3 Ways To Develop Your Team's Customer Service Skills

In any industry, a business must work continually to improve their service team’s skills with customer service courses and training. Some of the most important assets are really personality traits, which aren't necessarily easy to teach, but even so they're skills that can be developed and improved upon.

Empathy and Patience

When a customer contacts a service representative, it's typically because they have a complaint or query. Some customers are angry and some are impatient; regardless of the situation, a rep needs to handle each with a high level of diplomacy.

Skill development: empathy means stepping into someone else's shoes, and understanding why they feel the way they do. A great rep is naturally empathetic, a skill that can be learned to some degree. One way to develop empathy is by getting to know people from different backgrounds and understand what is important or less important to them.

Empathy naturally helps to improve patience, too, but just as important for a service rep is understanding what can make them lose their patience. Knowing what those cues are can help them stay calm under pressure.

Communication Skills

Service reps must be able to communicate with customers clearly and concisely so that customers understand what's being said. They also need to be able to use positive language and remain calm and cheerful in any situation, no matter how irate a customer becomes. Listening is also an essential skill: each customer is different, and each customer interaction will vary; a great rep can quickly sense a customer's mood, and adapt their service strategy accordingly.

Skill development: dealing with customers involves active listening, which means listening to what a customer says, and clarifying and rephrasing what has been said by repeating that back to the customer. This confirms that each party understands what's happening, and ensures that the customer feels heard.

Knowledge

Customers rely on service reps to help them solve their problems, so reps need to have good working knowledge of the business's products or services. A rep should be able to solve most problems, and know what to do in cases where solving a problem requires special knowledge or skills. This skill is one that customer service training should cover in depth and on an ongoing basis.

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