Skills to Look For in Your Customer Service Representatives

When you are looking for someone to handle your customer support for you, you should ideally be looking for someone that has a certain skill set that would make them ideal for customer support and the like. However, it is important that you know what these skills are in the first place.

Here are some skills that you should be looking for in the people you are thinking of hiring for your customer support team, bear in mind that it is recommended that you supplement this team with a customer service software such as the one offered by Kayako!

Even-Tempered

Handling customer complaints on a regular basis is the sort of thing that can make it very difficult indeed for people to stay calm at all times, especially if the person in question generally has a short temper.

This is why you need to hire people that have an even temperament, people that would be able to take things in stride and focus on the task at hand rather than responding to irate customers in kind.

Comprehension

You would be surprised at just how many people might end up getting seriously confused when a customer is talking. This is because of the fact that we often have difficulty understanding accents that are very different from our own, and often the customers are genuinely being incoherent so it’s often not even the CSRs fault for not being able to understand what is being said at a particular point in time.

However, if you hire people that have naturally good comprehension skills, you are going to find that things are going to end up going a lot better for you in the long run since these CSRs are naturally going to be able to perform better.

Diction

Your CSRs need more than just good comprehension skills, they need to speak in such a way that customers are able to easily understand them as well. The fact of the matter is that diction is a skill that often ends up getting overlooked because of the fact that people don’t realize how important it is.

Find someone that enunciates perfectly, just so that you can be sure that there are absolutely no misunderstandings between them and the customers that are phoning in.

Acting Skills

Dealing with customers can be emotionally exhausting, and the fact of the matter is that on some days everyone wakes up not wanting to have to talk to anyone. However, a CSR is always going to have to maintain good composure, so the CSRs that you end up hiring are going to have to be rather good actors since this will help them at the very least put on a brave face and get the job done.

If they can’t legitimately care about what the customer has to say, they should at the very least be willing to act like they do, and this means they need to be good at acting.

Empathy Skills

Someone with good empathy skills is always going to end up taking the plight of the customers that are phoning as seriously as possible. This is because of the fact that they would be able to relate to what the customers are complaining about, at least on some level and to a certain extent.

Hire someone with good empathy skills and you can rest assured that everything is going to end up going well for you in the long run since you are never going to have to worry about whether or not your CSRs are taking customer complaints seriously.

Improvisation Skills

Not everything is going to go according to the script. Life just isn’t like that, and by that logic neither is customer service! You need to find someone that knows how to think on their feet, and when they are put on the spot they will be able to rise to the occasion and figure out what would be the best thing to say at that point in time.

This is perhaps the most important skill that your future CSRs can have!