Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a customer care representative and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A customer care representative has the primary role of providing exemplary customer service to the clients of the organization. He/she interacts with the clients on the company's behalf and gives them a hassle free experience at the organization by providing exemplary service, answering their questions and diffusing frustrating situations.
Other associated duties include building trust with the customers, answering customer's questions on various complex matters related to the organization, assisting clients to solve their problems, providing information about the products and/or services provided by the company, taking orders, responding to the complaints of the customers, recording and updating the information of customers and following up with clients.
Core Skills Required to be a Customer Care Representative
Core skills describe a set of non-technical abilities, knowledge, and understanding that form the basis for successful participation in the workplace. Core skills enable employees to efficiently and professionally navigate the world of work and interact with others, as well as adapt and think critically to solve problems.
Core skills are often tagged onto job descriptions to find or attract employees with specific essential core values that enable the company to remain competitive, build relationships, and improve productivity.
A customer care representative should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.
Delegation:
Delegation is assigning responsibility or authority to another person a junior or subordinate to carry out specific activities while remaining accountable for the outcome.
A Customer Care Representative must be equipped with skills on how to make the delegation work correctly to save the organization time and money and to allow the subordinate make wise decisions, skills, and motivation to become better and grow the company.
Enthusiasm:
Enthusiasm is an intense enjoyment or a lively interest in a certain thing with a zest and a strong belief that can be felt by those around you.
A Customer Care Representative ought to be enthusiastic as well as create a friendly atmosphere that makes the staff comfortable with the surroundings, with the other employees to create a less passive working place.
Personal Drive:
Personal Drive is a combination of desire and energy in its simplest form directed at achieving a goal in whatever you have set your heart to accomplish.
A Customer Care Representative needs to creatively design ways that drive the staff to carry out their work without wasting time by helping them understand and develop their self-motivation skills that assist them to take control of many different viewpoints of their life.
Using Common Sense:
Using Common Sense is the ability to see what is missing in a situation or a project and supplying it without necessarily being assigned or asked to do it.
A Customer Care Representative needs to creatively train his employees always to see the missing element that is typically crucial in any workplace or project and take the opportunity to do business out of it.
Long Range Planning:
Long Range Planning is setting long-term goals and objectives for your business or project to ensure its growth and sustainability is reached by all the employees.
A Customer Care Representative needs creativity in defining long-term goals that ought to be proactive, putting together a full employee focused management strategy that analyzes the major initiatives and translates them into functional goals that employees handle.
Organizational Skills:
Organizational Skills is the ability to make use of time, energy and resources available in the most efficient manner to achieve their goal.
A Customer Care Representative should organize the work for the employees to ensure overall organization, planning, time management, scheduling, coordinating resources and meeting deadlines is handled most efficiently by each employee for both personal and professional growth.
Quality of Work:
The quality of Work is the value of work or products produced by the employees as well as the work environment they are provided with.
A Customer Care Representative needs creativity in assisting all teams in identifying characteristics that will result in a quality product and lead to greater efficiency and increased productivity by following the four critical outcomes of employee retention, customer satisfaction, profitability, and productivity.
Customer Service:
Customer Service is the ability to cater for the needs of the client by providing excellent customer service without compromise.
A Customer Care Representative must understand that pleasing customers is directly connected to the success of the business, therefore, must create a superior customer experience culture in the company that every employee should follow in ensuring all the customers are treated as they should.
Computer Skills:
Computer Skills are the necessary computer working skills that each employee need to have while seeking to get admitted into the professional world.
A Customer Care Representative ought to be technologically oriented and hire employees with strong computer skills because they fare better in the job market than their tech-challenged counterparts bringing a high level of quality employees in the job seeking category.
Technical Skills:
Technical Skills are the abilities and knowledge mostly related to mechanical, IT, scientific and mathematical needed to perform specific tasks in the workplace.
A Customer Care Representative ought to hire employees with particular talents and expertise that helps them perform certain duties and jobs that other skills like soft skills cannot perform to grow both the business and the employee and bring in productivity.
Hard Skills Required to be a Customer Care Representative
Hard skills are job-specific skill sets, or expertise, that are teachable and whose presence can be tested through exams. While core skills are more difficult to quantify and less tangible, hard skills are quantifiable and more defined.
Hard skills are usually listed on an applicant's resume to help recruiters know the applicant's qualifications for the applied position. A recruiter, therefore, needs to review the applicant's resume and education to find out if he/she has the knowledge necessary to get the job done.
A customer care representative should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.