Customer Service Resume: What to Include and What to Leave out

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Customer service jobs are highly competitive. There are many people who claim to have what it takes to be a good customer service agent.

If you’re applying for a customer service position, you’ll agree that the first hurdle you’ll have to jump over is getting your resume noticed. And then there is a little thing- getting invited for an interview. You might have all the skills needed, but if your customer service resume is poorly written and offers no evidence of your awesome skills, you might find yourself waiting forever for recruiters to respond to you.

 🚀Read Customer Service: A Guide for Successful Business Growth  🚀

In this article, we’ve taken the time to address everything you need to include in your customer service resume to get noticed. Apart from that, we’ve listed a range of good examples that can inspire you while compiling your CV.

Let’s start!

What to Include in Your Customer Service Resume?

Trying to put together a good customer service resume isn’t easy. Even though you are probably a soft skill master, it isn’t so easy for others to get the same reading purely from words on a sheet of paper. Make sure you’re putting down the right information!

Your resume should include your contact information, your education, and your experience. Highlight your good customer service skills by creating a skill section for it. 

You can also create an optional section where you can include your objectives or some details about your profile. A profile consists of a few sentences that provide an overview of your most relevant skills and experience to date adjusted to the position you’re applying for.

When writing your objectives, you can also specify the role you are interested in showing the talents or abilities you plan to use in filling that role.

Read: What’s the Difference Between Customer Service, Customer Care and Customer Support?

Picture 1. Resume template

Your experience is crucial. Make sure to emphasize it properly by providing details of the previous positions you worked at as a customer service professional.

If you haven’t had any relevant experience, it’s important you think of ways to demonstrate that you’ve gained the required skills from your education and prior work experiences. So present your past work experience in the ways that highlight you have good customer service skills.

Also, keep in mind that without the appropriate keywords, your customer service resume might never be found. To avoid reading through hundreds of resumes sent by job applicants, employers use applicant tracking systems (ATS). They screen all the resumes and pick out the most relevant ones based on keywords. Therefore, your goal is to use precise keywords because, without them, your customer service resume might never be noticed.

The Most Important Customer Service Skills

If you’re looking for a customer service job, patience and empathy are probably the most important skills you’re going to need and want to emphasize in your resume. Other may include:

• good communication skills
• attention to detail
• adaptability
• time management
• good organisational skills
• product knowledge

Whichever skills you choose to emphasize, make sure you know how to explain how they comply with the job you’re applying to.

Tips for Writing an Effective Customer Service Resume

Research and Adapt to Your Future Employers

You can’t change your experience and education, but you can sure adapt what you have to what your future employee is asking for. So before you start writing your resume take a careful look at what kind of company you’re applying to, their values and goals and think how your profile matches the job opening. If you’re applying to work in the finance sector, then maybe your student job in a warehouse might not be that important to emphasize in the resume. So put more emphasis on your characteristics and expereinces which are closer to what they’re searching for.

You can say something like this:

A Dedicated Customer Service Representative with over five years of front-office experience in the bank industry. Known for solving a wide range of customer issues with a high level of customer satisfaction. Trustworthy, reliable and consistent in providing optimal customer service.

Emphasize Results

When writing a customer service resume, make sure to highlight the outcomes of your work from previous experiences. Most people do not realize that making a contribution to response rates or improving customer satisfaction is a great accomplishment to put in your resume if you want to get noticed. Emphasizing results is important as it creates energy to entice the recruiter to contact you for more information.

For example, instead of saying simply that you handled incoming customer calls, say it like this: “Handled over 200 calls daily for Mississippi Insurance claims center” you could say that more accurately: “Achieved customer satisfaction rating of 95% within 2 months thereby exceeding the company’s stretch target of 90%”.

Picture 2. Emphasize your results

Show Stability

Let your customer service resume show that you have employment stability. If your work history has been a little sketchy, emphasize your customer service skills to downplay your work history.

Be Honest

Try to be very honest with any information you provide on your resume. Never state false information about your previous employment dates, job titles, and level of education since most employers will do a background check to verify information provided.

Be Concise and Consistent

You don’t have to mention every detail about your career. Instead, provide the most relevant information for the position you’re applying for. Use the same format throughout the document and try to be consistent with your style. To help you achieve this, you can use customer service resume samples as a reference to keep yours consistent and easy. Bear in mind that recruiters receive millions of resumes and you need to stand out in order to get hired. 

Optimize Your Customer Service Resume for Applicant Tracking systems

According to the Bureau of labor statistics, customer service employment opportunities will grow by 5% until 2026. This means more applications. And more applications means more resumes. This is why we can’t overemphasize the fact that it is important to optimize your resume. Most of the recruiters are most likely to continue using the ATS for selection amongst numerous resumes they receive every day.

Therefore, to make yours stand a better chance of being selected, you need to format your resume appropriately. Apart from keywords as we mentioned earlier, create a bot-friendly customer service resume by employing the use of simple and clean layout with standard typefaces like Georgia, Impact, Arial, Courier, or Tahoma.

Picture 3. Robots reading your resume

Examples of Customer Service Resumes

To help you craft a good customer service resume that will definitely stand the best chance for you to be employed, we’ve taken the time to gather valuable tips and tricks. These will help you understand what is important when applying for different customer service-related positions. These tips will involve the customer service skills you’ll need to highlight for each position and other information that will help you land your dream job position.

Related: Customer Service Interview Questions With Answers.

Call Center Representative Resume

If you’re applying for a call center customer service position, you may be required to perform a variety of duties in sales too. As a call center customer service representative, you’ll be required to listen to complaints and answer questions. In sales, all representatives are expected to do cold calling and accept calls from prospective clients who want to buy a product or service.

Hence, if you want your resume to get selected, you must emphasize your skills as a customer service representative. Apart from adding it in your skill section, your work history should reflect these experiences, it should tell stories of triumphs and victory as a customer service representative.

Mention your resiliency. This is important as call center representatives listen to a lot of negativity from clients. When a person frustrated with a product or service calls in, they tend to pour all their anger on the representative over the phone. In order to get this position, you need to prove that you can handle this negative energy and that you know how to calm such customers down before trying to solve their problem.

Picture 4. Call center representative

Food Service Specialist Resume

While applying for this position, it is very important to emphasize your problem-solving skills. Show recruiters that you can identify issues even when given little information. Also prove that you have the capacity to solve these problems with ease. Share your knowledge of food preparation or food technology in your resume as well. Let recruiters know that you know food well enough to warn customers about possible allergy reactions, etc.

Hotel Front Desk Resume

When applying for this position, your customer service resume should show relevant experience in the field including both jobs and volunteering positions you’ve worked at in the past. This will prove that you’ve gained hospitality and communication skills. If you do not have multiple experiences in this field or none at all, mention your academic extracurricular or volunteer experiences. These can also show that you have developed relevant skills that make you qualified for the front desk associate position.

Picture 5.  Hotel front desk job

Some of the guest service or hospitality skills that hotels look out for in a front desk customer service resume include organizational skills, good verbal and written communication, ability to use or learn a client relationship management (CRM) or reservation management software quickly, etc.

Foreign language skills like French, Spanish, Japanese, and German could be a huge plus. You are also expected to have good decision-making skills and professional composure and appearance for this position.

Client Services Coordinator Resume

Client services coordinators are responsible for managing communications between clients and service providers. The goal is in to ensure that the clients are satisfied with the progress of their accounts. They also onboard new clients and conduct off-boarding for those who do not require the providers’ services anymore.

If you are applying for this position, you should be an organized and persistent individual with outstanding communication skills. You should also be able to handle criticism and negative comments calmly while attending to frustrated clients. Therefore, your resume should reflect excellent communication skills, the ability to be proactive to customer needs and issues before they arise, persistence, relationship building and excellent verbal skills.

Technical Support Representative Resume

Technical support representatives are expected to provide support in solving technical issues for clients. Most of the time, this job position is related to machine, equipment or tech services problem-solving. In other words, you need to be familiar with the technology you are representing.

For example, your job could involve helping a customer solve problems with a newly purchased laptop or mobile phone. Support duties are done via phone, email or online chat and might require taking remote control of the device to fix the problem under the permission of the user.

Example of some of the skills you must include in your resume if you are applying for this position includes;

•   Ability to handle all types of technical issues
•   Outstanding knowledge of system components and development
•   Strong command over written and spoken English
•   Thorough knowledge of computer, internet, and social media platforms
•   Excellent skills at repairing and servicing
•   A tendency to provide good customer service and developing a good image of the company

Social Media Specialist Resume

The work of a social media specialist includes coordinating a company’s activity on social networks. You should be able to represent your company on social media since your role doubles as an online public relations officer. Working in this position requires you to be updated with information and trending topics, while at the same time you have to know the company and your products to the core. Your resume should also reflect your qualifications as well as writing and content editing skills, paying attention to details, good customer service orientation, and teamwork.

• A degree in marketing or communication is often required for this position. Other key skills you should include in your resume when applying for this position are:
• Ability to run social media campaigns and Google analytics
• Strategic planning and Community management skills
•  Ability to prepare and schedule updates,
• Sharing relevant content or information about the company,
• Ability to keep in touch with fans and followers in real-time,
• Being able to encourage conversations with good communication skills,
• Ability to solve customer queries and resolve conflict
• Graphic design and photography skills

Picture 6. Social media buttons

Multilingual Customer Support Specialist Resume

As a multilingual customer support specialist, you’ll be expected to perform customer support services in foreign languages. You should be fluent in three or more languages in order to communicate with a large base of customers globally. Your responsibilities for this position can also include center advisor, secretary or personal assistant duties depending on the company.

Therefore for you to apply for this position, your customer service resume should reflect these skills;

•  Ability to handle customer queries and provide solutions in foreign languages
• Translating documents, English to foreign languages and vice versa
• Ability to handle foreign correspondence
• Booking accommodation and transport for international visitors or your company staff at overseas visits
• Fluency in at least 3 languages
• Secretarial skills
• Excellent information technology skills
• Excellent verbal and written communication

Remote Customer Service Representative Resume

Remote customer service representatives offer support to customers and perform the services of a customer care representative but from home or another remote workspace. When you are employed to work at this position, you might be expected to work with a team of other remote and in-office workers following the company’s guidelines. Therefore this role requires you to be highly self-motivated and able to communicate virtually with teammates as well as customers.

To apply for this position, your customer service resume must include these skills:

• Customer service skills
• Multitasking ability on a regular basis
• Ability to work independently without supervision
• Extremely reliable
• Ability to learn new products or procedures quickly

Related: Online Customer Service Jobs: The Ultimate Guide for Remote Agents

Picture 7. Remote worker

Customer Service Manager Resume

A customer service manager supervises other members of the customer service team. They are responsible for training new reps and keeping track of their progress. They help other team members handle conflicts involving customers or employees. Their role is to make sure that the team members understand company goals and also follow company guidelines.

To apply for this position, you must have;

• Ability to communicate effectively both orally and written
• Prior experience in customer service and leadership roles
• A good understanding of conflict resolution and crisis management
• A good understanding of team building
• Ability to manage retail operations
• Other customer service skills

Chat Agent Resume

With the increased affinity towards written communication in the last couple of years, many companies have started to use live chat solutions to communicate with their customers. This trend is on the rise since its efficiency and speed are far greater than that of phone calls and emails. Precisely because of that, job prospects for chat agents are now greater than ever.

This position requires a bit different skills than positions providing customer service through calls and emails. If you are planning to land a job as a chat agent your resume should include:

• Proactive attitude
• Multitasking skills
• Great written communication skills
• Ability to drive a conversation, ask relevant questions and provide concise information
• Ability to react quickly and to identify pain points with ease
• Great understanding skills
• Ability to work without supervision

Conclusion

Give yourself some time to fine-tune your resume because it acts as a bridge between you and the recruiters. Often underestimated, yet a powerful tool that might help you get that position that you’ve always wanted. 

In today’s competitive market, it is essential to stand out in the masses to get noticed. As we know that recruiters spend very limited time to scan through a resume, it becomes more important to make that time count. There is no form or pattern which should be followed when writing a resume. When your resume gets on the table, it is all about how it looks in comparison to the other ones piled up next to it.

A resume speaks a lot about you as a person. It says what you have done in the past. What are you doing today and where exactly are you heading. And if this direction of yours is clear enough, maybe there is a new customer service job waiting for you right around the corner.