Nine critical skills for delivering first-rate customer service
Even while offering consistently good customer service requires work and alignment throughout your whole organization, your customer service team is a great place to start. It’s important to choose people who genuinely care about your clients’ success and to charge prices that are competitive with those of skilled professionals.
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It might be challenging to locate the best applicant for a support staff position. An ideal candidate is not one who has a certain set of professional experiences and academic degrees. Instead, what you’re looking for are qualities that might not always be imparted.
These folks work best in one-on-one community engagements. They like solving riddles very much. They are amiable, friendly, and very good at explaining how things work to other people.
All support personnel should strive to possess these nine customer service characteristics, and supervisors should take them into account when choosing new team members.
1. The capacity to resolve issues
Customers don’t always correctly diagnose themselves. It is often the support representative’s duty to attempt to reproduce the problem before coming up with a solution. This suggests that they should ascertain the customer’s ultimate objective in addition to determining what went wrong.
A superb example? Ultimately, the goal of any correspondence requesting assistance with password changes is to get access to the user’s account.
A competent customer support representative will not only anticipate the need and maybe go above and above to manually finish the reset and provide new login credentials, but they will also show the client how to do it independently going forward.
In other situations, a problem-solving specialist can simply be able to offer preventive advice or a solution that the customer isn’t even aware exists.
2. Calmness
Patience is a virtue for individuals who provide customer service. After all, customers that call customer care are usually confused and upset. If you listen to your customers and treat them with patience, they will feel as though you are going to help them with their current problems.
It is inadequate to end customer contact as soon as it is practical. It takes time for your personnel to fully comprehend the needs and concerns of each customer.
3. Alertness
For a variety of reasons, providing exceptional customer service necessitates having the ability to truly listen to your clients. It’s imperative that you take into account and focus on both the unique experiences of individual customers as well as the general feedback you get.
Although customers may not say it out loud, there may be a broad impression that your program’s dashboard is disorganized. Though they could say things such, “I can never find the search feature,” or “Where is (specific function), again?” it is doubtful that customers will say, “Please improve your UX.”
You have to listen carefully to hear what your clients are trying to tell you without saying it aloud.
4. Emotional sensitivity
A great customer service representative is empathetic toward all people, but they thrive while assisting furious clients. They have an intuitive knowledge of other people’s viewpoints, which allows them to prioritize and communicate empathy swiftly rather than taking things personally.
Think about this: How many times has the prompt acknowledgement of your concerns by the other person made you feel better about a potential complaint?
When a support agent can demonstrate true empathy for an angry client, even if it’s only by restating the situation at hand, they may both actively satisfy (the customer feels justified in their discontent) and assuage (the customer feels heard).
5. Capable of effective communication
Your customer care agents assist in immediately resolving product-related concerns, acting as a two-pronged bullhorn.
On the one hand, they will serve as your company’s spokesperson to customers. This suggests that they need to have a sophisticated grasp of the art of distilling complex concepts into extremely understandable language.
On the other hand, they will represent your company and the needs and viewpoints of your customers. Giving the customer a step-by-step guide on how to correct a certain issue, for example, is not in their best interests.
Having effective communication skills is crucial when working with customers since miscommunication may cause irritation and discontent. The best customer care agents are able to interact with customers in a clear and concise way that eliminates any possibility of confusion.
6. Writing skills
Writing properly is bringing the reader as close to reality as you can. Writing skills are, of course, the most important—yet underappreciated—talent to look for in a candidate for customer service employment.
Unlike face-to-face or even voice-to-voice interactions, writing requires a unique ability to communicate subtleties. A sentence’s structure can significantly influence whether it comes out as kind or unpleasant (e.g., “Logging out should help solve that problem quickly!” vs.
Furthermore, complete sentences and proper language are characteristics of well-written articles and are subliminal markers of the security and trustworthiness of your business.
Writing skills are always important even if the majority of your company’s operations involve phone support. They are not only a good speaker and thinker, but they will also assist your team in producing coherent internal documentation.
7. Creativity and resourcefulness
Solving problems is fantastic, but what’s even better is having the drive to go above and beyond in the first place and coming up with fun and inventive ways to do it.
Hiring a customer support agent with that kind of natural passion will help your customer service go from “passable” to “tell all your friends about it.” It requires style to add enduring warmth and individuality to an ordinary customer service interaction.
Chase Clemons of Basecamp provides the following guidance:
“You ought to have someone on whom you may dispense with many rules. You want someone who, while chatting with a consumer, can understand that, “their boss is really yelling at them today.” It’s not looking well for this person. How much do you know? I’m going to offer them some flowers to make them feel better. You truly can’t teach someone how to do this. They may effortlessly go above and beyond.
8. Persuasive power
Instead of contacting support staff for help, customers who are considering purchasing your company’s products often send messages to them.
When faced with situations like these, having a team of people who are very adept at persuasion aids them in convincing potential customers that, if true, your product is the ideal match for them.
Making a compelling case for potential customers to purchase your product is more important than trying to close deals with every email you get.
9. The ability to communicate favorably
You need to be able to subtly modify your conversational style in order to deliver excellent customer service. This might significantly raise customer satisfaction.
Since language influences people’s perceptions of you and your company, especially those of your clients, it plays a crucial role in persuasion.
Consider the following scenario: a customer contacts your team indicating interest in a certain product, but the product is backordered and won’t be available until next month.