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Top 10 skills for Customer Service professionals
Build exceptional customer service
Go beyond good. Create a great service culture, identify and remove the negatives, and use principles of outstanding service to create a benchmark.
Manage customer service
Understand the role of a manager as leader in customer service and establish customer service best practices.
Motivate employees and understand customer needs
Motivate and engage employees to understand and meet customers' needs.
Use FISH! to build customer service teams
Make use of FISH! practices to keep customer service employees happy and productive.
Communicate with confidence
Use the right voice, and develop clarity and precision. Listen actively to understand better.
Resolve conflicts
Prevent and resolve conflicts by finding the root cause, weighing options, evaluating and taking action.
Overcome negative communications
Remain professional and objective with irate clients, and bridge communication barriers to prevent misunderstanding.
Body language
Become aware of other people's body language and use your own to look and feel confident.
Align verbal and non-verbal signals
Use verbal communication and body language to express yourself. Ensure your body language doesn't contradict your words.
Manage telephone conversations with clients
Know how to create a favourable impression from start to finish. Use effective techniques to deal with irate clients.
Top 5 rated PD Training courses to improve Customer Service skills
Communication is of three types: verbal, non-verbal and written.
Customer service professionals use their body language, appearance and verbal communication to create a favourable impact on customers.
Para verbal communication, which involves how something is said (tone, pitch, speed and volume)
is an important part of developing communication skills.
Listen to understand the needs and preferences of the customer.
Active listening is about listening attentively, identifying the background and personality of the customer
so that an appropriate response can be given to them.
Active listening helps to understand customer needs correctly to meet them quickly.
Observing others' body language tells us truths that words put a veil on.
A person's facial expressions, pace of breathing, touching/fiddling, position of the body and proximity allows us to
determine their state of mind at that moment.
While a person in a hurry will turn his/her body away from us, an angry person will be completely focused on the object of anger.
If words fail, a good customer service professional relies on the customer's body language to understand their needs.
These are the qualities excellent customer service professionals have:
Knowledge to help the customer.
Communication skills to provide the help needed.
Appropriate attitude to meet the customer's needs.
Even if one of these three qualities is missing, the customer cannot be satisfied.
When giving customer service over the phone, you have only your voice to depend on.
Therefore, your telephone voice must reveal what your facial expressions or body language does.
The five factors to consider here are:
Alertness
Pleasantness
Conversational Tone
Distinctness
Expressiveness
The customer must feel encouraged to seek help, and the customer service professional must know what help to give and how.
Questions come in handy to guide a conversation.
Three types of questions that can be used to guide conversations are: Open Questions, Closed Questions, and Probing Questions.
Open questions demand elaborate answers.
They use the 5Ws of - Who? What? Where? When? Why? and How? - to build a conversation.
Closed questions are used to end a conversation or change the subject.
They use questions where the answer is a simple 'yes' or 'no'.
For example, the question "Is it four o'clock?" can be used to end a conversation and rush away, or move to a different setting.
Probing questions are interrogative in nature and require explanations.
For e.g. "Why did you go there?".
Organisations that only focus on external customers fail to keep their internal customers satisfied.
Internal customers are the people, departments and agencies we serve within an organisation
such as the boss, supervisor or agents of other organisations.
They are not consumers of our end product/service, but of our services in one way or another.
Good customer service targets to satisfy both internal and external customers of an organisation.
Conflicts occur but they can be resolved with minimum of damage by
following an effective conflict resolution procedure.
The steps include:
Neutralising emotions.
Setting ground rules for the resolution.
Choosing an appropriate time and place for the talks.
Establishing needs of the parties.
Finding the root cause.
Creating solutions that are mutually beneficial.
Reaching the solution.
Every company has specific standards of customer service and the procedures they have created to fulfil them.
A team manager and customer service professionals need to identify those standards and
develop their personal customer service standards based on them.
Customer service teams can benefit from the FISH! practices in how they do their work and serve customers.
FISH! uses these four practices:
Be There
Play
Make Their Day
Choose Your Attitude
By making work fun, taking pleasure in serving, and altering the attitude of employees,
you get satisfied customers and satisfied employees.
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