Customer service is more than answering the phone when it rings to resolve problems. It is an easy job to do, but it is hard to be great at it, and to maintain that level of greatness takes years of experience and the right skills. Having a customer service team is essential for any customer-facing business. Without it, the business would lose customers, rarely up-sell products and have so many complaints that the authorities would step in and close it down.

There is a price that customer service costs, but that price can far outweigh the costs of not having the team. A good customer service agent can save the company money and make the company more. Getting a new customer is around 6 times more expensive than it cost to keep an existing customer. It takes more work to get new customers than to keep the ones that the business already has. An existing customer can be sent an email, a text message, or a quick phone call to up-sell products or offer discounts to spend more money. A new customer must be persuaded first, and have all their questions answered in detail, so they are sure that your company is the one they want to spend their money with.

There are some hard skills that a customer service agent must have to be good at their job, and to be good for your company, some of these hard skills can be taught or trained, others are natural skills that they must have at the point of interview. These skills can be used to attract new customers, retain existing customers, and resolve concerns of customers. These hard  skills for good customer service can be the difference between success and failure of a business. Hiring people without the skills that you need and having a training team that can not train the hard customer service skills into the person, will mean more complaints, fewer customers and a failing business.

There is clearly a cost to the business for a good customer service team, but do the costs of not having one make it all worthwhile?

What is Customer Service?

Any information that is given to customers, prospective customers or potential customers is servicing their needs. This service could be in the form of written communication, voice communication or on the website so the customers can find it themselves. It needs a solid understanding of the product, the company, the company ethos, and the messages that the company wants to give out.  Customer service requires a certain set of hard skills that have been honed and perfected over years of experience and training.

These hard skills are related to how a person interacts with another person and build a rapport with that person. People skills are essential in many different jobs, mastering these skills means that they can be transferred into any job that you do for the rest of your career.

Does your team have those particularly hard skills, or can you train them into your team?

There are several skills required, but the top 7 are probably hardest skills are:

Communication – customer service agents must be able to communicate through crisis with customers clearly and concisely with confidence about the business and the products and must be able to pass the call or communication to someone else more trained when they are struggling.

Patience – some customers have more questions than others, some have different abilities and understanding of your systems and how they might work. Having patience with customers shows them respect and shows that you are professional. Patience allows you to resolve any issues that customers might have in a calm and reasonable manner. The customers will appreciate your support and understanding.

Collaboration – no customer service agent is alone. It is a team job, and requires guidance from management, and all other departments within the company to support the knowledge of the agents. The customer service team is the first team that customers speak to, but they support every other team in the business, so they must collaborate with every team, and every customer to resolve any concerns and make the customer happy.

Empathy – like patience, a good customer service agent has empathy with the customers and can listen to understand. Showing empathy means being a good listener and being able to put yourself in the customers shoes. If they are experiencing difficulties with the process or product, other customers will as well, so the better that you understand their position, the better you can help them, help other customers, and help the business.

Excellent Decision-Making Skills – There are rules to follow and Standard Operating Processes to learn, but sometimes you need to make a decision on the call with the customer there, and you need to be able to quantify that decision. That decision might be the difference between keeping the customer and losing them. A manager or a leader might not be available, so you need to have the confidence in the product, the business, and your own skills to be able to resolve the complaint or concern quickly. Making the best decision that meets both the customer needs and the need of the business takes excellent decision making skills.

Customer Management – Some customers can be frustrated, the shout, curse and try to control the call. Other customers demand discounts or have questions that you simply do not know the answer to. Customer service is hard, but if you can mange the call, and manage the customers on each call, the customers will be happy, and you will be doing a good job.

Product Expertise – Knowing the product and services that you offer is the key component of good customer service. If you do not know what you are talking about, you cannot answer any questions, or sell the product. If you are an expert, then you can resolve any issues and talk with confidence to every customer. Your confidence will inspire the customer to purchase and remain with your company. 

There are more skills needed which often come with experience and internal training. Knowing the product, the business, the limitations, the competition, and how customers use the product so you can manage their expectations are also key elements of being a great customer service representative.

Do you Focus on Sales and Marketing or Customer Service?

Customer service is crucial to getting, keeping, and up-selling to new customers. Without it customers would leave and find alternative products or services that do what you do, but better, because they have people to talk to.

Sales advertises your products and drives the customers to your business. Sales increase customer awareness and improve brand awareness, they drive new customer and can up-sell to existing customers, but do people want to be sold to all the time, or do they want to speak to someone who is listening and caring about their experience?

Sales might show the customer the door, but a good customer service agent holds the door open, helps with their bags and guides them through the processes.

Integrated Marketing communication increases brand awareness across multiple platforms and routes to the customer. They share valuable information with customers and compare your product to those of your competitors. Marketing messages through social media, advertising channels or given to customers through the company communications encourage customers to reach out and contact the customer service team. The marketing team is often not customer facing, and often does not communicate with the customers for the business, other than through their advertising and messaging.

Your business needs marketing to drive the sales, needs the sales to increase the number of customers, and needs the customer service team to retain and convert the customers once they have reached out. The customer is intrigued by the marketing messages, convinced to connect by the sales team, and converted and retained by the customer service team, all 3 need to work, so which is the most important?

A marketing message leads to a customer contacting the customer service team. Without the team, the contact goes unanswered, and you have wasted time, money, and effort on marketing.

A Salesperson completes a sale of your product and goes after their next sale, after all they want their bonus and commission associated with the role. They have targets to hit, new customers to engage with and sales to drive. The salesperson has done their job but now the customer has questions.  Without the customer service team, who is there to answer the questions? The customer can go back to the salesperson, but that slows down sales and the salesperson is trained to sell. Not to advise or to resolve concerns.  The salesperson listens to sell, the customer service representative listens to help. Once you have bought the product or invested in the services, do you want to be continually sold to, or do you want someone to listen and help you to use it?

A salesperson sells one product, but your company might have several more products that only existing customers can access or feel the benefit of. These existing customers want to contact customer support and be guided on the best use of the product and helped to use it. Existing customers are much more likely to invest in more products if they have a good relationship with your company.

The customer service team is the first port of call, the first contact point of customers to your company, so their training in your product and services is the first thing that customers hear and receive. They represent your image, brand, and mission. They are the face and the voice of your company. Their values are your values, their ideas and communication guide the customers to enjoy working with you and spending their money.

The quality of your customer service team is the quality of your company, if they are bad, you will lose customers to your competitors, customers will vote with their feet. By employing, training, and retaining excellent customer service representatives you are giving your existing customers excellent service so they will recommend you to others. You are boosting your brand, your marketing services, and your sales. Customer loyalty and the refer-a-friend processes are both supported by excellent customer service. 

The more customers come back to you the less you need to spend on marketing and sales, and the more that each customer spends with you. One customer buying one product might mean £1000 revenue for you. That sale might have cost you money in marketing and sales, meaning that there is only £100 profit after costs are considered. 

One customer buying one product, having an excellent experience, buying more products, and telling their friends about their experience might mean £10,000 profit for your business without any cost, since the customer is doing the sales, marketing, and upselling for you.  And why would they do that? Simply because of the excellent customer service team promoting your business and products!

The sales cycle has many teams involved in making it move, but without the engine of the customer service team, the sales cycle will stall and break. They are the ones keeping the sales cycle moving.

Why do Customer hang up on Customer Service?

There are 4 main reasons why customer service interactions fail, each of them can be minimized or removed by providing excellent customer service support.

Firstly, the main reason why customers are hanging up is the call taking too long or being on hold for a long time. Over 50% of terminated calls are for this reason, so if we can immediately improve this, a lot fewer calls will end badly.

How to reduce the time that the call takes?

With excellent customer service representatives, trained in all aspects of the product and services, every question asked and possibly asked will have an answer prepared. There will be handouts, email templates, scripted responses, and guides to help the customer with every potential concern they might have. Live Chat, social media, and phone calls will be available to make sure that concerns are resolved quickly and where an escalation is required, team leaders and managers will be on hand. Agents will know how to transfer and who to transfer to but transfers will be minimal, since they are knowledgeable and well trained.

Secondly calls end due to customers getting frustrated.

How to reduce stress on calls?

A well-trained agent knows how to speak to a customer, they also know how to listen to the conversation and judge the tone of voice. They know what the trigger words are to avoid so the frustration levels of the customer do not rise. They use the correct tone of voice, they listen, they use silence and pause and do not talk over the customer. They understand what makes customers frustrated and what makes them happy. A good customer service agent rarely has a call that escalates to an angry call.

Next the call quality makes customers terminate calls.

How to improve call quality?

This might be more of a job for the technology side of the company, or the management, but it is the role of the customer service agents to identify problems. If one call is bad, it is not likely to be escalated, but if several calls have bad quality, or choppy lines, and the customer service representatives can not hear the customer, that is an issue that must be discussed. A customer service agent needs all the best tools to do their job, and one of those tools is the telephone system for the company.

Having the best mobile phone telephone solution means that your agents do not need to be at their desks and can answer calls quickly and from anywhere. They have the flexibility of different workspaces, different locations, and if there is a mobile reception, they can answer the calls on a crystal-clear line. When we can hear customers, we can resolve their concerns.

Omnichannel Communication

Customers no longer rely on just the telephone to contact customer services. Every customer has a mobile phone and on that mobile phone they have their social media, email, text messages, voice calls and video conferencing services. They can access Live Chat through your website, see the FAQ page on your website and watch the videos that you have uploaded to You Tube. They can immerse themselves in your customer service journey and expect your customer service team to be better than they are at finding the answers to their questions.

When their concern has been resolved, they can respond to surveys and leave feedback, all through the device in the palm of their hand. Their mobile phone is your means of contacting them, as well as their means of communicating with you and with future customers.

Years ago, a good customer service agent needed excellent speaking and listening skills, now they need to write, text, send letters and emails as well as handle multiple accounts at once. Being skilled in all forms of communication is essential for customer service. You want your agents to be able to respond quickly to Twitter, Facebook, Live chat, and phone calls. You need them on emails and watching the You Tube videos provided to update their training and skills. Anything a customer might know; you need your customer service agents to know more and know exactly where they are looking to get the information.

Your internal systems must be aligned with your customer contact points and your agents must be able to use them easily and quickly. Having a great CRM solution that has all communications integrated means that any channel any customer uses to contact your customer service team can be easily accessed, replied to and documented in the customer account. Everyone using the same system, monitoring all communications, and replying in real time, means that every customer is happy.

If your business also has face to face communication, training your customer facing staff in body language, tone, and eye contact is an essential component of good customer service. Using video conferencing to give online demonstrations requires the technology, but also the ability to use it and the skills to train others how to use it if they are experiencing technical problems.

If a customer likes to use text message, or prefers Twitter, would you want them to explain their situation through their preferred means of communication and then explain it again on the phone when the complaint is escalated?

No, you would want the Twitter messages or text messages on the same platform as the phone, so when the phone call is made, the agent can see the messages and pick up the conversation where it left off easily.

Good online, bad on the phone.

Customer service staff must be good at all forms of communication. There are some people who prefer to text, others prefer to talk, and some prefer to go to the office and look someone in the eye. If you have different people for each communications channel, you are employing a lot of people!

Multi-skilling people to handle all forms of communication reduces costs and up-skills your agents. They might still have their preferences, and when a need arises for an escalated call, they could be the specialist person to escalate to, however, customer service staff must communicate with customers how that customer likes to be communicated with!

Handling angry customers on social media is much different to handling angry customers on the phone and even further from dealing with an angry customer face to face. The skills to manage those customer interactions have the same foundations in communication, but different skills are required depending on the situation. Can your agents handle every customer, over every communication channel?

Teamwork makes the customers dream work.

Being able to communicate with customers is one element of the job, but very few companies have a one-man customer service department!  Communication must be fluid and clear internally, as well as externally. If a customer’s concern can be resolved by speaking to sales, marketing, the IT department or the management, there must be fast and efficient communication channels open and available.

If a member of the team is struggling, they need to know who is available to support them and how quickly they can transfer the call or bring in the person to better resolve the issue. If the customer requires communication that one person is not great at using, they must find out who is better and how to get that customer to that person quickly.

Collaboration is hard to do, and harder to manage. If your company works across different time zones, or in different locations, or if you have a team working from home and isolated and some working in the office and sitting next to each other, team communication is a challenge. How can you make sure that all staff are communicating the same messages to customers?

The fix is simple, and there are some different strategies that you can use.

Firstly, ask yourself if the form of communication that is generating the most complaints is necessary for your business or if you can remove it or pause it until your staff are better equipped to use it. If it takes a few weeks of training and testing, those weeks will have fewer complaints and cause fewer concerns. It will be worth it in the long term.

Secondly, make sure that your communication system works to the levels that you need, and it is all connected to every channel, and to every agent. If every agent is logged in to the same system, leaving easy to read notes, and finding colleagues to transfer to when needed, the customer journey is simplified. Simple communication is the best communication.

Thirdly, ensure that everyone is trained to the same levels, and you are considering their communication preferences. If they have a preference to non-voice communication use that for the benefit of the customer, whilst always considering the other members of the team and noting the issues clearly.

We have talked about Soft Skills at length, but what about some hard skills?

Essential Hard Skills

Hard skills are those customer service skills that are essential for your type of business and are less transferable than the generic soft skills that a good customer service agent must possess.

In a construction company, or a care facility, you do not need to be as technology aware as you might need to be when working in an online company. If you are working in Finance, you need to be better with numbers than if you are working in eCommerce. When working in a niche retail outlet the customer service agents must be better at face-to-face communication and specific product explanation than through non-voice communication.

Go where your customers are.  This means communicate with them how they like to be communicated with and make sure that your sales, marketing, product, and communication strategies all align.

Tech Savvy

The pandemic of 2021 and 2022 forced businesses to evolve. This often meant improving their technology and communication strategies. Customers need to talk to you and your business and often do this through various technology or apps on their phone. The apps that you use might be different to the apps that your competition uses, so your agents must be skilled in using the specific application used by your company. 

Companies that use ConxHub for their mobile communication reach more customers and resolve more concerns than companies that have a fixed desktop phone solution that requires staff to be at their desks to answer the phone.

Every phone system has similar functionality but there are distinct differences between the good ones and the less popular or cheaper variations. Being aware and fully trained on your phone solution means that you can engage with customers and know how to move calls around. Using ConxHub on your mobile means that your technology is faster and more accessible than working for a different company, and you can confirm and resolve the issues that the customer has. It is better to verify now, than verify later. 

Customer management

Your customers are different to the customers of other businesses. Your customers base might be older, younger, more male, or more female dominated. You might have customers from a specific region. You might have customers that speak a different language or dialect. Knowing your customers helps you to manage their expectations.

Mapping your customers to the best customer journey means fewer complaints and a faster service. Using the IVR process within your phone system to guide customers to where they need to be helps to better manage customers. An existing customer will have different questions to a new customer, a customer speaking to someone about an existing issue wants a different service to someone talking about a new issue. Managing these customer concerns through the best use of technology helps to keep customers happy. 

Call Queuing means informing the customer where they are in the queue and how long it is likely to be before they reach a live agent, this helps to provide a professional service and minimize complaints.

Managing call routing means that you have an over-flow system, you have skills-based routing, and you have work-force management techniques in place to speed up the customer journey.  These are all freely available through ConxHub. Getting the customer to the best agent with the most appropriate skills and that agent being available between certain times means that no calls are dropped, and every customer is serviced.

Know your Product (KYP)

The products of different companies might be similar, but there are some distinct differences that must be explained and compared. If a customer asks, “I have heqrd of XYZ company but how is your company different?” your customer service agents must know how to reply with evidence backed information.

Experienced customer service staff must learn the products that the company offers in great detail, and this is a hard skill that must be trained into the staff from day 1.

Not knowing the product that the customers are calling to discuss will mean more complaints, even the person with the best soft skills in the world would struggle to manage a customer if they do not know the product.

Standard Operating Procedures – SOP

Each business must be accountable to their management and shareholders. The staff high up must know what the customer facing staff are doing. If everyone is following SOPs messages are clear, standards are set, and everyone knows what is happening.

Every company has different SOPs so learning these quickly, getting the right qualifications, certificates, passing the internal training courses and preparing yourself for the job ahead means that you can meet the expected standards and exceed them to earn more money.

Know your Analytics – KYA

Customer service teams must know what they are being assessed on so they can meet and beat those metrics. Some companies monitor the time to resolve calls, whereas others monitor the volume of calls. Some companies monitor complaints whereas others monitor outcomes and completed sales.

Knowing expectations and how you are assessed means that you can meet and beat those targets and move the company in the direction that it wants to go in.

The reports that are produced from detailed analytics guide the management and compare staff within the teams. Knowing who is excelling and who is struggling guides the training department and the managers so they can guide the company. 

Reports are generally automated so come from standardized processes within the specific company systems. The better an agent knows the systems and the products means the better they are doing their jobs and their work is closely matched to the performance indicators required.

Customer Service Solved

ConxHub has the best mobile phone solution for customer service support. You have all the skills and training to provide your staff. Matching the two together means that you can acquire, retain, and support more customers so your business will grow quickly.

Communication is at the heart of customer self-service so now that we have communicated the soft skills, the hard skills and given you the technology to excel, the rest is down to you.  You can do it, and when you need us, we are here to support.