When it comes to creating the best experience a customer can have, the answer usually lies in abilities, knowledge, and specific skill sets training. These basic skill sets are often referred to as hard skills (technical skills), which are specific to the job. However, hard skills are no longer enough to ensure ultimate customer satisfaction, especially in today’s increasingly competitive job market space. Customers now look out for other necessary soft skills needed to solve their complaints and assure them that they are being heard. Developing and honing a strong set of soft skills in the customer service experience department has become critical to any business’s survival.
But What Exactly Are Soft Skills?
Soft skills are all those personal habits, qualities, and attitudes that influence how customer care representative work and interact with customers. Companies today are beginning to place a greater emphasis on soft skills because they are often linked to various benchmarks need by a company to thrive, some of which include:
- Net promoter scores
- Customer satisfaction scores
- Customer effort scores
- Qualitative survey feedback on customer support interactions
- Qualitative data gleaned from online customer reviews
- Number of referrals and recommendations
Soft skills can be the difference between retaining a customer and getting more referrals or losing customers and getting bad press.
Here are a couple of soft skill required in customer service experience CX
- Communications. As long as a business has customers and clients they attend to, there will be communication. The ability to communicate effectively is arguably the most important soft skill needed by a customer representative.
- Problem-solving, decision making, and critical thinking. These skills are usually learned and developed through experience. There will always be conflicts to be solved and decisions to be made wherever you go; learning how to deal with them is important.
- Leadership and teamwork. Being able to manage yourself and others is a critical soft skill to have. The ability to inspire, motivate, and instill confidence are essential skills of a good customer representative. Some people are naturally talented leaders, but management skills may be learned and improved through training and development.
- A good work ethic. This skill can be difficult to quantify, and while this may largely be a natural skill, it can be developed through training and proper motivation. Developing strong ethics towards your job is the motivation need to put both your soft and technical skills together for a well-rounded customer service experience.
- Depending on the industry or job function, one skill set may matter more than the other, but it is important to balance hard skills and soft skills. This will ensure that customers remain satisfied with your business services.
Not everyone may be born with the necessary soft skills, but they can be trained and improved. CCC continuous to provide focused programs to equip your business CX department with the required knowledge and training needed to harness the most useful soft skills.
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