Customer Service is the voice of the company. Customer service is responsible for handling customers regarding product knowledge, service, and resolving customer’s complaints in a professional and courteous manner. Customer service jobs can be excellent depending what your goals and interests are. If you enjoy working with people, helping people get through challenges and making people’s days better, then customer service is an amazing field.
Customer service job helps you develop skills, proactive awareness, effective communication and emotional intelligence that will help you in every field of your life. According to BLS, about 361,700 job openings are projected every year on average in customer service. Customer service representatives are paid an average annual salary of $35,104. The salary may increase depending on your job in the customer service industry.
Is Customer Service a Good Career?
Customer Service – An Excellent Career Choice
In today’s ever-changing industries, every business depends on its customer service to get input from consumers and assist in eliminating product or service faults, which is critical to the company’s success.
Consumer services are those that are offered to resolve a customer’s concerns. The US’s constant inflow of income in the form of consumer spending has also helped it sustain a consistent GDP for years, allowing it to become one of, if not the finest, economies in the world.
Importance Of Customer Service Job
Customers sincere to your brand will help you acquire new customers by convincing potential customers to connect with and promote it. Putting money into customer service may help you lower your turnover rate and overall CAC.
Only happy consumers will come from pleased customer service representatives. It’s vital to remember that 55% of workers will work hard for consumers even if they are dissatisfied with their jobs.
You Are Your Brand’s Image
When customer service communicates with potential or current customers, these people talk directly to them and represent your brand. Regarding brand loyalty, 96% of customers value customer service.
Customer service representatives are crucial in communicating your brand’s image to customers.
Best Reasons To Get a Job in Customer Service
- Customer service is a broad sector with several options.
- Everyone needs assistance, and this field offers fantastic work opportunities and will continue to be in high demand.
- Today, every business depends on customer service to receive input from customers, which may aid in the resolution of product or service issues.
- A job in customer services might be an excellent method to get into other fields.
- You may use the skills you learn as a customer service representative to other sites.
- Your communication skills will improve as you acquire customer service experience and your problem-solving abilities.
- As a customer representative, you will develop a thorough grasp of the goods and services.
- Customer service careers enable you to combine education and training to prepare for future work prospects.
- Customer service jobs can assist you in learning about various sorts of technologies available via cloud computing platforms.
- Whether servicing consumers online or in shops, you may obtain significant experience dealing with voice, texting, email and analytics.
Skills Required for Customer Service Job
1. Patience
Not only is patience important to customers, who often reach out to support when they are confused and frustrated. But it’s also important to the business at large. Great service beats fast service every single time.
Great service needs patience. If you deal with customers on a daily basis, be sure to stay patient when they come to you stumped and frustrated, but also be sure to take the time to truly figure out what they want – they’d rather get competent service than be rushed out the door.
2. Attentiveness
The ability to really listen to customers is so crucial for providing great service. Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customer experience, but it’s also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive at large.
For instance, customers may not be saying it outright, but perhaps there is a pervasive feeling that software’s dashboard isn’t laid out correctly. Customers aren’t likely to say, “Please improve your UX!”, but they may say things like. “I can never find the search feature”, or, “Where is this function again?”
3. Clear Communication Skills
Make sure you are getting to the problem at heart quickly. Customers don’t need your life story or to hear about how your day is going.
More importantly, you need to be cautious about how some of your communication habits translate to customers, and it’s best to err on the side of caution whenever you find yourself questioning a situation.
4. Knowledge of the Product
The best forward-facing employees in companies will work on having a deep knowledge of how your products work. Without knowing your product from front to back, you won’t know how to help customers when they run into problems.
It’s not that every single team member should be able to build your product from scratch, but rather they should know the ins and outs of how your product works, just like a customer who uses it everyday would.
Having that solid product foundation not only ensures you’ve got the best tricks up your sleeve to help customers navigate even the most complex situations, it also helps you build understanding about their experience so that you can become their strongest advocate.
Without knowing your product front and back, you won’t know how to help customers when they run into problems.
5. Ability to Use Positive Language
Sounds like fluffy, but customer service involves having the ability to make minor changes in your conversational patterns. This can truly go a long way in creating happy customers.
Language is a very important part of persuasion, and customers create perceptions about you and your company based off of the language that you use. For example, Let’s say a customer contacts you with an interest in a particular product, but that product happens to be back-ordered until next month.
Responding to questions employing “positive language” can greatly affect how the customer hears your response. In this example, the item is unavailable, so focus on how when/how the customer will get to their resolution rather than focusing on the negative.
6. Acting Skills
Sometimes you’re going to come across people that you’ll never be able to make happy. Every customer service employee should have those acting skills necessary to maintain their usual cheerful personality in spite of dealing with people who may be just plain grumpy.
7. Time Management Skills
Despite many research-backed rants on why we should spend more time with customers, the bottom line is that there is a limit, and you need to be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner.
The trick here is that this should also be applied when realizing that then you simply can’t help a customer. If you don’t know the solution to a problem, the best kind of support professional will get a customer over to someone who does.
Don’t waste time trying to go above and beyond for a customer in an area where you will just end up wasting both of your time.
8. Ability to “Read” Customers
You won’t always be able to see customers “face-to-face”, and in many instances you won’t even hear a customer’s voice. That doesn’t exempt you from understanding some basic principles of behavioral psychology and being able to “read” the customer’s current emotional state.
This skill is essential because you don’t want to misread a customer and end up losing them due to confusion and miscommunication. Look and listen to subtle clues about their current mood, patience level, personality etc., and you’ll go far in keeping your customer interactions positive.
9. A Calming Presence
There are a lot of metaphors for this type of personality, “keeps their cool”, “staying cool under pressure”, and so on. It all represents the same thing, the ability some people have to stay calm and even influence others when things get a little hectic.
The best customer service reps know that they can’t let a heated customer force them to lose their cool. Infact, it’s their job to try to be “rock” for a customer who thinks the world is falling down due to their current problem.
10. Goal-Oriented
This is a vitally important skill. I noted that many customer service experts have shown how giving employees unfettered power to “wow” customer doesn’t always generate the return many businesses expect to see.
That’s because it leaves employees without goals, and business goals + customer happiness can work hand-in-hand without resulting in poor service.
11. Ability to Handle Surprises
Sometimes the customer support world is going to throw a curveball. Maybe the problem you encounter isn’t specifically covered in the company’s guidelines, or maybe the customer isn’t reaching how you thought they would.
Whatever the case, it’s best to be able to think on your feet, but its even better to create guidelines for yourself in these sorts of situations. For instance, You want to come up with a quick system for when you come across a customer who has a product or service problem you’ve never seen before.
One thing you can decide right off the bat is who you should consider your “go-to” person when you don’t know what to do. When the problem is noticeably out of your league, what are you going to send to the people above, etc.
12. Persuasion Skills
This is one that a lot of candidates don’t see coming. Experienced customer support personnel know that oftentimes, you will get messages in your inbox that are more about the curiosity of your company’s product, rather than having problems with it.
To truly take your customer service skills to the next level, you need to have some mastery of persuasion so you can convince interested customers that your products are right for them.
It’s not about making a sales pitch in each email, but it is about not letting potential customers slip away because you couldn’t create a compelling message that your company’s product is worth purchasing.
13. Tenacity
Call it what you want, but a great work ethic and a willingness to do what needs to be done is a key skill when providing the kind of services that people talk about. The memorable customer service stories out there were created by a single employee who refused to just do the ‘status quo’ when it came to helping someone out.
Remembering that your customers are people too, and knowing that putting in the extra effort will come back to you ten-fold should be your driving motivation to never ‘cheat’ your customers with lazy service.
14. Closing Ability
Being able to close with a custom means being able to end the conversation with confirmed customer satisfaction and with the customer feeling that everything has been taken care of.
Getting booted after a customer service call or before all of their problems have been addressed is the last thing that customers want. Be sure to take the time to confirm with customers that each and every issue they had on deck has been entirely resolved.
Your willingness to do this shows the customer three important things:
- That you care about getting it right.
- That you are willing to keep going until you solve their problems.
- That the customer is the one who determines what “right” is.
15. Empathy
Perhaps empathy – the ability to understand and share the feelings of another – is more of a character trait than a skill. But since empathy can be learned and improved upon, we’d be remiss not to include it here.
Infact, if your organization tests job applicants for customer service aptitude, you’d be hard pressed to look for a more critical skill than empathy. That’s because even when you can’t tell the customer exactly what they want to hear, a dose of care, concern and understanding will go a long way.
A support rep’s ability to empathize with a customer and craft a message that steers things forward a better outcome can often make all the difference.
16. Willingness To Learn
This is probably the most general skill but it’s necessary. Those who don’t seek to improve what they do, whether it’s building products, marketing business, or helping customers, will get left behind by the people willing to invest in their skills.