5 Transferable Customer Service Skills and Related Jobs
If you work in customer service, you’ve probably developed the essential customer service skillset many employers look for in new hires. Jobs in most industries require employees to work in fast-paced and interpersonal settings, which means your customer service skills are transferable across plenty of possible career paths. Follow along as we break down the top five transferable skills for customer service agents and the possible careers that use them the most.
Top Transferable Customer Service Skills
Any career has a set of practical qualities considered essential. However, not all careers hone these abilities quite like customer service. Many skills customer service hiring managers look for in candidates are often sought after in other fields as well.
Let’s take a look at some of the top customer service transferable skills that could open the door to a future career.
1. Effective interpersonal communication
Any position requires the ability to communicate effectively. While this is a top skill in any career, not every role trains you to listen and respond accordingly quite like customer service does.
Potential career opportunity: Account management. Account managers are responsible for all communications between a company and their clients, ensuring clients are satisfied and well informed.
Gladly pro tip: Knowing what to say is only half of effective communication. Knowing when to listen, as well as knowing how to actively listen, is an even more valuable skill in many situations.
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2. Emotional intelligence
Understanding and empathizing with a coworker or client is a vital skill as it drives you to find solutions that work for everyone. Customer service allows people to consistently practice empathy. Agents are constantly tasked with reading emotional states and conveying to customers that they care about their issues and concerns. These skills add value to any career.
Potential career opportunity: Human resources. Human resource workers must be capable of diffusing situations, empathizing with coworkers, and building relationships between employees to keep an organization happy and healthy.
Gladly pro tip: To improve your emotional intelligence, try adding empathy exercises into your employee training and everyday work.
3. Multitasking
Most jobs require employees to work on multiple projects simultaneously, sometimes with multiple clients or teams. Customer service agents must juggle daily duties; conversations happening simultaneously in varying channels; and interpersonal relationships with clients, team members, and managers. This requires a high level of cognitive ability that employers will recognize.
Potential career opportunity: Project management. A project manager is responsible for tracking all of the elements of a project to guarantee it’s completed on time.
Gladly pro trip: Skill alone isn’t all there is to effective multitasking. Gladly gives your team the right tools to help you become more efficient, like single-conversation timelines and comprehensive customer profiles.
4. Teamwork
Customer service is all about collaboration. Whether it be working with other departments to find a solution or alongside a manager to address concerns, customer service team members rely on one another. Teamwork is one of the most important transferable customer service skills that will make you an asset to any team, especially if you are interested in pursuing management positions.
Potential career opportunity: Office manager. An office manager must be capable of working with every department and team member to keep an office running smoothly.
Gladly pro tip: Working remotely? Centralize collaboration and empower autonomy by using these five techniques for empowering your team and encouraging teamwork.
5. Subject matter expertise
Customers look to customer service reps for their expertise in times of crisis or deliberation. By becoming a subject matter expert, agents will help customers solve their issues or decide to make a purchase. This is important for building trust among customers and identifying opportunities to drive a profit.
Potential career opportunity: Sales. Working in sales requires a depth of product knowledge to build trust with customers and convince them to buy.
Gladly pro tip: Looking to build trust with your customers? Our Customer Expectations Report found that 66% of shoppers prefer brands that can make informed recommendations. Training agents to be experts on your catalog will help ensure radically personal customer service and build trust among shoppers.
Customer Service Can be a Path to New Opportunities
Customer service is just one possible beginning to many career paths. A career in customer service offers the chance to gain qualifications that create future opportunities in other fields like sales, marketing, human resources, and management. The transferable customer service skills you learn every day on the job are invaluable. All it takes is finding the right fit.
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