While providing consistently exceptional customer service skills necessitates collaboration and coordination across your whole organization, your support staff is a smart place to start. It’s critical to hire people who genuinely want to help your customers thrive — and to pay skilled experts competitive salaries.

Finding the ideal candidate for a support team can be difficult. There is no one-size-fits-all list of career experiences and college degrees that equals the ideal candidate. Instead, you’re looking for intangible abilities that can’t be taught.

Within their community, these people thrive on one-on-one connections. They enjoy fixing problems. They’re kind, personable, and excellent at explaining things to others.

1. Problem-solving

Customers do not always appropriately self-diagnose their problems. Often, the support representative must take the effort to duplicate the issue before navigating a solution. That implies they must figure out not only what went wrong, but also what action the customer was looking for.

Is this a good example? If someone contacts us because they’re having problems resetting their password, it’s because they want to access their account.

A strong customer care contact will anticipate that need and may even go above and beyond to manually reset the password and supply new login credentials, all while educating the customer on how to do it themselves in the future.

In other cases, a problem-solving expert may simply know how to provide proactive counsel or a solution that the consumer is unaware is available.

2. Patience

Customer care representatives must have a lot of patience. Customers that contact support are frequently perplexed and frustrated. Listening to consumers and treating them with patience goes a long way toward making them feel like you’re going to solve their problems.

It’s not enough to finish client contacts as swiftly as possible. Your team must be willing to listen to and completely comprehend each customer’s difficulties and requirements.

3. Attentiveness

For a variety of reasons, the ability to actually listen to customers is critical to giving excellent service. Not only should you pay attention to individual consumers’ experiences, but you should also be aware of and responsive to the input you receive as a whole.

Customers, for example, may not express it directly, but there may be a widespread perception that your software’s dashboard isn’t properly laid out. Customers are unlikely to remark, “Please enhance your UX,” but they might say, “I can never find the search functionality” or “Where is (particular function), again?”

You must be alert to pick up on what clients are trying to tell you without stating it out loud.

4. Emotional intelligence

A good customer service person can relate to anyone, but they’re especially good with irritated customers. Rather of taking things personally, they intuitively grasp where the other person is coming from and know how to prioritize and transmit that empathy quickly.

Consider this: How many times have you felt better about a potential grievance just because the other party involved listened to you right away?

When a customer service representative can show genuine empathy for an unhappy customer, even if it’s simply by repeating the problem, it can help to both appease (the customer feels heard) and actively satisfy the customer (the customer feels validated in their frustration).

5. Clear communication skills

Your customer service skills team acts as a two-pronged bullhorn for the product and is on the front lines of problem solving.

On the one hand, they’ll be the face of your business to your clients. That implies they must have a strong understanding of how to break down difficult ideas into easily digestible phrases.

On the other hand, they will represent your company’s demands and opinions to customers. For example, it is not in the customer’s best interests to receive a long-winded explanation on how to fix a certain fault.

When working with customers, the ability to communicate clearly is essential because miscommunications can lead to disappointment and dissatisfaction. The greatest customer service representatives know how to communicate with consumers in a straightforward manner that leaves no room for doubt.

6. Writing skills

Writing well entails getting as close to reality as the language allows. Being a good writer is without a doubt the most undervalued, yet crucial, skill to look for when hiring for customer service.

Writing, unlike face-to-face (or even voice-to-voice) conversations, necessitates a special capacity to communicate nuance. The way you structure a sentence can make the difference between seeming like a jerk (“You must first log out”) and sounding like you care (“Logging out should help you fix that problem quickly!”).

Good writers also prefer to employ entire phrases and proper language, which are attributes that allude to your company’s security and reliability.

Even if your organization mostly provides support over the phone, writing skills are still necessary. They not only help your team create consistent internal documentation, but they also represent someone who thinks and speaks well.

7. Creativity and resourcefulness

In finding customer service skills, inventive and exciting methods to go the additional mile — and wanting to do so in the first place — is better than solving the problem.

Finding a customer service rep with that natural zeal will move your customer service from “good enough” to “tell all your friends about it” territory.