10 Customer Service Skills That Are Key to Customer Retention
10 Customer Service Skills That Are Key to Customer Retention
Emily Rivers
Marketing & Product
Jun 27, 2024
5m
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TL;DR: Customer service skills are essential for retaining customers and fostering loyalty. These skills include both hard skills (technical knowledge) and soft skills (interpersonal abilities). Improving these skills in your team can enhance customer satisfaction, efficiency, and brand reputation. Key skills include empathy, active listening, problem-solving, time management, a positive mindset, clear communication, and more. Investing in training and development for these skills benefits both customers and the overall effectiveness of your team. Integrating these essential skills into your customer service strategy will help deliver excellent service and increase customer retention.
What are customer service skills?
Customer service skills are the abilities and attributes that enable your customer service team to interact effectively with customers, ensuring their needs and concerns are addressed efficiently and to a high standard.
These skills encompass a wide range of competencies, from technical knowledge and problem-solving abilities (often referred to as hard skills) to interpersonal skills like empathy and active listening (often called soft skills). Your customer service agents must have great customer service skills to ensure that you continually improve your customer satisfaction scores.
Why is it important for your team to improve customer service skills?
Improving customer service skills within your team is crucial for several reasons:
It directly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty. When customers feel valued and well taken care of, they are more likely to return and recommend your business to others. They're also more likely to take part in your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program to help you develop your product.
Strong customer service skills can lead to increased efficiency in handling customer queries and resolving issues, saving time and resources. If their queries are solved quickly, customers are more likely to give you a low customer effort score (CES), indicating that they don't have to put much effort into interacting with your brand.
If your support team gives great service, it can significantly enhance your brand reputation. You'll get better customer feedback and they're more likely to tell others about their experience, giving you a competitive edge in the market.
Top customer service skills for gaining satisfied customers
1. Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. In customer service, it means being able to see the customer's perspective to grasp their emotions and concerns. By showing empathy, you create a connection with customers, making them feel valued and understood. This can turn a negative experience into a positive one and build long-lasting loyalty.
2. Active listening
Active listening involves paying full attention to the speaker, understanding their message, responding thoughtfully, and remembering the information. This skill ensures that customers feel heard and that you have taken a genuine interest in ensuring their issues are accurately addressed. It prevents misunderstandings and shows customers that their concerns are taken seriously.
3. Problem solving
Customers reach out for support to find solutions. Effective problem-solving skills allow service representatives to identify the root cause of an issue and resolve it swiftly. This not only satisfies the customer but also enhances the overall efficiency of the service process.
Plus, a team member might find an issue that they need the product team to help solve - and that's where a feedback tool like Productlane can be useful. Your support agents can record their calls and link notes to Linear issues and projects to give engineers what they need.
4. Time management
Proper time management is a key component of customer service to handle multiple inquiries and resolve issues promptly, ensuring that customer service quality stays high. Good time management skills ensure that representatives can prioritize tasks, avoid unnecessary delays, and deliver timely responses, leading to higher customer satisfaction - and ultimately higher retention, as customers know their issues will be resolved quickly.
5. Positive mindset
Maintaining a positive attitude, even in challenging situations, can significantly impact customer interactions. A positive mindset helps customer service agents stay motivated, handle stress, and create a pleasant customer experience. It can turn a potentially frustrating encounter into a memorable and uplifting one.
Plus, using positive language can help turn unhappy customers into happy ones. It's hard to stay mad at someone if they have a positive attitude, are demonstrating their problem-solving skills, and are dealing with your issue quickly.
6. Clear communication skills
Clear and effective communication skills are crucial in conveying information accurately and ensuring mutual understanding during customer interactions. This includes both verbal and written communication. If your customer service reps communicate clearly, it helps prevent misunderstandings and ensures that customers receive the correct information and instructions.
7. Genuine concern
Linked to empathy, showing genuine concern means truly caring about the customer’s problems and working diligently to resolve them. This authenticity builds trust and strengthens the relationship between the customer and the brand. Customers can often tell when a customer service representative is sincerely trying to help versus just going through the motions.
Ongoing training on industry knowledge and soft skills will help your support team understand the problems customers may face, which will help them show real concern.
8. Resilience
Resilience is the ability to recover quickly from difficulties. In customer service, representatives often face challenging and sometimes stressful situations. Most support teams will be able to tell a story of when they were faced with an irate customer and how it affected their own emotions. Being resilient helps them stay calm, composed, and focused, enabling them to handle difficult customers and complex problems effectively.
But resilience isn't something you can learn easily. If a customer service representative is struggling with resilience, they may need specialized training to help them build up this crucial soft skill.
9. Negotiation
Negotiation skills are essential for finding mutually beneficial solutions when conflicts or disputes arise among customers. This involves understanding the customer's needs, being flexible, and finding a compromise that satisfies both parties involved. Effective negotiation can turn a potentially negative situation into a positive one.
10. Patience
Patience is a critical virtue in providing excellent customer service. Dealing with frustrated or confused customers requires a calm and composed approach. Patience helps in understanding the customer's issue thoroughly and providing thoughtful, effective solutions without rushing, ensuring a positive customer experience.
Incorporating these skills into your customer service strategy will empower your team to deliver great customer service, which will keep customers happy and increase their brand loyalty. Investing in training and development for these skills not only benefits your customers but also enhances the overall effectiveness and morale of your team.
The key to developing good customer service skills is having a diverse set of customer service professionals who each have their own skills and can help other team members flourish in areas where they need to improve.
FAQs on customer service skills
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