Unlike many industry-specific skills, soft skills for customer service are applicable across various industries. Every industry needs customer service, even though the positions are often considered less glamorous in the world. Still, customer service personnel should be able to keep consumers coming back for more products and services.
Some of the negative perceptions associated with the customer service position relate to the belief that the position involves reciting scripted responses, passive aggression, and uncomfortable silences. The modern-day customer service professional practices nuanced skills that are known to guarantee success in the position.
More often than not, a company’s growth depends on the quality of its customer service skills. A weak customer service team can drive away customers and hamper a company’s growth and profitability efforts. Some companies have even realized that a customer service team with specific customer service soft skills is a source of competitive advantage.
It’s time to change the perception that customer service positions are mundane. This blog examines several essential customer service soft skills that individuals must develop to meet the evolving needs of today’s customers.
Definition and Significance of Soft Skills in Customer Service
Soft skills refer to the interpersonal attributes that enable customer service reps to effectively interact with and build positive relationships with both internal and external customers. These skills acquire their name from the fact that they are not technical. Additionally, they are not needed to complete tangible work procedures.
Soft skills refer to a person’s positive attitudes and abilities that facilitate effective interactions, especially during customer service operations. They take different forms, including social attitudes, behaviors, and personal attributes that facilitate communication, build strong relationships, and problem resolution.
Soft skills for customer service can come naturally, but they can also be honed and developed through experience and continuous learning. These skills play a significant role and are often just as important as technical skills. Here is a list of aspects that demonstrate the importance of soft skills in customer service.
Improved Customer Experiences
Soft skills define how customer agents handle customer requests when customers walk into the company. Customer service agents who possess good communication skills, empathy, active listening skills, and strong interpersonal skills can effectively understand the needs of their customers and ensure satisfaction.
Effective and Efficient Problem-Solving
Customer agents in organizations are responsible for handling customer complaints. Soft skills for customer service come into play when handling customer complaints, especially when a customer’s primary concern is to be heard and understood.
Leadership soft skills, such as active listening and empathy, ensure customer satisfaction at all times as customers find the solutions they are seeking in the most efficient way possible.
Building Rapport With Customers
Services are intangible, and customers have nothing solid to take back with them except their experiences with the company’s staff. Customer service skills help build rapport with customers and provide them with a good experience they will remember for days.
Enhanced Customer Satisfaction
Soft customer service skills play a significant role in enhancing customer satisfaction. For example, a customer is bound to feel differently when an agent attends to their needs with empathy and understanding.
Conflict Resolution
It is easier to calm down an irate customer using effective soft skills. Customer service skills, such as maintaining eye contact, good body posture, and empathy, can collectively help alleviate a customer’s rising tensions by showing an understanding of the customer’s feelings.
The elimination of tension means the possibility of calm interactions and significant customer satisfaction.
Common Soft Skills Required in Customer Service
Indeed, customers’ needs are constantly changing. However, possessing the right customer service skills enables customer agents to adapt to this changing environment more easily.
For instance, working as a customer service agent can involve multitasking, including acting as a salesperson, product expert, and sometimes a spur-of-the-moment therapist.
Therefore, it is important to understand some of the common soft skills required when interacting with customers.
Here is a list of customer service skills that every agent needs to develop to succeed in any industry.
1. Empathy
Empathy is a customer service skill that allows a customer service agent to sense and understand the emotions of others. Empathizing with others means seeing things from their perspective and imagining what they could be feeling or thinking. Empathy and emotional regulation break down communication barriers, creating a strong connection with customers and ultimately building trust.
Most customers call or reach out to customer service agents to have their issues resolved. These customers often experience a range of emotions before they even place that call, including anger, confusion, or frustration. More often than not, they experience anger the most.
Handling the needs of an angry customer first requires one to empathize with them and show genuine concern for their anger. Failing to empathize with the customer can mean shutting them out or dismissing them, which ultimately results in lost business. The situation makes empathy all the more crucial.
2. Active Listening
This skill involves paying close attention during customer interactions, engaging with them effectively, and demonstrating interest in what they are saying through both verbal and non-verbal cues. When you actively listen, you ensure that you understand the speaker’s perspective rather than simply waiting to respond to them.
People generally tend to listen to respond rather than listen to understand. In short, many people lack active listening skills and fail to listen with the intention of understanding. A person’s inability to communicate with others also stems from their inability to listen effectively.
Contrary to popular belief, hearing someone speak is not the same as listening to them. Hearing is being in the presence of another person who is talking to you casually and in a passive state.
On the other hand, actively listening involves engaging your mind, being conscious, and making decisions.
3. Communication skills
Communication skills refer to a collection of skills, such as empathy, active listening, and verbal and nonverbal cues. The ability to apply these skills during customer interactions guarantees positive outcomes.
If you don’t have clear communication skills, there is a high likelihood that your customer service efforts will fall flat. Effective communication skills ensure that your customers understand the solutions you offer and how they can utilize these solutions to their benefit.
Effective communication skills for leaders enable them to clearly explain an issue to a customer and guide them on how to resolve it, especially when the customer has contacted your workplace.
In this case, good communication involves actively listening to the customer, seeking clarification through questioning or restating what they said, and then providing them with clear and understandable feedback.
At the end of the communication session, there is no misunderstanding, and the customer ends the call happy.
4. Patience
Customer service jobs are the most challenging, and it takes a significant amount of patience to manage a whole day serving different customers. Patience is a vital soft skill in good customer service, encompassing the ability to remain composed, professional, and empathetic when faced with a challenging customer situation.
Patience is the soft skill you will need to continue listening to your customers’ concerns, asking them to clarify information when necessary, and then offering them solutions without getting angry, frustrated, or indifferent. Patience is a skill that fosters strong customer loyalty, as it instills confidence in the company.
5. Conflict resolution
Conflict resolution is also a customer service skill that entails the ability to resolve conflicts and disagreements with customers respectfully. Conflicts are common in customer service positions, especially when customers are dissatisfied with a product or service.
Conflict resolution skills enhance the quality of customer interactions, particularly by mitigating tensions from the outset of the interaction phase. Conflict resolution skills are a skill that reduces misunderstanding by allowing one to adopt different perspectives, remain open-minded, and understand the rationale of the other party.
6. Problem-Solving
Problem-solving is a critical soft skill for customer service representatives. This skill involves the efficient analysis of issues, the identification of needs, and the development of effective solutions that lead to improved satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Problem-solving is also a skill that goes beyond the simple need to resolve issues. These skills enable customer agents to identify areas for improvement, gather effective customer feedback, and analyze that feedback to pinpoint areas for further improvement.
7. Adaptability
Dealing with different customers throughout the day presents the reality that a customer service position is unpredictable. One customer will walk in when angry, and another one will be frustrated.
Other customers may require further clarification on how to use a specific product. The same skills cannot be applied in dealing with the varied needs of these customers, as excellent customer service requires adaptability.
Customer service professionals should be agile and adaptable to succeed in the customer service industry. When you adjust your approach to suit the needs of every customer, you are essentially choosing adaptability.
8. Product Knowledge
Soft skills are crucial for a customer service professional. However, these skills alone don’t guarantee successful interactions with customers if you lack technical knowledge about a product.
Product knowledge refers to the possession of important details about a product or service that your company offers to customers. Product knowledge is a soft skill that helps you devise quick and reliable solutions, making your customers comfortable enough to trust the product they want to buy.
9. Creative Thinking
Customer agents also need creative thinking skills to manage the challenges that come with dealing with various types of customer issues. Often, the solution to a customer’s problem is not entirely clear, and the only option is for the customer service agent to think creatively.
At the end of the day, you cannot tell a customer that you are unable to solve their problem, so you must know how to come up with solutions on the spot.
Detailed Examples of Soft Skills Applied in Customer Service Scenarios
It is one thing to understand the different types of customer service skills, and it is another thing to know how to use these soft skills in real-life customer service scenarios. Here are a few examples of how to apply soft skills in customer service interactions.
1. Active Listening
Active listening is a soft skill that helps customer service agents engage positively with customers and understand their perspective on an issue before providing a response. Every conversation requires that the parties involved engage with each other in order to increase their level of attention.
As a customer service agent, you must give your customers 100% attention without allowing any distractions. Realistically, that also means not interrupting the client by completing sentences or making suggestions before they are done speaking.
For example, a customer will call the customer care center to register their displeasure about a delayed order delivery. You cannot immediately tell the customer to check the delivery status of the order according to your shipping policies.
There’s always a possibility that the customer already did that before they called. Instead, wait for the customer to finish explaining why they are concerned. By doing so, you will gain a comprehensive understanding, and then you can propose suitable solutions.
Active listening is a soft skill that requires constant practice in order to master all the aspects that make you a great listener.
2. Communication Skills
Effective communication is critical in dealing with customers at all times. It involves knowing how to communicate with customers clearly and in a language they can understand.
For example, a customer may request that a technology company set up a website where customers can place their product orders without needing to visit the physical store. The company will agree with the customer to complete setting up the website by a certain date.
On the specified date, the customer will call to confirm that the work is complete. If the work is not completed, a customer service representative must use effective communication skills to ensure that the customer does not become angry and frustrated due to the failure to meet the agreed-upon deadline.
The best response is to first apologize to the customer and then explain why the service team is not yet done with the project, such as the need to ensure that customers receive the best experience from the website.
3. Creative Thinking in Customer Service
Some customers will come to the company to ask for a refund after returning a product. Instead of simply accepting the return and refund as standard procedure, a customer service professional should think creatively.
For example, you should engage the customer in a conversation to understand the specific fit issue and suggest a different product at the same price.
4. Problem-Solving in Customer Service
Problem-solving skills are an everyday necessity in the customer service industry. For example, a customer will complain that they are having trouble using a given product.
By combining their product knowledge and problem-solving skills, a customer service agent should ask questions about the product and respond accordingly based on the customer’s explanation. The explanation should be presented slowly and in a language that is clear and understandable to the client.
Training Methods Utilized by Peaceful Leaders Academy to Enhance Soft Skills
The importance of soft skills in customer service cannot be underestimated. Companies that need to enhance the effectiveness of their customer service team should look to Peaceful Leaders Academy for customer service de-escalation courses.
Understandably, soft skills are acquired and refined over time to ensure that the customer service team is always prepared. However, there is a need to adopt a well-thought-out training strategy.
Workshops
At Peaceful Leaders Academy, we utilize workshops for training in customer service soft skills. Our workshops can upskill your customer service team and ensure they are current with the most important soft skills. You can host workshops regularly to allow new and inexperienced recruits to improve their soft skills.
Continuous Learning
We offer comprehensive soft skills training programs that facilitate ongoing learning. This training program is particularly well-suited for developing essential soft skills, including time management, creative thinking, problem-solving, and delivering exceptional service.
These skills can only improve over time, and ongoing training approaches to teaching these skills will ensure that your customer service team is always primed for unpredictable customer interactions.
Feedback Mechanisms
Feedback mechanisms within an organization are also important ways to instill soft skills in your customer service team. Developing skills for giving feedback ensures that feedback is delivered constructively and helps team members grow.
Customer feedback can include enough details of exceptional customer service, honest testimonials, and experiences, which, in one way, highlight the strengths and weaknesses of one’s soft skills.
The strengths will require the customer service agent to maintain certain skills, while criticism indicates that the agent needs to make improvements going forward.
Explore Our Workshops and Training
Soft skills are essential for fulfilling customer service roles. There are several examples of soft skills, but the most common ones include active listening, empathy, good communication, time management, critical thinking, adaptability, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and product knowledge, among others. These skills help customer service professionals better understand and respond to the customer’s feelings, leading to more meaningful and effective interactions.
Customer service representatives should possess these soft skills to maintain a positive attitude and understand customers’ needs, enabling them to provide effective solutions. Soft skills play a crucial role in building trust, developing strong relationships, and enhancing the overall customer experience. Want to sharpen your team’s soft skills? Explore our workshops and training programs at Peaceful Leaders Academy to get started.
