What skills should leaders look out for when hiring employees for customer service roles? Well, the good thing about skills is that they are easily observable and can be honed and developed.
In this guide, we discuss nine of the most important skills that customer service professionals should exhibit to achieve success with their duty and responsibility.
- Patience is an important virtue
Too many times, customers reach out to support teams, often confused and frustrated. Listening to these clients as they pour out their frustrations requires a great deal of patience.
Customer service professionals have to take their time to understand the customer’s challenges to effectively solve their problems. Great customer service will beat fast customer service any day.
- Clarity of communication
Customer service professionals should be able to communicate clearly. They must be able to convey their messages clearly enough for customers to understand without creating confusion or misunderstanding.
- Attentiveness
Being able to listen to customers require both patience and attentiveness. Along with having the patience to listen, customer service professionals should be focused and attentive to fully understand the customer’s experience.
- Knowledge of the product/service
Without a deep knowledge of how the product or service works, it will be quite difficult to help customers with their challenges with such product or service.
Customer service professionals must be willing to get to know the product or service much like the customer who use the product regularly.
- Time management
While recognizing patience as a virtue every customer service professional needs, it’s still very important as well to have good time management skills. It doesn’t help when you’re trying to go above and beyond with a customer in an area where you may not be able to help. It pays to get the customer over to someone else who can help them.
- Positivity
Customer service professionals should only speak in positive and persuasive tones rather than being negative and discouraging. It’s important to understand that conversational patterns can affect a customers experience and perception of service.
- Persuasiveness
This is a bit similar to being positive with communication. There are times when support professionals may get messages from prospective clients contemplating on buying the product or service on offer. Your persuasion skills should be top-notch in cases like this to convert prospects into customers.
- Tenacity
The most memorable customer service stories are usually about those who have gone out of the way to help customers achieve what needs to be achieved. Customer service professionals have to be tenacious and ever-ready to help customers overcome their challenges.
- Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person. If one person should exhibit this skill, it’s none other than a customer service professional. Even in cases where you may not be able to help the customer, showing that you care and understand may go a long way in helping the customer take something positive out of the interaction.
Finally, customer service professionals must show genuine willingness to learn and adapt to changing working conditions. You should be willing to learn your product or service inside out. You should be willing to learn about your customers and each one of them that reaches out for support. Customer service professionals are expected to be a people person. To be exactly this, these professionals show exhibit the skills described above to help deliver positive customer experiences.
