For any business to succeed, it must have exceptional customer service from its employees. Majority of businesses especially here in Kenya fail because its owners and employees fail to recognize the importance of offering quality customer service to clients.
Here are some exceptional customer service skills that every employee needs:
1. Patience
Patience is the leading customer service skill that each employee should have without which a company’s sales is bound to drastically decline.
As an employee, if you lack patience, you will find it hard to serve clients and end up loosing them.
If you deal with customers on a daily basis, be sure to stay patient when they come to you stumped and frustrated, but also be sure to take the time to truly figure out what they want — they’d rather get competent service than be rushed out the door!
2. Attentiveness
Attentiveness is the ability to really listen to customers. This skill is so crucial for providing great service for a number of reasons;
Not only is it important to pay attention to individual customer interactions (watching the language/terms that they use to describe their problems), but it’s also important to be mindful and attentive to the feedback that you receive at large.
For instance, customers may not be saying it outright, but perhaps there is a pervasive feeling that your software’s dashboard isn’t laid out correctly. Customers aren’t likely to say, “Please improve your UX!”, but they may say things like, “I can never find the search feature,” or, “Where is the _____ function at again?”
3. Clear Communication Skills
Make sure you’re getting to the problem at hand quickly; customers don’t need your life story or to hear about how your day is going.
More importantly, you need to be cautious about how some of your communication habits translate to customers, and it’s best to err on the side of caution whenever you find yourself questioning a situation.
An example:Â I recently bought a pair of heels from a certain boutique in town, on inquiring if I could return the shoes if they had any problem, the sales person gladly assured me i could return it within two weeks after it’s bought.
Unfortunately, two days later the heel of one shoe broke. On taking the shoes back expecting it to be fixed for free or exchange the pair for another, the same sales person declined saying they couldn’t do that for free since there was no warranty on shoes bought!
I left that shop and swore never to buy anything from that shop again.
When it comes to important points that you need to relay clearly to customers, keep it simple and leave nothing to doubt.
4. Knowledge of the Product
The best forward-facing employees in your company will work on having a deep knowledge of how your product works.
It’s not that every single team member should be able to build your product from scratch, but rather they should know the ins and outs of how your product works, just like a customer who uses it everyday would.
Without knowing your product from front-to-back, you won’t know how to help customers when they run into problems.
5. Ability to Use “Positive Language”
Sounds like fluffy nonsense, but your ability to make minor changes in your conversational patterns can truly go a long way in creating happy customers.
Language is a very important part of persuasion, and people (especially customers) create perceptions about you and your company based off of the language that you use.
Here’s an example:Â Let’s say a customer contacts you with an interest in a particular product, but that product happens to be back-ordered until next month.
Small changes that utilize “positive language” can greatly affect how the customer hears your response…
- Without positive language: “I can’t get you that product until next month; it is back-ordered and unavailable at this time.”
- With positive language: “That product will be available next month. I can place the order for you right now and make sure that it is sent to you as soon as it reaches our warehouse.”
The first example isn’t negative by any means, but the tone that it conveys feels abrupt and impersonal, and can be taken the wrong way by customers.
Conversely, the second example is stating the same thing (the item is unavailable), but instead focuses on when/how the customer will get to their resolution rather than focusing on the negative.
6. Acting Skills
Sometimes you’re going to come across people that you’ll never be able to make happy.
Situations outside of your control (they had a terrible day, or they are just a natural-born complainer) will sometimes creep into your usual support routine, and you’ll be greeted with those “barnacle” customers that seem to want nothing else but to pull you down.
Every great customer service rep will have those basic acting skills necessary to maintain their usual cheery persona in spite of dealing with people who may be just plain grumpy.
7. Time Management Skills
Hey, despite my many research-backed rants on why you should spend more time with customers, the bottom line is that there is a limit, and you need to be concerned with getting customers what they want in an efficient manner.
The trick here is that this should also be applied when realizing when you simply cannot help a customer. If you don’t know the solution to a problem, the best kind of support member will get a customer over to someone who does.
Don’t waste time trying to go above and beyond for a customer in an area where you will just end up wasting both of your time!
8. Ability to “Read” Customers
You won’t always be able to see customers face-to-face, and in many instances (nowadays) you won’t even hear a customer’s voice!
That doesn’t exempt you from understanding some basic principles of behavioral psychology and being able to “read” the customer’s current emotional state.
This is an important part of the personalization process as well, because it takes knowing your customers to create a personal experience for them.
More importantly though, this skill is essential because you don’t want to mis-read a customer and end up losing them due to confusion and miscommunication.
Look and listen for subtle clues about their current mood, patience level, personality, etc., and you’ll go far in keeping your customer interactions positive.
9. A Calming Presence
There’s a lot of metaphors for this type of personality: “keeps their cool,” “staying cool under pressure,” etc., but it all represents the same thing: the ability that some people have to stay calm and even influence others when things get a little hectic.
I’ve had my fair share of hairy hosting situations, and I can tell you in all honesty that the #1 reason I stick with certain hosting companies is due to the ability of their customer support team to keep me from pulling my hair out.
The best customer service representatives know that they cannot let a heated customer force them to lose their cool; in fact it is their job to try to be the “rock” for a customer who thinks the world is falling down due to their current problem.
10. Goal Oriented Focus
This may seem like a strange thing to list as a customer service skill, but I assure you that it is vitally important.
Customer service experts have shown how giving employees unfettered power to “WOW” customers doesn’t always generated the returns that many businesses expect to see.
That’s because it leaves employees without goals, and business goals + customer happiness can work hand-in-hand without resulting in poor service.
  As an employee, learn how to use the above customer service skills to help move the company a notch higher.