Essential Customer Service Skills and Improvement Tips

Having a well-staffed and talented support center is the bedrock of driving customer loyalty. When your team possesses strong customer service skills, particularly the soft skills that lead to relationship development, your brand will benefit from more revenue opportunities over the long term from satisfied customers.

Communication is the core capability every agent should possess. Personal conversations make customers happy, plain and simple. Gladly’s 2022 Customer Expectations Report found that 73% of consumers want to be treated like people, not like another case number.

Managers should be able to work with agents to improve their communication capabilities. Here are the tips and tools that will help you to amplify your team’s customer service skills.

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How to Improve Your Customer Service Skills

When managers focus on improving agents’ communication techniques, customer interactions become more personalized. As a result, customers will feel confident reaching out for help and they will feel more inclined to buy from you again.

Improving customer service skills means focusing on three aspects:

• Empathy
• Adaptability
• Patience

1. How to improve empathy in customer service

Prioritize customer service empathy training that teaches your staff to put themselves in shoppers’ shoes, while also using active listening skills. Paying attention to the personal details a customer shares will show empathy and lead to connection.

Pro tip: Finding a support platform that makes personalization easier gives agents more context in order to have understanding conversations. These investments pay dividends over time when a happy customer base continues to come back for more.

2. How to improve adaptability in customer service

Provide your agents with the ability to be as present and supportive of customers as possible. This means making them feel capable of tackling issues no matter which channel customers reach out on or how much time is needed to handle each request.

Pro tip: No customer wants to feel like they just pulled another ticket number from a deli counter. Conversation-driven support platforms provide better personalization than traditional ticketed ones by allowing agents to track, transfer, and record discussions.

3. How to improve patience in customer service

You can preach patience to your team, but it’s on management to make sure support center staff have the bandwidth and the capability to deal with customer requests, however long they take. This means prioritizing personalized connections with customers over quick time-to-resolution metrics.

Pro tip: Patience isn’t just a virtue, it’s a profit opportunity. Working closely with customers and taking the time to develop relationships through customer service can create upsell and cross-sell opportunities that turn agents into revenue drivers.

Tools to Boost Your Agents’ Customer Service Skills

The soft skills every customer service agent should have can go underutilized if they aren’t amplified by the right support technology. A platform like Gladly comes with features that make empathetic, patient, and adaptable communication possible.

Gladly provides personalization tools that show the entirety of a customer’s details in one simple interface, helping agents check the empathy box with a glimpse into prior conversations. A conversation timeline that transfers communications across channels helps agents adapt quickly when they’re pulled into a conversation. Workforce management tools help managers organize teams so they have the time to patiently serve customers. With these capabilities, the platform elevates service agents into full-fledged Support Heroes.

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