Customer Service Skills

What are the skills that make an excellent customer service representative?

Every customer-facing employee must possess and develop specific customer service skills to be a successful customer service representative. Without those skills, your organization risks providing poor customer service and losing customers—and revenue—as a result.

The top skills necessary to provide high-quality customer service—which are discussed in detail below—include:

• Communication
• Organization
• Collaboration
• Subject matter expertise
• Workload management

Read on for details on each of the most-needed customer service skills to master the role.

Organizational skills

Beyond communication skills, a customer service representative must be organized. From keeping track of the necessary information and tools to being able to help every customer in need, there are a lot of pieces involved in providing high-quality customer service. An agent must have a strategy for tracking every aspect of customer issues and each interaction, and be detail-oriented in their approach to finding resolutions. They must also be able to distribute resources and identify potential improvements to process to take care of tasks as quickly as possible, while maintaining quality. Every aspect of organization in customer service must be shaped around the goal of achieving customer satisfaction every time.

Customer service requires working directly with customers in a way that balances time spent actually in contact with them with efficiency. No one (customer or agent) wants to spend more time than necessary in a live chat with support, so it's important to take care of the task at hand with accuracy and speed. Don’t leave a customer waiting or spend too much time on small talk when you’re able to share the solution with them instead.

And beyond direct contact with customers, there are many other parts to working in customer service. A successful agent will need to handle internal tasks in a timely manner, as well as avoid distractions and stay focused. There are many methods for managing it all, but finding the right solution is up to the individual. Some combination of creating systems and routines, developing habits, and continually making adjustments as needed will allow an individual agent to find just the right balance.

Collaboration skills

A customer service agent must be skilled in collaboration to be successful. An agent will collaborate with team members, other departments and customers. When working on any team, it’s necessary to maintain good relationships with colleagues to ensure a positive working environment and keep the focus on the work that needs to be done. And when something goes wrong, the ability to acknowledge mistakes and take ownership of them, while continuing to improve and move forward is essential.

Beyond collaborating with team members, an agent must also collaborate with customers. The ability to communicate with users of your product or service in a way that aligns you both on the same team and allows you to work together to find a solution is key. Instead of remaining on the other side of a problem, learning to team up with customers—to become an advocate—goes a long way in increasing customer satisfaction and finding the best solution for both sides.

In some cases, an agent may also find themselves needing to convince a customer to take a particular path as you work together on a solution. It’s important to overcome resistance to change to keep things moving along, while also finding a satisfying conclusion. Not every question will have the answer a customer is hoping for, so an agent must be prepared for how to handle those situations with ease.

Subject matter expertise

While many customer service skills are pretty universal no matter what product or service one is supporting, becoming an expert on the particular product you’re working on is important. To start, one must have the technical know-how to understand and solve complex issues. The best customer-facing agents on your team will have in-depth knowledge of how your product or service works. When an agent doesn't know the product from top to bottom, they won't know the best way to help a customer when they run into a problem. Even when a product changes causing an agent to not know an answer immediately, their overall knowledge will contribute to their ability to troubleshoot effectively. While it's not necessary for a customer service agent to be able to build the product, they should be able to use it effectively as a customer.

Once an agent has a firm understanding of the product, they can move beyond using it and assisting customers in using it, but can also strategize and apply insights gained in customer support to future decisions. The ability to quickly pick up new technologies and adjust to changes within the product as they happen is key too. Once an agent fully understands a product and knows it well, they can work on improving their problem-solving skills and how best to help customers. While one method of assistance may work well enough, with knowledge comes the ability to look for an even better option to continuously improve your craft.

Workload management

Managing the workload is an essential customer service skill for any agent. There are many pieces to the work, with constant deadlines and benchmarks to meet. Any customer service agent looking to improve their workload management skills should focus on the following areas:

• Managing time well
• Meeting deadlines
• Maintaining performance and productivity
• Setting realistic expectations and goals
• Multitasking effectively

Tools to Enhance Customer Service Skills

Customer service can be provided in many ways, including in a simple email inbox or in the mentions of a Twitter account. However, when any organization has a team of people working in customer service or a workload beyond a few questions here and there, finding the right tools to provide effective, high-quality customer service becomes a necessity. With the proper tools and tracking, your customer service team will not only perform better, but can also set goals and track their progress to reaching them too.

Spreadsheets

For a simple, low-cost option, use a spreadsheet. Since spreadsheets allow for inputting and calculating data, once you identify what you’d like to track, you can do it manually in spreadsheet software, like Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets. Use an online form to collect data or organize previously collected information and feed into a spreadsheet to analyze and create workflows to improve customer service skills and relations with customers. Your team may quickly outgrow this method though, so keep in mind that you will likely need to upgrade to a more robust customer support tool in the near future.

Customer Relationship Management Tool

A CRM tool is for managing a company’s relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. It’s meant to understand the relationships better to allow for improving business relationships. CRM refers to the strategies, technologies, and practices an organization uses to manage customer interactions and data throughout the customer lifecycle. If you use Freshdesk, check out the CRMs that integrate with it to choose the best one for your workflow.

Knowledge Management Tool

As you create documentation, you’ll need a place to store it. A knowledge management tool is a great option for organizing internal information, including:

Helpdesk ticketing software

Helpdesk ticketing software is a fantastic solution for managing customer service interactions and allowing your agents to focus on their work. By creating one central space for managing customer relations, agents will have a full view of the tasks to be performed and customer details, as well as a place to work together.

Helpdesk software isn’t just for organizing incoming customer queries. With the right features and the proper configurations, a helpdesk can improve your team’s customer service skills and create an environment for providing top-notch customer service to every customer.

Look for the following features in your helpdesk for improved customer service and expanding agents’ skillsets: