10 Most Important Qualities Of Successful Customer Service Agents

A recent article from Helprace discusses the topic of hiring the best people to be your company’s customer service agents. Hiring the right person to fill an agent role is very challenging because the goal is to have a person that not only fits the company culture and can handle the brand voice, but they also need to have the right personality traits to offer the high level of experience you want to provide your customers. On top of all that, customer service can be an extremely challenging job to do right, and not everyone is able to handle it. The article provides the following ten most important customer service skills to look for when hiring new customer service agents.

1) Empathy: Customers respond better to call center agents who truly care about their issues and make a try to make personal connection with the conversation. An agent who can provide empathy will be able to pick up on subtleties in conversations and relate to the customer to find a satisfying solution.

2) Listening Skills: It’s important that an agent can do more than simply hear the customer talking. They have to be able to pick up on details and read between the lines.

3) Integrity: If you can’t trust your agents and your customers don’t trust your agents, it’s going to be an up-hill battle. Agents need to be honest and know the right things to say in the right situations, or else your customers won’t get fully satisfactory service.

4) Positive Attitude: Working in a call center or customer service environment can’t be extremely hectic and frustrating. If a person is negative from the start, it probably won’t lead to very good customer interactions. A person who maintains a positive attitude even during rough times will do a better job at serving customers in chaotic times.

5) Decision Making Ability: Scripts and macros are utilized often in customer service departments, but agents should be able to make decisions based on their experiences or what they feel would be best to solve a customer’s dilemma.

6) Thinking on Your Feet: Similar to number five, an agent needs to be able to improvise when a situation arises that they’ve never experienced or isn’t covered in a script or manual. Calls differ based on the customer, so being able to think on their feet is a strong need for customer service agents.

7) Patience: If a person is easily annoyed or can’t listen to somebody without cutting them off, they’re probably not the best fit to be a customer service agent. An agent needs to have the ability to let customers vent and talk through their confusions and frustrations to better learn from them and determine the best way to approach their issues.

8) Persistence: A person who can stick with something no matter how challenging it gets is going to be better at many jobs, but especially in customer service. Maintaining focus during the most difficult customer interactions and never getting defeated will lead to high quality customer experiences.

9) Product Knowledge: This is pretty obvious but needs to be mentioned. Customer service agents need to know everything about the product or service their company provides to ensure they can assist the customers with any inquiries.

10) Progress Mindedness: A person who is ambitious and wants to develop their skills while advancing in their career will go far in the customer service industry and be inclined to want to always help the customer to the best of their abilities.

This blog post is based on an article from Helprace. To read the original article, please click the link below:

10 Important Customer Service Skills (and how to identify them)