publishes content focused on improving internal service team dynamics for better customer outcomes rather than solely focusing on external customer-centric content.
18. Gainsight
Gainsight’s blog covers customer success best practices across a myriad of sectors. From B2B to SaaS to healthcare, their blog has no shortage of strategies that can be applied to various sectors.
Top Pick: How to Make CX Less ‘Squishy’ and More Data-Driven
Why We Chose It
This blog is a great option for those wanting tips for managing customer success while scaling as most of the content is focused on growth.
19. SmartKarrot
SmartKarrot’s blog publishes both service and product content. Spotlighting retention, customer advocacy, leadership, and general business tips, service professionals are bound to find something of value.
Top Pick: Is Conversational Intelligence the Future of Customer Success?
Why We Chose It
This blog is an excellent option for those looking for a one-stop shop for service and product related content.
20. The Success League
Customer consulting firm The Success League’s blog is all about leveling up your success customer efforts. From events, courses, guides, and interviews with industry professionals, The Success League has you covered.
Top Pick: The One Thing Missing From Your Onboarding Process
Why We Chose It
This blog is a great resource for professionals looking for actionable steps they can take to grow within their role or teams. All content is geared toward creating top performers.
Keep Up With Customer Service Trends
It's important to stay current on trends and new data in your industry, but it's harder to actually dedicate the time toreadingnew content. Try subscribing to blog newsletters and make it a part of your morning routine to read at least one. Sure, sometimes you'll fall into the black hole that is the email inbox instead, but most days, you may read about interesting new research and thought leadership other outlets are covering.
Editor's note: This article was originally published in August 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.
