21 Key Customer Service Skills (And How To Develop Them) - Help Scout (2023)

No matter how good your product is, if your customer service sucks, people will complain and you will lose customers.

The good news is that changing things is not impossible. Transforming your customer service from mediocre to great won't happen overnight. It requires a serious commitment to meaningful change, a team of Rockstar support experts, and work across the organization.

What is customer service?

Customer service is the act of supporting potential and existing customers. Customer service representatives often respond to customer inquiries in person, by phone, email, chat, and social media, and may also be responsible for creating documentation for self-service support.

Organizations can also create their own definitions of customer service based on their values ​​and the type of support they want to offer. For example, at Help Scout, we define customer service as timely, empathetic help that keeps customers' needs at the forefront of every interaction.

Why is customer service important?

When86% of customersStopping doing business with a company due to a bad experience means companies must view every support interaction as an opportunity to buy, hold, or sell more.

Good customer service is a revenue generator. Provide customers with a complete and cohesive experience that aligns with an organization's purpose.

Aftera variety of studies, US businesses lose more than $62 billion a year due to poor customer service, and seven in 10 consumers say they spend more money to do business with a company that offers great service.

Understanding that customer service is the foundation of the customer experience helps you use it as an opportunity to delight and retain customers in new and exciting ways.

What are the principles of good customer service?

There are four basic principles of good customer service: it is personal, competent, convenient, and proactive. These factors have the biggest impact on the customer experience.

• Costume:Good customer service always starts with a human touch. Personalized interactions greatly improve customer service and let them know that your company cares about them and their concerns. Don't think of service as a cost, think of it as an opportunity to win back your customer's business.

• Competent:Consumers identified competition as the element that plays the most important role in a good customer experience. To be competent, a customer service representative must have a thorough understanding of the company and its products, as well as the ability to solve customer problems. The more knowledge they have, the more competent they become.

• Practical:Customers want to be able to contact a customer service representative through the channel that is most convenient for them. Offer support through the communication channels your customers trust most and make it easy for them to get in touch with you.

• Proactive:Customers want companies to be proactive in communicating with them. If one of your products is on backorder or your website is down, proactively contact your customers and explain the problem. They may not be happy with the situation, but they will appreciate you keeping them informed.

By building your customer service strategy around these four core principles, you create a seamless and positive customer experience for everyone involved in your business.

The 21 Best Customer Service Skills

While providing good customer service in your organization takes work and coordination, your support team is a good place to start. It is important to hire people who genuinely want to help their clients succeed and pay attractive prices for qualified professionals.

Finding the perfect support team member can be challenging. No specific checklist of work experience and college degrees makes the perfect candidate. Instead, look for qualities that can't necessarily be passed on.

These people thrive on one-on-one interactions within their community. They love solving problems. You are warm, approachable, and great at teaching others how things work.

Here are the 21 customer service skills every support professional should develop and every leader should consider when recruiting new team members.

1. Problem solving skills

Customers do not always correctly diagnose their problems on their own. Often it is up to the support agent to take the initiative to reproduce the problem before seeking a solution. This means that they not only have to intuitively understand what went wrong, but also what action the customer wanted.

A great example? When someone writes about having trouble resetting their password, it's because they want to sign in to their account.

Good interaction with customer support will anticipate this need and may even go so far as to manually perform the reset and provide new credentials, while also educating the customer on how to do it themselves in the future.

In other situations, a problem solver may simply understand how to offer preventative advice or a solution that the customer doesn't even realize is an option.

2. Patience

Patience is crucial for customer service representatives. After all, customers seeking help are often confused and frustrated. Being listened to and treated patiently goes a long way in making clients feel like it will ease their current frustrations.

It's not enough to finish customer interactions as quickly as possible. Your team must be willing to listen and fully understand the problems and needs of each client.

3. Attention

The ability to truly listen to customers is critical to providing excellent service for many reasons. It is not only important to pay attention to individual customer experiences, but also to be observant and attentive to the feedback you receive in general.

For example, customers may not say so outright, but there may be a general feeling that your software's control panel isn't organized correctly. Customers may not say, "Improve your UX," but they may say things like "I can never find the search feature" or "Where is (specific feature) anyway?"

You have to be attentive to understand what customers say without saying it openly.

4. Emotional intelligence

A great account manager knows how to get along with everyone, but is especially good with frustrated people. Instead of taking things personally, they intuitively understand where the other person is coming from and know how to quickly prioritize and communicate that empathy.

Think about it: how many times have you felt better about a potential complaint just because you immediately felt heard by the other person involved?

When a support representative can genuinely empathize with a frustrated customer, even if they are just rehashing the issue at hand, they can both calm (customer feels heard) and actively please (customer feels validated in their frustration).

5. Clear communication skills

Their customer support team is on the front lines of resolving issues with the product itself, serving as a kind of two-pronged megaphone.

On the one hand, they are the voice of your company to your customers. This means they must have a working understanding of how to break down complex concepts into easy to digest and understand terms.

On the other hand, they represent the needs and thoughts of customers towards your company. For example, it is not up to the customer to receive a lengthy explanation of the intricacies of fixing a particular bug.

The ability to communicate clearly when working with clients is a crucial skill, as misunderstandings can lead to disappointment and frustration. The best customer service representatives know how to keep customer communication simple and no questions asked.

6. Writing skills

Good writing means getting as close to reality as words allow. Without an ounce of exaggeration, a good writer is the most overlooked but most important skill to look for when it comes to hiring account managers.

Unlike face-to-face (or even voice-to-voice) interactions, writing requires a unique ability to convey nuance. The way a sentence is worded can make the difference between sounding like a jerk ("You have to go first") and sounding like you care ("Leaving should help me solve this problem quickly!").

Good writers also tend to use complete sentences and correct grammar, traits that subtly signal the safety and trustworthiness of their company.

Even if your business primarily offers phone support, typing skills are still important. They not only enable your team to create consistent internal documentation, but also demonstrate a clear-thinking and communicative person.

7. Creativity and ingenuity

Solving the problem is good, but finding clever and fun ways to move forward, and wanting to do it, is even better.

It takes panache to infuse a typical customer service exchange with unforgettable warmth and personality, and finding a customer service representative who possesses that natural zeal will take your customer service out of "good enough" territory and straight into " tell me". friends about this country.

Basecamp's Chase Clemons recommends the following:

“You want someone who you don't have to impose a lot of rules and regulations on. You want someone who talks to a customer and understands, "Your boss is really yelling at him today. This person is having a really bad day. You know what? I'm going to send them some flowers to brighten things up." That's not really something for you. teach. You have to go beyond that naturally."

8. Persuasion

Too often, support teams receive messages from people who aren't looking for support—they're considering buying your company's product.

In these situations, it helps to have a team of people with some persuasion so they can convince interested prospects that your product is right for them (if it really is).

It's not about making a selling point in every email, it's about not letting potential customers slip away because you failed to create a compelling message that your company's product is worth buying.

9. Ability to use positive language

Effective customer service means being able to make small changes to your conversation patterns. This can really go a long way in creating satisfied customers.

Language is a crucial part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create a perception about you and your business based on the language you use.

Let's say a customer contacts your team interested in a specific product, but that product is on hold until next month.

Answering questions with positive language can have a big impact on how the customer hears the answer:

The first example isn't negative per se, but the tone it conveys seems abrupt and impersonal and can be misunderstood by customers, especially with email support when thePerception of written language can be distorted.

On the other hand, the second example says the same thing (the article is not available) but focuses on when and how the problem will be solved instead of focusing on the negative.

10. Product Knowledge

The best customer service representatives have a deep understanding of how your company's products work. After all, they don't know how to help customers when they have problems without knowing their product from start to finish.

For example, all new Help Scout employees receive customer service training in the first week or two; It is a crucial component of our employee onboarding process.

According to Help Scout's Elyse Roach, "This strong product foundation not only ensures you have the best tricks up your sleeve to help customers navigate even the most complex situations, but also helps you understand their experiences so you can use yours." strongest defender. ”

11. Acting Skills

Sometimes your team meets people you can never make happy.

Situations that are out of your control (like when a customer is having a terrible day) sometimes creep into your team's normal support routine.

Any great customer service representative needs basic acting skills to maintain their usual bubbly personality despite dealing with people who are downright grumpy.

12. Time management skills

On the one hand, it is good to be patient and spend a little more time with customers to understand their problems and needs. On the other hand, there is a limit to the time you can spend with each client, so your team has to worry about getting the client what he wants efficiently.

The best customer service representatives quickly spot when they can't help a customer and quickly get them to someone who can.may lHelp.

13. Ability to read clients

It is important that your employees understand some basic principles of behavioral psychology so that they can read the current emotional states of customers. As Emily Triplett Lentz writes:

"I rarely use a smiley face in a support email when the customer signature says 'PhD,' for example. It's not that academics don't have a sense of humor, it's just that:)They are unlikely to be taken seriously by someone who has spent five years deconstructing the utopian overtones of 19th-century autobiographical novels.

The best support professionals know how to look for and listen for subtle clues about current mood, patience level, personality, etc. of a customer, which goes a long way in keeping customer interactions positive.

14. Imperturbable

There are many metaphors for this type of personality: "keep calm", "stay calm under pressure", etc., but they all represent the same thing: the ability of some people to remain calm and even influence others when things get tough. They get a little rough. .

The best customer service representatives know they can't let an angry customer make them lose their temper. In fact, her job is to be the "rock" for clients who feel like the world is falling apart because of their current problems.

15. Goal-oriented approach

Many customer service professionals have shown that giving employees unlimited opportunities to delight customers doesn't always produce the benefits that many companies expect. This is because employees are left without direction, and business objectives and customer satisfaction can go hand in hand without resulting in poor service.

Relying on frameworks like the Net Promoter Score can help companies create policies for their employees that allow a lot of freedom when dealing with customers on a case-by-case basis, but also prioritize solutions and "go to" Leave Fixes for common problems.

16. Ability to deal with surprises

Sometimes customers throw curveballs at their team. They'll make a request that isn't covered by your company's policies, or they'll respond in a way no one expected.

In such situations, it is good to have a team of people who can think for themselves. Even better, find people who will take the initiative to create guidelines that anyone can use in these situations in the future.

17. hardness

Call it what you want, but a great work ethic and a willingness to do what needs to be done (and not take shortcuts) is a key skill when it comes to delivering the kind of service people are talking about (positive).

The most memorable customer service stories, many of which had a tremendous impact on the company, were written by a lone employee who refused to simply follow the standard process when it came to helping someone.

18. Blocking ability

Being able to close with a customer as a customer service representative means ending the conversation with the customer's satisfaction confirmed (or as close as possible) and with the customer feeling that everything has been (or will be) taken care of. .

Booting up before all your problems are fixed is the last thing customers want. So make sure your team knows that they need to take the time to confirm with customers that any issues they've had have been fully resolved.

19. Empathy

Perhaps empathy, the ability to understand and share the feelings of others, is more of a character trait than a skill. but sinceEmpathy can be learned and improved, I would be remiss not to include it here.

When your company tests job applicants for their customer service aptitude, it's unlikely you're looking for a more important skill than empathy.

Because even if you can't tell the customer exactly what they want to hear, a dose of attention, compassion, and understanding can go a long way. A support agent's ability to empathize with a customer and articulate a message that steers things toward a better outcome can make all the difference.

20. A methodical approach

In customer service, rush creates waste. Hiring thoughtful and detail-oriented employees goes a long way in meeting the needs of your customers.

First, they will make sure to get to the heart of a problem before giving an answer. There is nothing worse than trying a "fix" only to fail to solve the real problem.

Second, they will check. A carefully written answer can lose much of its problem-solving luster if it's riddled with typos.

Three, and this might be the most important, means they'll be doing regular follow-up. There's nothing more impressive than getting a message from a customer service representative saying, "Hello! Remember the bug you found and I said we were looking into it? Well, we fixed it. That's a loyal, lifetime customer who you just won

One important note: the best employees can maintain their methodical grace under regular fire.

Because support reps often take on the hard work of cleaning up other people's messes, it's especially important that they understand how not to internalize the urgency and potential anger of frustrated customers. Instead, they know how to keep a cool head and a steady, guiding hand.

21. Willingness to learn

While this is probably the most general ability on this list, it's also one of the most important. The willingness to learn is ultimately the foundation for developing skills as a customer service professional.

Your team members must be willing to know your product inside and out, willing to learn how to communicate better (and when to communicate poorly), willing to learn when it is good to follow a process and when it is more appropriate, choose their own adventure. .

Those who don't strive to improve what they do, whether it's creating products, marketing businesses, or helping customers, are left behind by people who are willing to invest in their own skills.

What if someone on your team doesn't have these skills?

What if you manage a team of support professionals who are unwilling to improve your customer service? What if they don't have the above skills and don't seem interested in developing them? Help Mathew Patterson from Scout has a solution:

Often the root cause of what is perceived as a lack of skills or an unwillingness to learn is the result of a work environment (current or former) that is not rewarded for going above and beyond to provide excellent service.

Try to give your team some clear guidelines on what to expect, and some examples of what great customer service looks like at your company, in a way that brings all of those skills together, while making sure to use those little ones. Celebrate things by watching people start to use those skills.

Once your team realizes that their efforts are being recognized and rewarded, it will drive people to get more involved and you will have a clearer idea of ​​whether or not there are people on your team with real skill gaps. that you have to work

The evolution of customer service

Andwrote Seth GodinCustomer service means different things to different organizations, but things will not end well for companies that see customer service simply as a "race to cut costs."

Gary Vaynerchuk echoes this sentiment.The economy of thanks, where he highlights the evidence that there is profit and growth for any business that communicates openly with its customers to make them feel valued and valued.

Bottom Line: Great customer service is a growth center, not a cost center. Too easy.