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Table of Contents
Introduction
Good customer service skills among your brand representatives are a must, so why is it often so difficult to define exactly what skills make good customer service possible? When hiring or training customer service representatives — or just improving and upskilling your current team — it’s important to keep in mind both the soft and hard skills required and train on both. Let’s look at some of the most important customer service skills to master, and how you can implement them in your business.
Key takeaways
- Why good customer service matters: When your business has a culture of great customer service, it drives success and encourages customer loyalty. Good customer service contributes to a good reputation and leads to increased sales.
- Aspects of good customer service: Excellent customer service relies on proactive outreach, service tailored to the individual, flexibility in communication, and expertise in the products or services.
- Important skills to master: To provide outstanding customer service, it’s important to master the skills of listening, communication, empathy, communicative control, patience, positivity, problem-solving, technical knowledge, tenacity, adaptability, resourcefulness, attention to detail, conflict resolution, and critical thinking.
- Feedback: Feedback from customers and managers is an excellent tool for improving customer service skills.
What is customer service?
Customer service represents all of the various actions that a company performs to create a positive experience for customers. Customer service extends from every interaction that a customer has with the brand leading up to their purchase, and extends to any subsequent interactions they have once the purchase is completed.
Key qualities of good customer service
Good customer service doesn’t merely reach the technical definition of being customer service — it provides an extra touch to show the customer that they are cared for. Some important qualities of good customer service include:
- Proactive: Good customer service doesn’t have to wait until the customer calls in with a problem. Representatives can reach out ahead of time to establish a dialogue early, sharing helpful tips and tricks that can set customers up for success, and making customers more comfortable to ask questions when necessary.
- Customized: Customers don’t like to be treated like interchangeable numbers on a spreadsheet. No one likes that. For that reason, it’s important to understand individual customers and their needs. When customers feel like the specifics of their problem are being taken seriously, and they aren’t receiving the same standard, boilerplate responses, they are more likely to feel seen and therefore have a better experience.
- Flexible: Today, there are a multitude of communication options that customers can use to get in touch with customer service. It’s important to provide multiple channels of communication for your customers, in addition to providing a seamless customer experience when transitioning from one channel to another.
- Expert: When it’s clear that a representative is knowledgeable about the company, its products and services, and its policies, not only do customers get more quality information from the interaction, but problems can also be solved more effectively and efficiently.
Why Good Customer Service Skills Are So Important
Good customer service can make or break your business. Don’t believe us? Just look at the data:
- 68% of customers would be willing to pay more for products or services from a company that offers great customer service.
- 92% of customers would stop doing business with a company after three (or fewer!) negative interactions.
- Companies that offer excellent customer service drive revenues 4-8% higher than that of their competitors.
More effective customer service and excellent customer experiences improve brand loyalty and reputation, driving sales.
Good customer service begins with good customer service skills. With skilled customer service representatives, your support for customers is more effective, personalized, valuable, and simply easier.
Customer expectations for service and experiences are also rising—and specialized skills can help you and your team deliver.
Customers want employees who can answer their questions quickly and are knowledgeable enough to provide accurate answers, but they also want to interact with friendly representatives who know what customers want.
Customer service skills your organization must master
1. Effective listening skills
Effective listening skills are one of the most important customer service skills agents need to master.
Successful customer service involves accurately understanding the customer concern or complaint, and following active listening techniques to ensure the customer feels heard and understood.
Customer service agents who are skilled listeners will be attentive to the situation at hand and able to understand what the customer is and isn’t saying.
Non-verbal communication such as body language (if applicable), tone, vocal cues, attitude, choice of words, and more all contribute to what the customer is communicating.
Active listening—being present in the conversation, listening to verbal and non-verbal cues, seeking to understand, and reflecting back on what the customer is saying — can all help increase the effectiveness of your customer service and improve customer satisfaction.
2. Clear communication
Along with effective listening skills, customer service agents must be clear communicators across any channels they operate.
This can include both written and verbal communication, whether it’s over the phone, on live chat, or via Twitter.
Of course, there are different standards and conventions for different channels—how agents talk to customers on Twitter is necessarily different than how they should talk to them via email.
As a result:
Customer service reps need to be skilled in both understanding the conventions and expectations of each channel and be able to master how to communicate clearly and concisely within each.
3. Empathy
Soft skills such as empathy and listening are essential for customer service.
While it may be difficult to teach empathy to agents, it’s still an essential customer service skill to master.
When customer service agents are empathetic, problems are solved more quickly and satisfactorily, because the customer feels heard and understood.
As a result, they’re likely to be more satisfied with the solution and the interaction overall.
It’s not just that customers feel more understood though—empathetic customer service agents are more likely to understand the heart of the issue, therefore providing more creative and satisfactory solutions faster.
This can lead to faster handling times, improved first-call resolutions, and of course, more satisfied customers.
In addition:
When customers feel heard and supported, it leads to increased brand loyalty and affinity—which means better relationships with customers and more valuable customers for your brand.
4. Communicative control
While agents need to ensure that the content of their messages is clear, concise, and accurate, it’s equally important for agents to be skilled in controlling the emotion and mood of their message.
For example:
Customer service agents must be able to keep their cool, even when the customer is frustrated, angry, or impatient.
It’s essential that agents are able to maintain communicative control rather than matching the mood or tone of the customer.
After all, customer service is often an intense job—many customers who call are already frustrated with the solutions they’ve tried, and bring that frustration into the call.
Good customer service agents know how to diffuse the situation and tension and find a favorable solution, all while staying calm and composed.
In addition, agents should be able to be polite but assertive—staying friendly and positive while still maintaining control of the conversation.
Many customers can be pushy or demanding.
Good customer skills ensure that you can negotiate a favorable solution while still staying within company policy and being polite.
This is no easy task!
But it’s an essential skill for customer service representatives to master.
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5. Patience & a positive attitude
These soft skills may often be overlooked, but their importance shouldn’t be understated!
Customer service agents must have a positive attitude and plenty of patience for handling all of their customer interactions.
While your customer service representatives may answer the same question hundreds of times each day, it’s essential for them to remember that, for the person calling, it is their first interaction.
As a result, agents must be patient and understanding, providing a good experience for both their first and their hundredth calls of the day.
Customer service agents also need to practice patience when it comes to listening to customer queries and finding solutions.
Impatient agents may jump to trying to find a solution and wrap up the call before the customer has really described the nature of their concern, leading to frustrated customers who feel they’re not being heard and inadequate solutions.
Beyond patience in problem-solving and empathy, attitude during the customer service process is important.
Of course, customers value friendliness and a positive attitude—don’t we all?—but your agents’ friendliness and positivity can make an impact on your bottom line too.
How?
Almost three-quarters of customers said friendly customer service agents increase their loyalty to a brand.
Friendly agents improve customer service and satisfaction, and more satisfied customers tend to spend more, remain loyal to your brand for longer, and refer more customers.
In addition:
Framing solutions in positive language during customer interactions can go a long way in making sure customers feel understood and valued.
For example:
If a customer isn’t satisfied with their item and wants a refund, but your company only offers exchanges or store credit, there are two ways to frame the solution:
- With negative language: “Sorry, we don’t offer refunds.”
- With positive language: “We’re sorry it wasn’t the right fit for you! We can send you a prepaid shipping label to send that back to us and we’d be glad to exchange it for something else or give you store credit to find something you’d like instead.”
Training customer service agents to use positive language helps to spin negative situations into a win for customers, improving overall customer satisfaction.
6. Problem-solving skills
Almost all customer service is problem-solving: a customer calls in with a question, a concern, or a problem of some sort, and the customer service agent steps in to provide a solution.
With self-service and live chat options becoming more prevalent for easy questions such as store hours, beginning a return, or exchanging an item, customer service agents are now more than ever handling a higher volume of complex calls.
After all, when customers can easily access most information and solutions on their own, it leaves customer service agents to deal with the truly difficult problems.
As a result, customer service agents need to have exceptional problem-solving skills.
Not only do they need to know where and how to find answers to customer queries, but they should also be empowered to find solutions and create solutions when they don’t yet exist.
Creativity is a big part of problem-solving: being able to think outside of the box, find novel solutions, put information together in new ways, and so on.
At the same time, customer service representatives need to know how to be creative within set boundaries, that is, while still adhering to rules and service guidelines.
To improve these skills, it can help to have agents engage in regular team training involving problem-solving games or riddles, creativity exercises, or role-playing exercises where they can take turns responding to invented customer inquiries and providing feedback for each other on the solutions provided.
7. Technical knowledge
Customers often rely on customer service agents to help them solve the frustrating problems that get in the way of using the things they want or need.
The customers that call in are often experiencing a barrier to full functionality that they don’t have the technical skills to fix, so it’s important for customer service agents to not only have a solid foundation of the inner workings of the product or service but also to know which components to troubleshoot with a given set of symptoms.
Additionally:
Having a good handle on the technical aspects of the products and services allows customer service representatives to more effectively cross-sell or upsell to customers based on what the customers say they need.
8. Tenacity
Customer service can take a lot of stamina for representatives to keep up with.
Some customers might be less kind than others, constant changes of topic throughout the day can be disorienting at times, and there can be some pressure for agents to be “on” or “performing” while speaking with customers.
Because of this, an important customer service skill that agents and teams need to cultivate is tenacity. Tenacity is a sense of perseverance and persistence, shown when a person “doesn’t quit” until they achieve their desired outcome.
In the context of customer service, this often takes the form of remaining friendly but confident throughout each interaction, even when the customer or their inquiry makes that difficult.
It can also be shown when a representative makes a sale because it often takes determination in order to convert while maintaining a high-quality customer experience.
However, with tenacity, should come an understanding of the importance of self-care.
Getting back up and continuing to work towards your goals should not exclude — and is in fact aided by — understanding the importance of rest, stress reduction, and letting go of frustrations throughout the day.
9. Adaptability
A customer gets more from a customer service experience when the agents and teams who help them are adaptable to the customer’s preferred method of communication.
Many customers will begin communicating with customer service through one channel, such as by phone, but then will continue the conversation in another channel, like email.
This demonstrates not only the utility of omnichannel contact centers but also the importance of agents being adaptable enough to engage in helpful conversations over various channels.
10. Resourcefulness
The ability to listen to a customer’s comments or questions and quickly make connections between the conversation and any prior knowledge or useful solutions is crucial in customer service.
Being resourceful, thinking on your feet, and having a sense of where to look for certain types of information provides a richer customer experience and an ultimately more effective session.
11. Attention to detail
A lot of information can be shared during a customer service interaction.
In these situations, the customer is often approaching the representative because they are confused about something, so the customer might not know which piece of information will be most informative about the problem and how to go about fixing it.
That makes it important for customer service reps to pay keen attention to the details that customers share over the course of a conversation because missing a key detail could greatly increase the amount of time it takes to resolve a customer query.
12. Conflict resolution
It’s no secret that some customers can be more, shall we say, confrontational in their approach to customer service.
This is yet another situation where patience will come in handy to customer service reps, but it’s also an important time to flex conflict resolution skills.
The key to conflict resolution is to de-escalate when emotions are heightened, and a great way to de-escalate is through the LAST method: Listen, Apologize, Solve, and Thank.
- Listen: Help the customer feel heard through reflective listening. Listen closely and paraphrase the customer’s experience back to them.
- “Okay, so the main problem you’re experiencing is __, is that correct?”
- Apologize: This doesn’t mean you take the blame, merely that you are expressing sincere sympathy, and validating the customer’s frustrations.
- “I’m so sorry you’ve had to deal with that! That must have been very frustrating.”
- Solve: Use your expertise to provide solutions. If appropriate, offer a few options to show that you value the customer’s opinion and preferences.
- “So, there’s a few ways we can fix that. My suggestion is…”
- Thank: Express gratitude to the customer for bringing the problem to your attention, showing them that their input doesn’t just help their own situation, but can improve the way things work for other customers.
- “Thank you for pointing that out! We want that to work properly, so it’s really important we fix those kinds of problems when we see them.”
13. Critical thinking
Though we often treat it as a given, critical thinking is a skill that requires practice and refining.
At its most basic level, critical thinking involves deeply analyzing given information, evaluating it based on legitimate and appropriate criteria, before finally making a well-reasoned judgment and applying the new information to future actions.
This skill is crucial in most areas of our lives, and customer service is no exception.
To provide good customer service, it’s often useful to think critically about the information the customer is giving to you.
To be clear:
That doesn’t necessarily mean that you think the customer is being dishonest.
Thinking critically about their information also allows you to extrapolate from what they tell you, and apply your previous knowledge and experience to their current problem.
If a customer is confused about why a certain problem is happening, but they can describe some of the symptoms of it, you might be able to mentally weigh what they’re telling you against other situations where customers told you something similar.
What were the problems in those situations, and what finally fixed them?
In the context of customer service, critical thinking can be an extremely valuable skill that allows you to “read between the lines” of what customers tell you, and draw efficient and accurate conclusions based on what’s presented.
How to master your customer service skills
Ask for direct feedback from the customer
Direct feedback from customers allows you to hear exactly what you’re doing right and where you need improvement — directly from the horse’s mouth.
By getting customer feedback at regular intervals, whether that be annually, quarterly, or more frequently, you can gain valuable insights into your customer service performance, as well as track the trends of improvement from one interval to the next.
Ask a manager for feedback
If you’re experiencing customer interactions going poorly, it can often be useful to get in touch with your manager to learn how you can improve things.
If your contact center uses call recording, that can be very helpful for giving your manager a record of the interaction exactly as it went down.
If the interaction was through a textual channel like email, text, chat, or social media, you could also send your manager a screenshot.
With a record in hand, you and your manager can sit down and discuss strategies and methods for improvement.
Read customer feedback reports
Many call centers use customer feedback reports to gather comments and constructive criticism from customers regarding the quality of their customer service experience.
If your company does this, it can be highly informative to give those reports a read.
Not only do they provide helpful suggestions for improvement, but they can also give you a greater sense of your customer base’s sentiment as a whole.
Sign up for customer service training courses
For business leaders who are overseeing a team of customer service representatives, the key is to provide plenty of practice and training.
While most agents receive training during the onboarding process, training after that can be lacking.
According to a report from Salesforce, 55% of agents say they need better training to do their jobs well.
Ongoing training for agents can include self-service training modules that can be accessed at any time, regular skill refreshes, individual and group training, and other options to ensure agents’ skills are consistently being practiced and improved.
Research your company’s product or service
At the end of the day, to provide truly great customer service, you have to know more about your company’s offerings.
Think of any time you’ve gone to a big box store that wasn’t exactly famous for training their employees well.
Unless you got lucky, it’s not super likely that the employee you spoke to had deep, intimate knowledge of the product you were looking for, which would make it hard for them to give you an educated recommendation or help you interpret what the products specs will translate to in terms of your real-world experience.
Now contrast that with any experience you’ve had with a very specialized store.
The people working there are usually very well-versed, if not passionate, about the items they sell, so when you tell them what you need, they tend to have well-reasoned recommendations and pointers for getting the most out of the product you buy.
To offer an experience more akin to those specialty stores, not only do contact centers need to provide excellent training, but they also require agents and representatives to research their company’s products and services thoroughly, allowing them to speak confidently about the company’s offerings and provide a more tailored experience to the customer.
If you’re looking to improve your customer service, consider working with a customer experience partner like Global Response.
Our team of CX experts will provide you with a team of brand ambassadors who have expertise in the most important customer service skills.
