What Skills to Look For in your Next Customer Service Reps
Assembling a great team of customer service reps takes time, patience, and a solid knowledge of what great customer service really means. Of course, anyone can provide customer service, but your customers deserve to be served by reps who truly care about the customer experience. Here are the skills you need to look out for in your next customer service reps.
Confidence
Confidence is a great skill to have in any job, but it takes a very special type of confidence in customer service roles. Your service reps need to be confident enough to take charge of any problem or situation that your customers have, yet they need to avoid coming across as bossy or overbearing. Most importantly, it’s the attitude that goes along with the confidence that counts the most. If they are cocky and inflexible in their confidence, keep looking. That type of inflexibility will be a turnoff for your customers.
Empathy
Alongside confidence, empathy is one of the best skills any customer service employee can have. The ability to put yourself in your customer’s shoes is critical in diffusing angry situations and it’s vitally important in helping employees relate to customers. Empathy requires a lot of patience, which is another great skill for customer service employees to embrace.
Flexibility
Customers can have a wide variety of problems every day of the week, so you need employees who are flexible enough to be able to work through these challenges to provide individualized service to every employee. Flexibility is also important when your business experiences a particularly high volume of customer calls. You need employees who are happy to help above and beyond their normal duties in times like that.
Sense of responsibility
Customer service reps who can own up to their mistakes are more likely to be better problem solvers in the long run. If they assume responsibility of their customer’s problems, they’ll be more likely to give better customer service, too. Encourage responsible customer service reps to provide followups to your customers once the problem is resolved to help strengthen customer relationships.
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