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5 Customer Service Skills that Drive Every Business - PATLive - ContactCenterWorld.com Blog

5 Customer Service Skills that Drive Every Business

Customer service departments don’t just exist to address issues after they’ve already happened; they’re meant to be proactive parts of your overall business strategy.

The level of competition in almost every field is so high that customer service has become a key decision making factor for most buyers today. 96% of consumers, for example, stated that customer service is an influential factor in their choice of brands, and 93% are more likely to make repeat purchases with customers who have strong customer service.

According to Salesforce, 88% of high-performing service decision makers are making significant investments in agent training, versus only 57% of decision makers with low-performing service. There are certain customer service skills that are particularly valuable when it comes to driving your business forward, helping you to attract and retain clients both immediately and long-term while improving your overall brand reputation. So let’s take a close look at the five most important skills you need your staff to develop.

1. Empathy 

Imagine that you’re calling the customer support line of your credit card company, frustrated beyond belief because your purchase of an online Lowes gift certificate was flagged as suspicious and your account was locked. You need that credit card, which you’ve just opened to buy all your new furniture for your first house, but now it’s temporarily frozen.

Do you want someone on the other end of the line who is cold, clinical, and maybe apologizes but only keeps repeating company policies back to you? Of course not. This is a stress-inducing, blood-pressure-raising incident that could bring on a breakdown even for people who aren’t in the middle of buying a home or moving, so the only thing that might make you feel better is someone who genuinely apologizes, expresses that they’re stressed for you, and conveys that they have a quick solution.

Empathy is such a crucial skill for strong customer service agents, that it’s one that can impact your business’ success moving forward. It allows your team members to really connect with your customers and is a core component in how your clients view your brand. 

2. Personalized Problem Solving 

Let’s go back to the example above. Do you want to just be told “Sorry, that’s policy, good luck,” or do you want the agent you’re working with to actually try to find you a solution that works for you? 

Personalized problem solving is an insanely valuable skill set that all good customer service agents should have if you want to drive your business forward. They’ll be able to deliver true customer service excellence in a way no other competitor can, because you’ve given them the training and the ability to reasonably take matters into their own hands.

In order to enable your team to deliver personalized problem solving, give them guidelines they can work within to help their customers, and while you can offer suggestions for how to handle specific circumstances, let them know when they can go off-script. 

3. Active Listening 

Plenty of people listen half-heartedly, thinking about what they’ll say next instead of really concentrating to what the other person is saying.

Active listening, on the other hand, is all about paying careful attention to what the other person is saying and letting them know that you’re doing so. It’s no surprise that this is a huge skill your customer service team should possess if you want them to be a standout part of your business.

Active listening will not only increase the likelihood that they retain what the customers are saying, but also that the customer will feel heard and understood.

A few ways to practice active listening over the phone include:

  • Not interrupting the caller
  • Asking clarifying questions at the appropriate time to show that you’re listening and want to understand
  • Offering short “I see” and “ok” statements to show that you are engaged in the conversation
  • Summarizing the client’s main points to ensure you’re on the same page and show that you were paying attention

4. Knowledge of Your Customers 

When your customers call your customer support numbers, they don’t want to have to do a ton of explaining or state the same thing over and over to different agents. Instead, they want you to have a basic idea of who they are, their past purchases, and their past experiences with you. If this is the fourth time they’ve called you because you’ve frozen their account, they expect that you’ll have some of this history down in your notes somewhere.

Understand your customers as a whole. In general, who are they and what motivates them? What are their pain points and what solution does your company’s product or service offer them? Someone who is using your online portal because they’re stressed and overwhelmed for time, for example, is going to be frustrated beyond belief if they have to keep calling because there was a glitch that caused them to lose half an hour of work.

Your customer service team - and any agencies that you hire to take on calls, like PATLive - should have access to your CRM (customer relationship management) software, allowing them to quickly get up to speed on the individual customer at the start of each call.

5. Knowledge of Your Product 

You don’t just need knowledge of your customers in order to deliver great customer service; you also need to know a great deal about your product or service. Plenty of people will call customer service with questions, concerns, or complaints. If the representative isn’t familiar with company policies, available services, or how to use or care for different products, they won’t be able to best serve the client they’re working with.

Imagine, for example, you’re running a bakery. Someone calls to ask about your cupcakes, and they want to know if they’re certified as gluten-free because they’re allergic. Your customer service rep says, “Yes, they’re definitely gluten-free”, but in reality, they’re only made without gluten ingredients but are prepared in an area with a high likelihood of cross-contamination. They can’t be certified gluten-free because of this, and a customer service rep who hasn’t been trained to know the difference could cause someone to become very sick, which could lead to a legal liability. 

Make sure your staff and any answering service agency working for you have a deep dive in knowledge about your products, service, and brand. This will go a long way. 


Great customer service can be a powerful differentiator that helps your business stand out, even in the face of fierce competition. In order to deliver great customer service, however, your team needs to be more than just friendly; they need to come equipped with an effective and versatile skill set allowing them to best serve your clients across the board. 

When it comes to customer service, we pride ourselves on training and nurturing these soft skills. In a note from our CEO, Austin Davidson, during Customer Service Week 2019, he noted, “As we all know, answering the call is about a lot more than just ‘being on the phone’. It’s about being on point – being friendly, professional, and engaging with every single caller. That’s hard to do… But day in and day out, what I see, is a team of agents doing an amazing job.”

Ensure that your customer support staff is fully trained in each of these five key skills and you’ll start to see the benefits of a proactive customer service process in no time at all. 

Source: https://www.patlive.com/blog/5-customer-service-skills/

Publish Date: November 12, 2019


2024 Buyers Guide Analytics

 
1.) 
Alvaria

Noble IQ
Turn business insights into actionable intelligence. Noble’s IQsolutions provide you with rich and robust customer data that can transform your business. Automate decision making and campaign management and refine the quality of interactions with precision and efficiency. We have developed proprietary and patented tools to help you make sense of data on your current operations and then help you make strategic decisions to improve performance and efficiency. Identify who your best customers and prospects are and the ideal methods to reach them. Understand what types of campaigns work best for your business and how to optimize underperforming campaigns. And nake real-time decisions rather than looking back to see what went wrong.

2.) 
BPA Quality

Call Center Quality Monitoring
Outsourced call center quality solutions including Multi-lingual, Multi-Channel Quality Monitoring, Call Center Consulting, Psychometrics & Analysis of Customer-Agent Interactions, Cloud-based Quality Analysis Software configured by Needs, Virtual & In-person Training, Speech Analytics & Speech Analytics Management.

3.) 
Daisee

Daisee
Daisee builds technology that empowers people to solve problems by making interactions simple and smart so they can have a more significant impact, be more productive and be better at what they do. We believe incremental improvements carry huge potency and provide exponentially greater change for the better.

Genesys customers can now automate risk and quality management using Daisee’s speech and sentiment analytics and remediation workflow software. Daisee helps improve customer experience, ensure regulatory compliance, identify missed commercial opportunities & training requirements as well as provide valuable insights back to the business directly from the frontline – the true voice-of-...
(read more)

4.) 
DialogTech

DialogAnalytics™
Powered by AI, DialogTech’s DialogAnalytics analyzes conversations to provide marketing and sales teams a wealth of insights for smarter optimizations. With the power of conversation intelligence, you can learn which channels, ads, keywords, and webpages drive the best sales calls, if the caller converted, and more.

AI analyzes how calls are handled at locations and call centers to detect issues that negatively impact ROI. See what percentage of calls go unanswered and who is best (and worst) at converting callers to appointments and customers. Get email alerts when phone leads are mishandled at locations so those leads can be called back right away.

With DialogAnalytics, you can get a...
(read more)

5.) 
eGain Corporation

eGain Analytics
eGain Analytics makes it easy to measure, analyze and refine your contact center operations, knowledge and web customer experience. Create informative reports, charts and dashboards effortlessly. Slice-&-dice the data in any number of ways and use it to manage the business effectively.

6.) 
Pointel

CXi - Customer Experience Insights
Pointel CXi, the IVR analytics platform, maps the entire customer journey and analyzes calls end-to-end to turn data into actionable insights. Centralized reporting is essential for seamless customer journeys, as it is critical to know where calls are transferred or abandoned.

CXi generates multiple reports on IVR performance, the Customer-IVR interactions, and sticking points in the IVR that cause customers to struggle. CXi’s IVR Analytics platform provides a comprehensive understanding of customer engagement.

Pointel Customer Experience Insights (CXi) delivers actionable information that enables businesses to reduce customer effort, operational costs and increase contact center effi...
(read more)

7.) 
PRILINK

SIP-Trunk Demarc Monitor
Analyzes SIP signalling and RTP audio stream of every call passing through the network demarcation point. Provide a real time 24/7/365 network baseline database that contains the IP bandwidth, call traffic of up to 128 voice groups, Call Detail Record (CDR), call blockage and MOS voice quality. All information are displayed in SIP-Trunk dashboards and are used in many applications, such as Telco collaboration, UC/CC analytics, Work Force Optimization (WFO) and caller identification.

8.) 
Vads

Social Media Analytics
Social media analytics is the practice of gathering data from blogs and social media websites and analyzing that data to make business decisions.

Typical objectives of Social Media include increasing revenues, reducing customer service costs, getting feedback on products and services and improving public opinion of a particular product or business division.

Key the activities involved:

Analyzing net sentiment score
Qualitative and quantitative of sentiment analysis
Measure the emotions (6 Emotions) of the consumers
Mapping out all potential advocates
Measuring a nationwide consumer sentiment
Unlimited data extraction & cleaning
Customized positive and negative keywords
Qualitative and quantitative insights & report writing
Measuring the consumer sentiment

9.) 
QPC Ltd.

QPC Live
QPC provides realtime unstructured and structured data analytics solutions and services to contact centres globally.
We provide a complete end-to-end customer integrated offering powered by a Multichannel Intelligence Gateway which collects and inter-relates all customer interactions, from each and every customer contact across an entire contact centre ecosystem, all in real-time.
We also provide solutions for conversational and interaction analytics with solutions from our specialist portfolio.

10.) 
Tethr

Tethr is a cloud-based conversation intelligence platform that combines AI, machine learning and over a decade of customer experience and sales best-practice research to surface contextual insights from phone calls, chats, emails and other customer interactions. Companies use Tethr to turn large amounts of unstructured voice of customer conversation data into insights they can deploy to improve their customer experience.

11.) 
Trillys Systems

ActuCall
Imagine for a moment that you are a call center manager responsible for generating revenue through signing new customers or up-selling to existing ones. Imagine that your KPI is telling you you have an abandonment rate of 5% and someone comes along and says "No, your abandonment rate or dropped call rate is 13%." .." How do I know? AcutuCall VoIP software application can show you the dropped call data including, originating number and whether it was a network or equipment failure." Now imagine you can see your calls in progress on a mobile app, take your dashboard where ever you go! "What is a lost call worth to you?"

12.) 
VOIPFUTURE GmbH.

Voipfuture Qrystal
Qrystal provides communication service providers, wholesalers, enterprises, call centers and cloud-based voice providers with unique, dual visibility monitoring capabilities for analysing both SIP and RTP packets.

Unlike other solutions, Qrystal provides visibility into both control and media plane. This way, you get the full picture of in-call user experience, all in one place.

Voipfuture’s patented technology automatically identifies typical impairment patterns, allowing you to reduce the time it takes to fix problems.

13.) 
Xdroid

Xdroid is an independent, privately-owned software development company. This enables us to respond to changes quickly.

Our Artificial Intelligence solution, based on deep expertise, reveals the truth about your customer interactions and will help you to communicate better.

Analytics knowledge is the backbone of our development team. Years of experience in developing high-tech software for contact centers of financial institutions, utility companies, telecom operators, etc., give us an incredible edge.

We help you to predict and anticipate in an uncertain and turbulent environment. Communicate better.
 



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