When hiring customer support agents, companies often focus on the hard skills that are required for the job, like language proficiency or technical knowledge. However, there is another set of skills that might not be as prominent but are still vital for your agents. These so-called soft skills play an important role in making your agents more effective at their work. Let’s take a look at some of the essential ones your team should have and how to hone them.
Understanding the Value of Soft Skills
One major difference between hard skills and soft skills is their specificity. As has been said, the former set is exclusively for doing one job. Meanwhile, soft skills are applicable across different jobs. This is why they are sometimes overlooked during the application process, as companies already expect candidates to have these skills coming from their previous positions.
Despite being in the background, soft skills are still very much important for customer service. The biggest reason is because they help improve the quality of work being delivered to the customer. As many of these skills relate to communication and interaction, they help agents better engage customers and deliver what they need. These also become useful for attracting and converting new clients.
Soft skills also play a big role in the internal dynamics of your customer service teams. The same communication skills ensure that every member can effectively talk with each other and work as a team. Meanwhile, leadership-related soft skills are vital for steering the team in the right direction.
It is also worth noting that soft skills are expected to become more essential as customer service evolves. For one, rtificial intelligence-based customer support would still rely on human agents with such skills to provide a more nuanced customer response. Such a need is in line with the expected general growth in the demand for soft skills in different job categories.
The Soft Skills Customer Service Agents Should Have
Now that you understand the role that soft skills play in customer service, it’s time to explore the specific skills you would want to have in your agents. Note that this selection is not comprehensive, as agents can call on other soft skills that would be useful for a given situation. But these should be at the core of the skills your team needs to hone.
Patience
Customer service can be a tedious job, with agents having to deal with a wide variety of people. Some of these can be a challenge to handle, with their different behaviors. In all of these, the customer support agent must remain patient to hear out their issues and provide them with solutions.
Patience also plays a major role in the long-run effectiveness of the customer service team. Dealing with the same issues daily can lead to a loss of interest in the part of agents. By training your team to become more patient on the job, they learn to enjoy it more and maintain their efficiency at their tasks.
To hone your team’s patience, you need to improve their attitude towards pain and discomfort. Tell them that the discomfort they feel from losing their patience is not intolerable. You can also remind them that even that long moment dealing with a customer will eventually pass.
You would also want to help your agents to control the source of their discomfort. Find the external triggers that can lead them to become inpatient. Help your team look for ways to lessen the effect of these triggers. Additionally, teach them to spot internal signs that they are getting impatient, like when they start clenching their first. This short guide will be useful for helping agents stay calm and collected.
Listening Skills
Being a good listener is the first communication-based soft skill that you would want to see in an agent. After all, they wouldn’t be able to help the customer if they can’t understand them clearly. As such, you want them to become more attentive to what the customer is saying.
Here, you don’t want them to just focus on the details of the customer’s concerns. Agents should also be able to pick up on subtle cues that tell them about the customer’s emotions and desired action. A simple exercise to help them is by staying silent for at least 3-4 minutes. This trains their ears and minds to focus more on such subtleties.
Another handy exercise you can let your agents do is listening to different media like a podcast. The idea here is to help them listen more critically and empathically. First, they listen to the media from a critical viewpoint and validate the statements in it. For the second pass, agents focus on the emotions of the speakers and explain what cues are there that indicate their feelings.
Empathy
Being empathic is another vital soft skill for assessing the customer’s situation. Your team should know how to connect with customers on a more emotional level and understand their pains. Here, you would want to cultivate greater emotional intelligence in your team.
One strategy is teaching them how to take ownership of the customer’s concerns. Your agents must be ready to see the issue from the customer’s viewpoint. This helps them better understand its nuances and particular concerns. It also assures the customer that someone can indeed help them out.
Another good way to make your customer support team more empathic is by encouraging them to socialize with different people. This lets them have a better feel for different people’s views. For instance, you can have your team mingle with the other company departments they don’t usually get to interact with to get some useful pointers.
Communication Skills
The main role of customer service teams is to act as a link between the company and its customers. As such, being a good communicator is a necessary soft skill for them. Agents need to know how to convey the information coming from either side into a clear and meaningful manner.
To help them build their spoken communication skills, encourage your agents to speak slowly. This gives them time to think ahead and determine what to say next. Learning how to enunciate words properly would also make it easier for your agents to convey exact details.
Writing skills are also a must for agents, especially with the popularity of chat-based support. In particular, agents need to know how to pen well-crafted correspondences with customers. These should convey the company’s solutions and comments in a clear and concise manner. To train them for these, including these tips on writing customer support emails.
Take Your Customer Service Team’s Soft Skills to the Next Level
A great thing about these soft skills is that any agent can acquire them, as long as they are ready to learn. That willingness to learn is itself even considered a must-have soft skill. Explore what other such skills you can include in your team’s repertoire and invest in their training for these. You will be surprised at how competitive your agents will be in meeting customer needs.