Soft Skills to Master for an Ever-Learning Customer Service Rep

If you are aiming for excellence, you can never stop learning and polishing your skills. What skills are needed for a great customer service?

There is a long-running debate over which set of skills is more important for a customer service rep, soft skills or technical skills.

A recent survey by Service Strategies concludes that 96% of respondents judged communication skills and interpersonal skills more important than technical skills for the success in customer support.  After all, to resolve any technical problem a CSR needs strong communication skills to effectively gather information, analyze it and find a solution which will help the customer.

A set of soft skills every CSR needs to learn:

  1. Attentiveness

A customer service rep needs to listen to the customer carefully, pay attention to every detail in order to understand the problem or the question correctly. Getting it right the first time saves a lot of time in the course of your communication. It also helps to avoid frustration on the part of the customer if he has to explain his issue over and over.

  1. Clarity of language

It is important to explain the information to the customer clearly so that he can understand it. When it’s not a face-to-face interaction, it is quite easy to misunderstand each other. So the language of communication needs to be simple, precise and clear.

  1. Confidence

No doubt, confidence is something we need in our everyday life, not only in customer service. However, in areas concerned with communication and advice, a confident conversation is of utmost importance, otherwise, the other party will just not hear you.

  1. Patience

A customer service rep is bound to deal with different kinds of people. Some of them could be angry or frustrated and thus difficult to manage. Being patient is the key to steering your communication with the client in the right direction.

  1. Empathy

Customer service field is in a way like a hospital. People come there with a problem and they want you to be understanding of it, to empathize with them. They don’t want to hear reprimands that they cannot do something. They want to be heard, understood and helped or given advice.  So a customer service rep always needs to be ready to step into the customer’s shoes and show empathy.

  1. Team-work skills

There is safety in numbers, so if your company is aimed at providing high-class customer service, training all the employees for well-coordinated team-work is the key to success. A CSR needs to know well the whole structure of the company, who is responsible for what and be able to escalate customer service issues to the right person or department in no time.

  1. Creativity

Being creative helps a lot in our work-places. If you can think out of the box, finding solutions to difficult customer issues will be a challenging, but an interesting task. A creative rep is never bored at work and rest assured, satisfied with his employment. And his customers, in their turn, are satisfied with the company’s service.

  1. Friendliness

We all enjoy being treated nicely and the customer service field is no exception. It helps a lot if a CSR has a friendly personality and can communicate with customers in a professional, but friendly manner. This will build relationships with your customers that will last for years.

With all the above said, we cannot underrate the value of having solid technical skills. A good rep needs to have strong tech skills to be able to perform well in his work.

A balanced approach to training both types of skills is what gives best results in customer support.

Read More

Why empathy is a key to employee engagement

Did you know that 51 percent of U.S. employees are looking for a new job? Why?

Aren’t they satisfied with their salary? Don’t they like their old laptops? Can’t they bear long traveling to and from office? Or maybe their chief isn’t empathetic enough?

It’s quite a difficult task to find the one who cares only about material values when deciding on a job. The ProvideSupport blog writers have prepared fascinating statistics on this issue. Take the trouble to have a look at it and find out how much chiefs lose per year just because of not being empathetic (reading will take you 3 minutes).

Each time when a young or already experienced specialist decides to apply for a job, they expect to be engaged at work, to love what they do, to have friendly and permanently smiling colleagues (such innocent fools!) and what else? An empathetic boss. Statistics show the great correlation between a chief’s empathy and employee’s productivity, that means between a chief’s empathy and company’s income.

Do you still doubt empathy plays an important role in business? Take a look at what we’ve prepared!

>>>

Read More

Three Questions Every Customer Service Manager Should Be Asking Everyday

questions to customer service representative

What’s the most important thing a business needs to do to improve relationships with their customers and keep them coming back for more? The answer is pretty obvious, and yet so often overlooked: providing a delightful customer service.

No matter how good your product may be, or how competent your customer service team is, the only thing that matters is how your customers feel about your company.

And the key to providing an exceptional customer service lies directly in the ability of your team to deliver a positive experience. If you are a customer service manager, you are probably aware that it’s your team that is the face of your company, and your customers’ experiences will be driven by the skill and quality of the support they receive.

As a customer service manager, it’s your ability to drive both customer satisfaction, and employee engagement, that defines your own success. Happy agents are more likely to go above and beyond while servicing your customers. And customers who feel they are cared for, are the ones that will return.

The bottom-line is that you can’t have delighted customers with disengaged, or even disgruntled employees. That’s where you need to start.

>>>

Read More

4 Ways AI Will Transform Customer Experience

A decade ago, our familiarity of AI was only restricted to the silver screen. But today, the scenario has changed completely. Although AI is yet to take over our lives in a formidable way, as projected in 2004 blockbuster movie- I, Robot, the technology is certainly pervasive. It has transformed forever the way we interact with our immediate surroundings. The most notable forms of AI an average user is familiar with are – SIRI, Google Now and Alexa skills. Although these are examples of narrow or non-thinking AI, the application acts as personal assistant to make our lives organized and better.

But what if AI could think, analyze, recommend and predict? What difference would that make to our lives? Well, chances are that it may be already making a difference. For instance, recently if you have contacted your insurance company or your broadband provider, there is a good possibility that you may have interacted with a Chatbot, instead of a human agent. AI is taking over customer service department in a big way.  >>>

Read More

4 Dimensions of Customer Trust: How To Get The Most of It

4 Dimensions of Customer Trust
4 Dimensions of Customer Trust

Put simply, high trust is a dividend; low trust is a tax. In fact, in our increasingly low-trust world, trust has literally become the new currency of our global economy. — Stephen M.R.Covey

Digital innovation has transformed today’s business world: it has changed business environment and performance, as well as the whole landscape of customer choice. Today’s customers are more demanding, knowledgeable and selective, and the ways how they connect with brands nowadays largely define the key dimensions that shape up business relationships of the new digital era. >>>

Read More

A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Personal Customer Service Emails

A Comprehensive Guide to Writing Personal Customer Service Emails
A Guide to Writing Customer Service Emails

Despite the rise of social media, live chat services and chatbots, email is still one of the most commonly used communication channels for businesses and individuals all over the world. In 2017 alone, over 269 billion emails were sent every single day.

When it comes to your business, the chances are that you communicate with your customers using this traditional method. In fact, as many as 46% of customers will choose email as their preferred method of communication.

So, as a business, what emphasis do you place on making sure that these emails are of the highest quality? Thanks to the level of connectivity that we all share, thanks to the internet, your customers now expect the very best service possible. They want to feel special. They want to feel valued. They want to feel like you care about them as individuals. >>>

Read More

12 Positive Phrases and Empathy Statements for Customer Service (Infographic)

Everyone working in customer service knows that words are incredibly powerful, and some of them can truly either make or break customer service experiences. In fact, according to Andrew Newberg M.D. and Mark Robert Waldman, the authors of Words Can Change Your Brain, a single negative word can trigger the release of dozens of stress-producing hormones. Using the right customer service phrases in your communication with customers makes all the difference between a bad service and a delightful one.

Empathy is the Key to Excellent Service

Empathy is the ability to “walk a mile in someone else’s shoes”. Believe it or not, customers are not expecting customer service professionals to resolve their issues 100% of the time. On the other hand, they do expect empathy from service agents every single time they contact your company’s support. Empathy statements can do so much in making customers feel that they are understood, respected, and their feelings are validated. >>>

Read More

Customer Self-Service and Its Value in the Digital Age

Customer Self-Service and Its Value
Customer Self-Service and Its Value

In any interaction, allowing another person to take the initiative and choose the terms of communication tends to empower them and enhance their experience. This is the main reason why customer self-service is so popular nowadays, as well as the main reason why it adds so much to the value of your brand. Aside from this, it is quite potent as a tool of reducing your company’s overhead, providing significant time-efficiency as well as allowing your customers to solve some of their issues on their own. Here are some examples.

1. Lower overhead costs

The greatest advantage of customer self-service is probably the fact that the self-checkout devices provide a much lower overhead than actual cashiers or operators. Sure, acquiring these machines is not cheap, yet, over the course of time, they are bound to save you a small fortune. >>>

Read More

The Importance of Critical Thinking in Customer Service

Critical Thinking For Customer Service
Critical Thinking For Customer Service

Customer service jobs require a composite mix of soft and hard skills for success. To positively interact with customers and team members we need social and emotional intelligence, and self-regulation skills. We also need lots of technical expertise, general industry and product knowledge to handle everyday customer requests effectively.

In our blog we have already published a series of articles highlighting skills for being awesome at customer service. Following those posts I would like to add up another skill crucial for service industry employees — critical thinking. This blog post also puts together some helpful techniques that foster this skill.  I hope that these tips will help you grow personally and professionally, and let you progress to the next level along your career journey.

>>>

Read More

AI Chatbots Vs. Human Powered Live Chat: Which is Winning the Customer Service Game?

AI Chatbots Vs. Human Powered Live Chat
AI Chatbots Vs. Human Powered Live Chat

Predicting what the future of customer service will be like a few years from now there is absolutely no room for doubt that artificial intelligence is going to transform the way businesses interact and engage with customers. In fact, chatbots are already dramatically changing the way customer service is provided in various industries.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, customers will manage 85% of their relationship with the enterprise without interacting with a human. A survey by Oracle found that 8 out of 10 businesses have already implemented or are planning to adopt AI as a customer service solution by 2020.

According to a recent report by Grand View Research, the global chatbot market is expected to reach $1.23 billion by 2025, a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 24.3%. Within the global chatbot market, approximately 45% of end users prefer chatbots as the primary mode of communication for customer service inquires. >>>

Read More