Soft Skills Customer Service Staff Need to Make Customers Happy | #customersupport #supporticket

Customer service can effectively make or break your business in the eyes of customers. According to Small Biz Genius, 95% of customers indicated that customer service is a decisive factor in their brand loyalty. In addition, 58% of customers said that bad customer experience can lead to them abandoning a brand they otherwise enjoyed purchasing from.

This makes careful selection, onboarding, and coaching of new customer support agents a necessity rather than a luxury. And it’s particularly critical in B2B customer support organizations where clients are more complex and higher value entities. Whether you are a customer support professional or manage a team of agents for your company, certain soft skills can significantly improve your servicing efforts. Let’s take a closer look at some of the skills your staff should work on in order to make customers happy in 2020 and beyond.

1. Active Listening

The majority of customer support tickets can be solved by simply listening to what the person on the other end has to say. This makes active listening an essential soft skill in your customer service team. Active listening represents proactive communication with the other part in which your support agent carefully listens for trigger words. If a customer is agitated about their late shipment, how can you help them get it more quickly? Or, if your customer has problems with the cloud-based platform they are subscribed to, how can you help them complete an operation on their end? Learning how to directly and succinctly respond to each question is an essential element in making your customers happy.

The same principles can be applied to text in the form of chat and e-mail, thanks to technology powered by AI. TeamSupport leverages IBM® Watson® to determine sentiment analysis and gauge whether a customer is happy or at risk.

1. Problem-Solving Mindset

Your customer service staff should never bow down and accept defeat when it comes to support tickets. If a package was lost somewhere during international transit, don’t simply acknowledge the fact and do nothing about it. Problem-solving is a pivotal part of customer support workflow for your staff, no matter if it’s a SaaS or eCommerce company they represent. Tim Wyatt, Customer Support Agent and Content Writer at Trust My Paper, said that: “It’s OK to apologize to your customer for a poor service they might have received. However, always follow that up with a written explanation and compensation to maintain good customer relations. Never write off a support ticket because it’s too complex to solve as this can drastically lower the trust in the brand you represent.”

In the case of complex issues, even if you have to forward the ticket to the product team, stay with the communications process until you know there is resolution. When a customer has someone that they started with also there to check in and make sure the issue gets resolved, it goes a long way towards providing a comfort level that they are receiving personalized service. Solutions like TeamSupport provide complete visibility and enable communication between support, product, and sales teams, so the appropriate team members can collaborate on how to resolve an issue, and ensure the customer is kept up to date along the way.

We take a close look at two more soft skills that support staff should master in order to provide the best customer experiences in Part 2.

About Kristin Savage Kristin Savage is a professional Content Writer at Classy Essay and Content Editor at Grab My Essay writing services. She is a passionate writer who aims to improve her writing style through each subsequent article and publication. Kristin is a trusted associate and contributor to Best Essays Education, where she continues to expand her writer’s skillset to a variety of writing formats.