Essential Customer Service Skills your Employees Should Have – Part One

Regardless of the industry you operate in or the products or services you offer, there are several essential skills that your employees should possess while engaging with your customers. Employees who work in customer-facing roles represent the organization and, to a large extent, are the only face or voice that the customer knows in that organization. If the customer is not happy with the customer service representative or if his/her issue has not been resolved, this bad impression festers and the image of the whole organization suffers because of the single employee.

In this post, we’ll look at several essential skills that customer-facing employees should have. Of course, no one says that every employee should possess all these skills from day one but employees and the organization must take steps to develop these skills over time.

Communication: If you take away only one point from this post or this series, it has to be communication. The single most important skill anyone in a customer-facing role needs is good communication with the customer, which involves empathy, listening ability, speaking ability, and so on. Just like you, your customer has no real time on hand to spare either. So you have to train your employees to get to the point quickly and resolve the issue. A customer might be able to take a delay if it meant resolution but no number of results can make up for bad communication.

Knowledge: When a customer calls you, odds are that it is about some issue with your product or service. If the customer service rep who answers the call is not knowledgeable about the product, it will defeat the purpose of the call and will result in the customer eventually slamming down the phone disgruntled. Always ensure that your employees have complete understanding about your product or service.

We‘ll see more in the next posts.