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When it comes to retaining customers, the quality of your product or service alone does not guarantee their loyalty.
What can make or break their entire perception of your brand, from the moment they consider it to the post-purchase period, comes down to how good the customer experience is.
You may have some questions; what customer service skills should your support team have so that they can deliver a high level of experience and sustain it?
In this blog, we take a look at the essential customer service skills that turn ordinary customer interactions into extraordinary experiences, and how you can improve them.
What are customer service skills?
Customer service skills refer to the essential knowledge, abilities and qualities that enable customer facing teams to effectively engage with and support customers.
Think about that time you went into a café where the coffee was just okay, but the barista greeted you with a warm smile, remembered your name, and asked about your day.
Suddenly, that ‘just okay’ coffee became part of a pleasant experience that gave you a good reason to go back for a second round.
Without any doubt, it’s the customer service skills that this barista possesses that wins the customers over and keeps the coffee business going.
Types of customer service skills
There are generally two types of skills in customer service:
- Hard skills: These particularly refer to competencies that can be developed and assessed. They are frequently obtained through academic learning and training. Some hard skills that are related to customer service include skills like research, data entry, and taking notes.
- Soft skills: These are interpersonal abilities that enable people to interact professionally with others. Although some training can teach them, soft skills are largely learned by an individual over time. Soft skills in customer service include active listening, empathy, conflict resolution, and problem-solving.
Training your team to comprehend and apply both customer service skill sets can significantly enhance your overall customer experience strategy.
Importance of good customer support skills
Remember, providing the best customer service is not just about addressing issues or solving problems. It’s about fostering lasting customer relations and providing memorable experiences at all touchpoints.
Having the right set of skills in customer service is the first step in providing good customer service.
Equipping your team with the right customer service skills will:
- Improve customer retention: Good customer service skills make customers feel valued and understood. It creates memorable experiences that can make 94 percent of them continue buying from your brand.
- Increase sales and revenue: Positive interactions encourage customers to spend more, explore additional products or services, and recommend your business to others.
- Gives you a competitive edge: Offering good customer service experiences makes businesses stand out from competitors who may have similar offerings but lack customer care.
- Yields valuable customer feedback: Customers are more likely to spare a minute or two to share honest feedback after a good customer service experience. You can use this information to find areas where you need to improve on.
What are the key principles of customer service?
Providing exceptional customer service goes beyond answering inquiries—it requires a commitment to key principles.
- Empathy: Actively listen, understand, and acknowledge customer feelings with care and compassion.
- Personalization: Tailor product offerings and interactions to match customer needs for a more engaging experience.
- Accessibility: Customers should easily contact support agents for assistance through multiple channels.
- Proactivity: Anticipate and address potential issues before they arise.
- Consistency: Your support offerings should be uniform and reliable across all customer touchpoints.
- Speed and quality: Customer queries should be responded and resolved quickly without compromising accuracy.
- Transparency: Involves businesses being honest and open with clients regarding policies, pricing, issue-resolution status, etc.
Essential skills in customer service that teams should possess
Every customer service agent brings a unique set of values, experiences, and talents to the table. While individuality is a strength, there are certain core competencies that every team member should possess to optimize the customer experience.
The following essential skills in customer service lay the foundation for excellent customer experiences:
1. Active listening
It’s one thing to simply hear and another thing to truly listen and understand what someone is saying. Often, customers reach out for support feeling frustrated due to a problem they’ve encountered.
As they voice their complaints, take a genuine interest in clearly understanding their needs and concerns.
Good listening techniques can help with:
- Deescalating tension for unhappy customers
- Pinpointing the main cause of customer issues
- Fostering a conducive environment for customers to voice their concerns
- Getting the context of a customer’s issue
Tips for practicing active listening
- Acknowledge the customer’s feelings
- Check the main points to make sure understanding and provide closure
- Ask open-ended questions to clarify any doubts
- For face-to-face interactions, maintain eye contact
2. Good time management
When a customer reaches out, they expect fast response and issue resolution from the support team. Every second wasted by the support team to respond is a potential risk of customer churn.
According to Jay Baer’s The Time to Win study, two-thirds of customers say speed is as important as price.
Teams with proper time management are able to respond and resolve support issues before set periods.
Businesses can invest in a comprehensive help desk ticketing system with tools for ticket time tracking, ticket prioritization, and. This will ensure agents respond and resolve support issues before the set periods.
Tips for improving time management
- Divide complex tasks into smaller and manageable steps
- Employ a robust task management system
- Set service level agreement targets that clearly define the expected response and resolution due times
- Multitask without compromising quality
3. Problem-solving
A support agent’s main responsibility is to resolve customer pain points promptly and efficiently.
Good problem-solving entails handling a concern and suggesting solutions that prevent it from happening again.
Tips for improving your problem-solving skills
- Listen attentively to the customer issue to define the problem
- Ask relevant follow-up questions to understand the problem
- Know where to get relevant information in the knowledge base
- Identify whom to consult or escalate the complex tickets to
- Practice escalation management procedures to effectively address complex tickets
4. Empathy
Empathy in customer service involves genuinely understanding and sharing the customer’s emotions, perspectives, and experiences.
Empathetic interactions demonstrate to customers that the company genuinely cares about their well-being and is not just after making sales.
Tips for forging deeper emotional connections with clients
- Acknowledge and validate the customer’s feelings, tone, and sentiment
- Foster customer connections based on mutual respect and understanding
- Appreciate clients’ achievements
- Show continued interest and support during and after each interaction
5. Clear communication
Clear communication is a major customer service skill that directly impacts the quality of customer interactions and overall customer satisfaction.
It involves passing information across clearly, concisely, and comprehensibly to the customer.
Good customer communication helps minimize misunderstandings, solves problems quickly, and creates a bond between the customer and the service provider.
Tips to improve your communication skills
- Think logically before responding to clients
- Actively listen and provide clear and detailed information
- Make your message easy to understand
- Keep customers updated
- Talk to clients in a formal manner
6. Technical knowledge
Customer queries are getting more complex and technology driven. Technical competence is, therefore, important for teams seeking to deliver seamless customer experiences.
Data from Email Analytics shows that, 62 percent of customers indicated that it was the expertise and ingenuity of those employed in customer services that made them happy.
All these aspects, however, call for the customer service team to have a thorough knowledge of the company’s system of products and services, its tools, and its operations in order to help resolve clients’ issues very quickly and accurately.
Well-informed agents are better positioned to troubleshoot problems, provide detailed explanations, anticipate potential issues, and provide proactive customer service.
Tips to improve your team’s technical know-how
- Organize continuous cross-functional team learning
- Be informed on industry trends
- Encourage collaboration
- Promote a learning culture
7. Good decision-making
Looking into a situation and consciously taking action even when all seems lost enhances decision making. It minimizes waiting or queuing time, hence fostering the processes and helping avoid any irritations.
Reps who are skilled in decision-making are able to assess situations and quickly determine the best plan of action.
This is a key customer service skill when:
- Complicated customer service issues arise
- There are angry or difficult customers
Tips to improve your decision-making abilities
- Understand your products or services inside and out
- Evaluate available options and their potential impact on the customer and the business
- Consult with supervisors or colleagues when facing complex issues
8. Adaptability
Customers always contact support through different channels such as social media, SMS, email, and live chat. Agents need to be available on all these platforms and be aware of the evolving market trends and customer needs.
With customer service agents interacting with people from diverse backgrounds, cultural sensitivity is a vital customer service skill to have.
It involves being aware of and respectful of different cultural norms, practices, and communication styles.
Adaptable agents are able to accommodate the cultures and beliefs of the clients, customizing their engagement to suit each customer’s situation.
Tips to cultivating a more adaptable team
- Continuously train your agents on new products, services, policies, or industry trends
- Offer multilingual customer support to ease communication with all customers
- Be responsive across multiple communication channels
- Encourage critical thinking and creative problem-solving to solve unexpected challenges
9. Patience
Most clients who come for help may be feeling some level of disappointment, annoyance, or even confusion.
This could prompt them to either engage in long-winded explanations or reiterate themselves several times so that the issues are addressed satisfactorily.
Dealing with upset customers requires an even higher level of patience, as these individuals may express their dissatisfaction through disrespectful language or behavior.
In such scenarios, a patient agent should be customer-focused and listen attentively without interrupting. This will allow the customer to express their issues completely.
This approach not only helps in accurately identifying the problem but also:
- Assures customers that their issues are being taken seriously
- Allows agents to manage the conversation effectively
Tips to practice patience in customer service
- Allow customers time to express their concerns
- Remain composed and don’t take tough situations personally
- Set boundaries and learn how to decline customer requests when necessary
- Speak calmly and clearly, avoiding jargon or technical terms
10. Positivity
Customer-facing teams need to approach each interaction with optimism and enthusiasm to create a welcoming and supportive environment for customers- even in challenging situations.
Customers are more open and calmer when they sense a genuine willingness to help.
Positive language, on the other hand, comes off as respectful and professional, which sets the right tone for a successful interaction.
Tips to cultivate positivity in customer service
- Start customer interactions with a warm and friendly tone
- See problems as opportunities to learn and grow
- Remind yourself of your achievements after a challenging encounter
- Celebrate small wins
11. Creativity
Creative customer service skills allow reps to come up with unique solutions to customer issues.
Rather than following a script, creative agents can use new solutions tailored to individual customer needs.
Creativity can also fuel proactive problem-solving, foster innovation within the customer service team, and transform a potentially negative experience into a positive one
Tips to improve creativity in the workplace
- Provide a safe space for staff to share unconventional ideas without fear of judgment
- Facilitate knowledge exchange among team members to inspire new ideas
- Give employees the freedom to make decisions and find solutions without rigid protocols
- Use customer insights to identify trends and opportunities
- Conduct regular brainstorming sessions to generate new ideas
12. Persuasion
Persuasiveness is the ability to influence others’ thoughts or actions. As much as this is often practiced by sales reps, customer service reps should also have their way with words.
A sweet tongue can easily make customers see the benefits of a product or service. This special convincing skill often leads to sales conversions.
Beyond sales, persuasiveness is essential in de-escalating situations, negotiating compromises, or guiding customers toward mutually beneficial outcomes.
Tips to improve persuasiveness
- Use clear, concise, and positive language to articulate your points effectively
- Demonstrate understanding and empathy to build rapport and trust with the customer
- Handle objections calmy
- Always strive for a consensus and propose constructive solutions
13. Collaboration
Effective teamwork requires the exchange of ideas and working with others in different functions to provide the most comprehensive solutions to customer problems.
It fosters a healthy workplace, promotes unity in facing any kind of challenge, and assists teams in providing uniform services to customers.
Tips to improve collaboration
- Establish an internal knowledge base for sharing information, best practices, and lessons learned
- Create a community forum to encourage open discussions on support-related issues
- Leverage collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, and shared inboxes to improve efficiency
14. Professionalism
Professionalism is the foundation of a strong customer service reputation, encouraging repeat business and customer loyalty.
This customer service skill encompasses adherence and commitment to your support team’s policies, standards, and vision.
It is about maintaining a calm and respectful attitude even when confronted with harsh or abrasive customers.
Being composed and courteous helps agents manage difficult situations and learn how to say no to customers.
Tips to practice professionalism
- Adhere to your company’s customer service policies
- Maintain good posture, eye contact, and a confident demeanor
- Prioritize tasks, set SLAs, and manage your time efficiently
- Put in place effective security measures for customer information protection
15. Honesty and transparency
Customers appreciate honesty, even when the truth isn’t exactly what they want to hear. It demonstrates respect and a commitment to ethical standards.
Be open and share every little detail with your customers. Send them notifications on any progress you make on their support issues, such as ticket escalations and changes in ticket status.
You can also alert them of any scheduled maintenance or offer recommendations.
Honest customer service representatives help manage customer expectations, foster a sense of trust, and facilitate long-term customer loyalty.
Tips to cultivate honesty and transparency
- Offer accurate information about your brand and pricing
- Communicate any potential limitations beforehand
- Admit when mistakes are made or when certain requests cannot be fulfilled
16. Accountability
Accountability is the act of owning up to and explaining one’s actions and decisions.
It is an important customer service skill when it comes to winning over clients and showing them that you value their time and money.
Tips on how to become more accountable
- Follow through on commitments and tasks
- Always fulfill customer promises and communicate whenever unable to deliver
- Learn from your mistakes and prevent similar issues in the future
17. Willingness to learn
Customer expectations and technologies are constantly evolving. Agents who are eager to learn and continuously improve their skills in customer service can quickly adapt to new tools, systems, and processes.
They can also easily take up and solve new challenges, enhancing their ability to serve customers effectively.
Tips to encourage continuous learning
- Provide a comprehensive internal knowledge base to empower your support teams
- Support employees in obtaining industry certifications
- Provide regular training programs on product knowledge, customer service skills, and industry trends
- Allow employees to explore different customer-facing roles for a diversity of skills
18. Confidence
Confident agents should convey information clearly and assertively. When customers sense that an agent is knowledgeable and self-assured, they are more likely to feel comfortable and assured that their issues are in safe hands.
This customer service skill also empowers agents to take initiative and make decisions independently, improving efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Tips to improve confidence
- Familiarize yourself with company guidelines to avoid uncertainty
- Regularly remind yourself of your strengths and abilities
- Keep up with industry trends and changes in your field
- Continuously expand your knowledge and skills
19. Ability to ask for and receive feedback
Being receptive to feedback is crucial for personal and professional development. Customer-facing agents who are open to feedback can learn from their experiences, identify areas for improvement, and make necessary adjustments.
This customer service skill involves not only accepting constructive criticism gracefully but also actively seeking out customer feedback to grow and enhance performance.
Moreover, embracing feedback helps:
- Build stronger relationships with colleagues and supervisors
- Foster a collaborative environment
- Create a more supportive workplace culture
Tips on how to solicit and manage customer feedback
- Offer various feedback channels such as surveys, email, social media comment sections, or in-app prompts
- Collect feedback after interactions at all customer touchpoints, such as pre-sale discussions, post-purchase follow-up, or after resolving an issue
- Provide quick and simple customer satisfaction survey questions
- Document the feedback for future reference and analysis
20. Goal-oriented focus
Customer support teams that have a strong emphasis on achieving goals are more likely to operate effectively to satisfy both corporate goals and consumer expectations.
Support agents who have a clear understanding of their goals can prioritize tasks, stay motivated, and deliver quality support.
Tips for strengthening goal-oriented focus
- Set clear and smart objectives for customer service operations.
- Align customer service goals with the overall company vision.
- Use reporting and analytics tools to monitor and analyse customer service.
- Reward and recognize agents who meet or exceed the set standards.
21. Writing skills
Consumers anticipate clear, courteous, and organized responses and self-service resources that successfully handle their issues.
Misunderstandings, annoyance, and a bad impression of the brand can result from poorly written communications.
Teams with strong writing skills can convey information accurately, maintain a positive tone, and provide clear solutions that enhance the customer experience.
Tips for improving writing skills
- Use clear, simple, and jargon-free language to prevent misunderstandings
- Keep messages concise while providing complete information
- Maintain a professional and friendly tone
- Proofread responses for grammar, spelling, and clarity
- Personalize messages to make customers feel valued
How to improve your customer service skill set
Companies must make conscious efforts to consistently polish and elevate their skills in customer service.
Here are several customer service tips to help you level up:
- Provide regular training: Continued training will keep employees updated on the latest customer service skills, tools, and industry trends.
- Foster a customer-centric culture: Empower your support team to go the extra mile to ensure the customer is satisfied.
- Encourage collaboration: Put in place information-sharing practices to improve problem-solving abilities.
- Leverage technology: Adopt advanced customer service tools like help desk software and artificial intelligence, to provide timely, personalized solutions and streamline support processes.
- Measure customer satisfaction: Regularly ask for customer feedback so you are able to track customer satisfaction metrics and identify which customer service skills to improve.
Upgrade your customer service skills
Any business that values its customers’ experience needs to carefully evaluate and invest in its support teams’ customer service skill set.
This impacts their ability to effectively handle a wide range of customer issues and still ensure they exceed their expectations, foster loyalty, and build strong, lasting relationships.
To support these efforts, tools like BoldDesk® have comprehensive features that help improve the support teams’ customer service skills and enhance clients’ experiences. Contact us to book a live demo and see how BoldDesk can complement your customer service team. Sign up for a 15-day free trial today to get started.
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FAQs on customer service skills
The ticketing software from BoldDesk is the best way to streamline your customer service. Its intuitive interface and robust features help you to efficiently manage, track, and resolve customer inquiries.
You can enhance customer service by implementing the following strategies:
- Utilize the appropriate tools to enhance efficiency.
- Actively listen to understand customer needs.
- Practice empathy to build stronger customer relationships.
- Personalize interactions to create a more engaging customer experience.
- Gather feedback to identify areas for improvement.
- Foster a positive workplace culture to support excellent customer service.
Technical skills like sales methods, research, and multitasking are examples of hard skills in customer service.
Interpersonal skills that enable individuals to engage with others in a professional setting are known as soft skills.
Quick and effective problem-solving abilities in customer service increase customer satisfaction, retention, sales, loyalty and brand reputation.
Empathy in customer service strengthens relationships, facilitates communication, increases retention, and builds positive brand perceptions.
Customer service skills like active listening, time management, problem-solving, and empathy are necessary for providing excellent customer service.
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