
Key Customer Service Skills and How To Develop Them
In business, human relationships form the core of customer service, which goes beyond offering customers what they want. It involves how you make them feel when they reach out, even when they seem to tire you out with their demands. To ensure you give a good service, all staff must be equipped with the requisite customer service skills, which will go a long way to help build long-lasting customer relationships, which will help in business profitability. If you’re wondering what some of these skills are, this article has all the answers.
Communication Skills
Your customer service team is critical to the success of your business as they’re always on the front lines, helping solve problems for your product while dealing with your customers. They act as problem solvers and are the voice of your company to your clients. As such, they need to be able to relay information in a manner that will be understood.
Clear communication can be achieved by the employment of a call center software for small business startups and even large franchises. In addition to this, a continual improvement in communication through a coaching program geared at business success is vital. As much as possible, your customer service team should hone the skill of reducing any complex terms into simple language that anyone can understand.
Problem-Solving Skills
In our first point, we mentioned problem-solving, which is another skill everyone in customer support should possess. When a customer comes with an issue regarding your product, the customer support team should be good at taking the initiative and replicating the said issue to better navigate the solution. In many cases, a customer might misdiagnose their issues. Thus, it’s up to your innovative team to use their intuition to find out the exact issues possessed by each customer before offering a solution.
Building such intuition can be tough, but with excellent coaching in the workplace from bosses and supervisors, it can be attained. In a perfect case scenario, your support team should anticipate what a customer might need after stating their issue and go the extra mile by offering to perform the solution for them.
Emotional Skills
You need to know how best to relate to anybody, no matter their mood. This runs true for customer service personnel, especially for frustrated customers. As a team member, you should avoid making comments and complaints from clients personally. As much as possible, your intuition and level of emotional intelligence should allow you to understand your client’s perspective and also help you communicate swiftly with the needed empathy. It would be best to make today’s consumers feel hard in all situations, as this makes them feel better about a potential issue or grievance.
Writing Skills
Writing is another form of communication, so you’ll need to sharpen the skillset for a better customer experience. When using your written words, be sure to get as close to reality as possible without any form of exaggeration. Choose your words carefully, considering the human factor, as this will differentiate you, showing you care from being rude. Also, try to make use of proper grammar and full sentences to help establish trust and security.
Persuasion Skills
The skill of persuasion is great when you have potential key stakeholders who are still considering whether or not your product is the best fit for their needs. This goes beyond the constant sales team pitches sent via email, and it surpasses your social media marketing strategies or plans. Customer service personnel need to know the most compelling ways to convince potentially interested individuals that your product is worth purchasing.
Developing any of these skills takes intentionality and lots of experience on the job. As a small business owner, you must take all team members through regular training sessions to get them accustomed to different scenarios and the best approaches.


3 Comments
Polly
You must remember that the main influence on the satisfaction of your customers is the quality of your service, not the content and all that. There is a great article on this subject here https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2022/01/13/bad-customer-service-a-success-or-failure-of-strategic-business-thinking/?sh=1f921ab223c3
Adam Miller
Thanks. Support or customer service is a complex process that helps to achieve balance in business. Now there are many good tools that can help you with this. My company uses Zendesk and also uses custom theme add-ons https://growthdot.com/custom-zendesk-themes/
fnf mod
Thank you for the responses for my interview tomorrow.