Essential Customer Service Skills your Employees Should Have – Part Two

Continuing from last week, here are some more skills your customer-facing employees must possess.

Quick thinking: Not all customers are the same and neither are their issues or concerns. However, the one thing that is common among all of them is that they want clear and prompt responses and immediate resolutions. In the last post, I spoke about how knowledge is an essential requirement but knowledge alone is not enough. Sometimes, customers serve up issues that we never anticipate. Apart from being able to tap into this knowledge, the customer service rep has to be able to think quickly on his/her feet and come up with a satisfactory answer to resolve such issues.

Time management: Do you ever notice how customers always seem to be in a hurry? How they expect immediate answers and how their tone keeps rising the more they are kept waiting? Customers don’t like to be kept waiting. Reps should have good time management skills to ensure that they don’t keep customers waiting but serve them quickly and well.

Anticipation: This point ties in well with the one above. One good skill for customer service reps to have is anticipation. If you can anticipate the customer’s issues before they have to be vocalized, you are sure to make your customer feel better and make them think that they are in safe and knowledgeable hands. It helps with your time management too.

The human touch: Another essential skill is the human touch, making the customer feel at ease by showing some apathy. You have to make them feel that you understand the problem and that you are doing everything you can to resolve it.

Customer service is part science, part art, and part just good old common sense. Make sure you pick up as many skills as possible to serve your customer better. Remember, happy customers, make very good ambassadors.