21 Key Customer Service Skills

No matter how good your product is, customers will complain and leave if your customer service is terrible.

It is possible to make things better. It takes time to transform customer service from being mediocre to outstanding. This requires a commitment to meaningful change and a team of support professionals who are rockstars. It also requires collaboration across the organization.

What is customer service?

Customer service refers to the act of offering support to customers, both current and prospective. Customer service representatives can answer customers' questions via phone, chat, email, chat, or social media. They may also create documentation for self-service support.

Depending on the support they provide, organizations can define customer service on their terms. Help Scout defines customer service as providing prompt, compassionate help that keeps customers’ needs in mind.

Why is customer service so important?

86% of customers leave a company after a negative experience. This means that businesses should approach every support interaction with customers as an opportunity to acquire or retain customers or even up-sell.

A good customer service experience is a significant revenue generator. Customers will have a seamless experience that is consistent with the organization's mission.

A variety of studies show that U.S. businesses lose over $62 billion each year due to poor customer service. Seven out of 10 customers say they would rather do business with companies that provide excellent service than spend more to do so.

Customer service is the foundation of customer experience. This allows you to use it to delight customers and engage with them in new and exciting ways.

What are the fundamental principles of customer service excellence?

Good customer service is based on four principles: Personal, competent, efficient, and proactive. These are the most important factors that influence the customer experience.

1. Personalization: Customer service should always be personal. Personal interactions are a great way to improve customer service. They also let customers know that you care about their problems. Don't view service as a cost. Instead, see it as an opportunity to win your customer back.
2. Competent: Customers identify competency as the most crucial element in providing a positive customer experience. A customer service representative must be knowledgeable about the company and its products. They also need to have the ability to solve customer problems. They will become more competent the more they know.
3. Convenience: Customers want to be in touch with customer service representatives through the most convenient channels. Customers should be able to reach you through the media they use most.
4. Proactive: Customers expect companies to be proactive and reach out to them. Reach out to customers to explain why a product is not available, or your website is experiencing downtime. Although they may not be pleased with the situation, they will appreciate that you kept them informed.

These four principles will help you create a pleasant customer experience for all who deal with your company.

Customer Service Tips by Industry and Business Type

• B2B customer service
• SaaS support
• Customer service for healthcare
• Startup customer support
• Customer service in education
• Financial services customer service
• Small business customer support
• Nonprofit organizations Customer service
• Ecommerce customer support

21 Key Customer Service Skills

Your support team is a great place to start. While providing consistently excellent customer service takes effort and alignment across the entire organization, it's possible. It is important to hire people who are motivated to help customers succeed and pay competitive salaries.

It can be challenging to find the right person to join your support team. No one set of skills or experience will make for the ideal candidate. Instead, you are looking for talents that cannot be taught.

They thrive on personal interactions with their communities. They are passionate about solving problems. They are warm and approachable and love to teach others how things work.

These are 21 customer service skills every support professional should strive to improve upon and that every leader should be looking for when forming new teams.

1. Problem-solving skills

Sometimes customers don't know how to diagnose their problems correctly. It's often up to the support representative to try to replicate the problem before finding a solution. This means that they must see beyond the problem and identify the customer’s desired solution.

Good customer service interactions will anticipate this need. They may even go the extra mile and manually reset the login details and provide new login information while also educating the customer about how they can do it themselves in the future.

Other times, a problem-solving professional may give preemptive advice or offer a solution that the customer didn't know was possible.

2. Patience

Customer service professionals must be patient. Customers who call customer service are often confused or frustrated. Customers will feel more comfortable if they are listened to and treated with patience.

It is not enough to end customer interactions as fast as possible. Your team needs to take the time and listen to each customer to understand their problems and needs fully.

3. Attentiveness

It is essential to listen to your customers to provide great customer service. It's important to pay attention to customers' experiences and listen to all feedback.

Customers may not say it outright but might feel that the software's dashboard isn’t properly laid out. Customers won't say, "Please improve your UX," but may instead say, "I can't find the search function" or "Where is a (specific) function?"

It is important to listen to customers and not only hear them.

4. Emotional intelligence

Great customer service representatives can connect with anyone but are especially adept at helping frustrated customers. They don't take things personally. Instead, they can intuitively see where the other person is coming from and communicate empathy quickly and prioritize.

Consider this: How many times have you felt more at ease about a potential complaint because the other person involved made you feel heard?

Support reps who can show empathy and understanding for frustrated customers, even if they only repeat the problem, can help them soothe (the customer is heard) or actively please (the customer feels validated in their frustration).

5. Clear communication skills

Your customer support team acts as a two-pronged bullhorn and is at the forefront of solving problems for the product.

They will be your company's voice to customers on the one hand. This means that they must be able to translate complex concepts into easily understandable terms.

They will also represent your customers' needs and ideas. Customers don’t need to be given lengthy explanations on how to solve a specific bug.

It is essential to communicate clearly with customers. Miscommunications can lead to frustration and disappointment. Customer service professionals who are the best know how to communicate clearly with customers without any doubts.

6. Writing skills

Writing is about getting as close as possible to reality. A good writer is a skill that customers need to know.

Writing requires an ability to communicate nuance and is not like face-to-face or voice-to-voice interactions. The way a sentence is written can make the difference between sounding a little jaded ("You need to log out first.") or sounding like someone cares ("Logging out should solve that problem quickly.”)

Writing well is also a skill that requires the use of complete sentences and correct grammar. These qualities are subtle signs that your company is secure and trustworthy.

Even if you offer support over the phone, it is still vital to have writing skills. They will enable your team to create coherent internal documentation, and they show that you are a person who communicates clearly.

7. Creativity and resourcefulness

It is great to solve the problem, but it is more fun to find creative and entertaining ways to make the problem disappear and want to do this in the first instance.

You need panache to inject warmth and personality into a typical customer service conversation. Finding a customer service representative with that natural enthusiasm will elevate your customer service from "good enough" territory to "tell all your friends about it" territory.

8. Persuasion skills

Support teams often get messages from people looking to purchase your product, even though they aren't seeking support.

These situations call for a team of people skilled at persuasion to convince potential customers that your product is the right choice.

It is not about selling in every email but creating compelling messages that convince potential customers that your product is worth buying.

9. Possibility to use positive language

Customer service is about being able to adapt your communication style to improve customer service. This is a great way to create happy customers.

Language is an essential part of persuasive speech. Customers and others form impressions about your company and you based on what language you use.

For example, a customer who contacts you about a product but the product is back-ordered.

Positive language when answering customer questions can make a big difference in how they hear the answer.

• Without positive language: "I cannot get you that product until next year; it is back-ordered and not available at this time."
• With positive language: "This product will be available next month. I can place your order now and make sure it gets to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse.

Although the first example isn’t necessarily harmful, the tone it conveys could be misinterpreted by customers. This is especially true in email support, where the perceptions of written language can lead to negative.

The second example, however, is the opposite. It states the same thing (the item cannot be shipped), but it focuses more on the positive than the negative.

10. Knowledge about the product

Customer service professionals who are the best have deep knowledge about how products work. They won't assist customers with problems if they don't know the product inside and out.

For example, all new Help Scout employees are trained in customer service during their first week or second week of employment. It's an important component of the employee onboarding process.

Elyse Roach of Help Scout says that having a solid product foundation will not only guarantee that you have the best tools to help customers navigate the most difficult situations but also allows you to gain a better understanding of their experiences so you can be their strongest advocate.

11. Acting skills

Sometimes, your team will come across people you won't be able to make happy.

Sometimes, situations outside your control (such as a customer having a bad day) can creep into your support routine.

To be a great customer service professional, you need to have basic acting skills to keep your cheerful persona despite dealing with people who may be grumpy.

12. Time management skills

It's a good idea to be patient and take the time to get to know your customers. However, each customer has a time limit, so your team must be focused on getting them what they want.

Customer service professionals who are the best at what they do are quick to identify when they cannot help a customer and refer that customer to someone who can assist.

13. Ability to read customers

Your team must be familiar with the basic principles of behavioral psychology to understand customers' emotional states.

14. Unflappability

This type of personality can be described in many ways, including "keeps their cool" or "staying cool under pressure.” Still, they all represent the same thing: The ability to keep calm and influence others when things get hectic.

Customer service representatives who are the best know that customers can get heated, and they don't have to lose their cool. Their job is to "rock" customers who feel the world is crumbling because of their current problems.

15. Focus on the goal

Customer service professionals have proven that giving employees the power to impress customers does not always result in the results businesses want. This is because employees are left without goals. Business goals and customer happiness can go hand in hand without resulting from poor service.

Businesses can use frameworks such as the Net Promoter Score to help them create guidelines for employees. These guidelines allow for a lot of flexibility in dealing with customers on a case-by-case basis but leave them with priority solutions and "go-to" fixes for common problems.

16. Capability to deal with surprises

Customers can throw curveballs at your team. Customers will make requests that aren't covered by your company's guidelines, or they'll react in ways that no one could have predicted.

It's important to have people who can think for themselves in these situations. It's even better to find people who are willing to take the initiative and create guidelines that everyone can use in these situations.

17. Tenacity

It doesn't matter what you call it, but a strong work ethic and the willingness to take risks are key to providing the type of service people love.

One employee refused to follow the normal process of helping others. These are some of the most memorable customer service stories.

18. Closing capacity

Customer service professionals must close the conversation with customers with customer satisfaction or as close as possible.

Customers don't want to be booted before they have resolved all their issues. Make sure that your team is aware of this and takes the time to verify with customers that every problem has been resolved.

19. Empathy

Empathy, the ability to understand and feel the feelings of others, is perhaps more of a personality trait than a skill. We'd be remiss if we didn't include empathy since it can be learned and improved upon.

If your company tests job applicants for customer service ability, it'd be difficult to find a more important skill than empathy.

Even if you don't know what the customer wants, showing concern, empathy, and understanding can go a long way in helping them. A support representative often can empathize and create a message that guides things towards a better outcome that makes all the difference.

20. Methodical approaches

Haste is a waste in customer service. Your customers will appreciate your ability to hire thoughtful, detail-oriented employees.

They'll make sure they get to the root of the problem before resolving it.

They'll proofread it. If a response is poorly written, it can lose much of its problem-solving power.

It means that they will follow up on customers. Nothing is more impressive than receiving a note from customer service saying, "Hello! Did you notice that bug I mentioned we were investigating? We fixed it." You've won a lifetime customer.

Important side note: Only the best hires can keep their methodical grace under constant fire.

Because support staff are often responsible for cleaning up other people’s mess, they must know how not to get overwhelmed by the frustrations and anger of customers. They know how to maintain a cool head while guiding customers with a steady hand.

21. Willingness and willingness to learn

This is the most basic skill on the list, but it's also the most important. Willingness to learn is the foundation for customer service professionals' growth.

Your team members must be willing to get to know your product, learn how to communicate well (and know when they are communicating poorly), and learn when it is appropriate to follow a process and when it is more appropriate for them to take their own paths.

People who aren't willing to learn and invest in themselves will be left behind by those who want to improve their work -- building products, marketing businesses, or helping customers.