Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a customer service agent and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.
A customer service agent is given the primary responsibility of acting as a liaison link between the company's clients and the company itself. He or she will get to assist with various issues such as; complaints, orders, accounts queries, billing, and cancellation. He or she will ensure that the clients are satisfied at all times.
Other duties that he or she will handle are; cancelling or upgrading user accounts, updating customer details, placing or cancelling clients orders, sell company products and services, advise on relevant company information, resolve clients issues either via mail, calls and texts, inform clients of any new changes or promotions and maintaining service report.
Core Skills Required to be a Customer Service Agent
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 service agent 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 Service Agent 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.
Planning and Scheduling:
Planning and Scheduling are the act of establishing a plan for a set of tasks that needs to be completed and including when they should be done.
A Customer Service Agent needs creativity in balancing both planning and scheduling by clearing defining what and how activities will be carried out by when and who in particular to ensure there are a clear flow and accountability to every staff.
Dependability:
Dependability is the characteristic of being able to be counted on and relied upon by providing services that be trusted within a period.
A Customer Service Agent needs to be dependable and hire reliable employees who can be counted on as consistent and beneficial to the business, building their niche as an essential element of the larger team without worrying about bringing less than your efforts.
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 Service Agent 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.
Monitoring Others:
Monitoring others is tracking employee activities monitor the worker engagement with the workplace-related tasks.
A Customer Service Agent should always monitor his workers to measure productivity, track attendance, incoming and outgoing phone calls, safety spying, employee theft, employee's location, horseplay and collect proof of hours worked using the latest computer detective monitoring system that provides accurate data that cannot be debated.
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 Service Agent 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 Service Agent 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 Service Agent 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 Service Agent 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.
Product Knowledge:
Product Knowledge is an essential sales skill to understand the features of your product allowing you to present the benefits compellingly and accurately to the customer.
A Customer Service Agent should ensure the teams understand the company's goods or services and can quickly take a client through them, therefore, instilling faith, trust and respect in the customers which in turn creates a positive customer experience.
Hard Skills Required to be a Customer Service Agent
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 service agent should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.