Customer Service Skills

What are Customer Service Skills?

Customer service skills are skills needed for adequately dealing with customers. Customer representatives should carefully take care of specific customers’ issues and give personalized responses. They should also be persuasive speakers.

It is imperative to stay patient when the customer is angry. If something goes wrong, customer service staff should take responsibility for the problem.

There are many other skills that customer representatives should have, such as excellent communication, empathy, assertiveness, friendliness, flexible, self-control, time management, and much more.

Learn more about customer service skills.

Picture 1. Find out more about Customer Service Agent Training Courses

Customer Service Skills for Each Support Channel

The best customer service agents will be able to move quickly between channels and solve problems with the skills that best suit each support channel. If you can hone your ability to practice empathy and communicate your product knowledge with customers, you’ll be a rock star in your company customer service.

Customer Support by Phone: How’s your “phone voice”?

Some say we wear our emotions on our sleeve, but others might say we convey our emotions through our voice. Customer service agents know from experience how frustration and anger translate through the phone lines. And, of course, that communication is a two-way street; phone agents reading from a script must consider their communication tone.

The following skills are what’s needed for phone support:

1. Smile, be relaxed
2. Mirror a customer’s’ language and tone
3. Listen first
4. Acknowledge the customer
5. Summarize the problem and try to resolve him

Picture 2. Valued skills

Customer Support by Email: Be more human

Honing your writing skills is especially important when providing excellent email support. The email response is arguably the most structured response and requires the most precision. You must write with clarity while detailing a list of issues. Also, take the time to proofread and correct any mistakes from service.

Here’s what you’ll need for excellent email support in any situation:

1. Use templates, not boilerplates
2. Make the templates by your own
3. Respond in a defined timeframe
4. Act like a customer

Customer Support by Live Chat: Multitasking is the king

Providing great live chat support requires a cross of a phone and email skills. Chat is conversational and real-time, just like customer service over the phone or Facebook but it also requires strong writing skills.

Here’s what every great live chat agent needs to pay attention to:

1. Use a gentle, informative tone
2. Multitasking
3. Read customer cues