Find out the top 10 core skills you need to master as a customer care professional and what hard skills you need to know to succeed in this job.

A Customer Care Professional links an organization to its customers by handling customer's inquiries and providing support. He/she provides answers to the client's questions and resolves their problems either in person, via the phone or email while giving them excellent customer service.

Other duties include giving customers information about the products and/or services, maintaining high levels of customer service, handling issues efficiently and swiftly for the smooth running of the business, answering incoming calls and making outbound calls, identify the needs of the caller and route calls to the relevant parties, document call information, effectively gather information from clients and provide reassurance and effectively deal with challenging clients to understand their issues and provide appropriate solutions.

Core Skills Required to be a Customer Care Professional

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 professional should master the following 10 core skills to fulfill her job properly.

Teamwork Skills:

Teamwork is the process of collaboratively working with a group of people with an aim to achieve a set goal within a business ensuring that the staff and management cooperate using their skills and provide constructive feedback.

A Customer Care Professional needs to exercise effectiveness and understanding in creating teamwork using the right techniques in an environment of trust and cooperation with the aim of increasing productivity, higher morale, and a fulfilled workforce.

Public Speaking:

Public Speaking though closely related to presenting differs in that it is the process of performing a speech before a live audience with the purpose of informing, persuading or entertaining.

A Customer Care Professional must be equipped with good public speaking skills to be able to address an audience through presentations or talks to drive the point home and create a reputable record.

Strategic Planning:

Strategic Planning is organizational management activity that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations while guaranteeing that employees and other stakeholders are working towards common goals.

A Customer Care Professional should be liable to develop the systematic tools to be used in the organization's processes that coordinate and align resources and actions with the mission, vision, and strategy throughout the organization.

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 Care Professional 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.

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 Professional 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.

Self Confidence:

Self Confidence is the ability to know who you are and what you are capable of doing which shows in your behavior, your body language, how you speak, etc.

A Customer Care Professional must be confident enough to inspire confidence in others while encouraging them to handle daily tasks and their personal lives with self-confidence that will, in turn, produce a well-rounded individual.

Attention to Detail:

Attention to Detail is the capacity to achieve a thoroughness and accuracy when accomplishing a task.

A Customer Care Professional needs to have this prime characteristic and utilize it in a high performing organization that allows both the customers and staff to understand the need to be keen to all the details required to avoid massive costs for overlooked details that are common in the workplace.

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 Professional 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 Professional 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.

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 Professional 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.

Hard Skills Required to be a Customer Care Professional

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 professional should have a good command of the following hard skills to succeed in her job.

Customer Care Professional: Hard skills list

Accounting
Acting
Analysis
Basic Performance
Bookkeeping
Budgeting
Business Correspondence (compose business correspondence)
Communication
Computers and Electronics
Customer Psychology
CS Apps
Data Entry
Documentation
Email
English Language
Freshdesk
Human Psychology
Interpersonal
Interview Customers
Investigating (investigate and resolve customer problems)
Market Knowledge
Mathematical Principles
MS Access
MS Word or Spreadsheet
MS Outlook
Phone
Product knowledge
QuickBooks
Recording
Research
Resolving Conflict
Salesforce
Schedule Appointments
Sales
Sales Contracts (understand sales contracts)
Servidata
Software System
Team Support
Technology
Technical
Tech Savvy
Telephone calls
Telephone log
Telephone Etiquette
Time Management
Typing
Writing
Zendesk

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