The heart of every great business is their customer service. Your business might have the best product or the coolest brand, but it relies most heavily on the customer service skills of not just yourself, but every one of your employees.
Customer service and support ensure that the customer is happy throughout their entire buyer journey, which includes after-sales care as well. This is why customer loyalty is so deeply connected to the quality of your customer service.
Here are the 7 most important online customer support skills for you and your employees to have.
- Empathy
The greatest, most precious, most difficult to obtain skill that any customer service employee can ever have is empathy.
Empathy is the ability to understand what someone is going through as if they were going through it themself. When dealing with someone’s problem, you must be able to treat the problem as if you were having it yourself.
This ensures that you will never be dismissive of anyone’s troubles and truly do your best to fix the problem to the best of your capabilities. What’s more is the customer can always tell if the employee that they’re dealing with really cares.
- Flexibility
While there are a lot of similar situations, customer support isn’t dealing with the exact same situation over and over again. While the problem might be similar or even the same, the customer will be an entirely different person.
Their words, reactions, and specific issues will also be entirely different and therefore result in a unique situation. This means that being able to respond in a flexible manner is a key element of excellent customer support.
If you can think quickly on your feet when you find yourself in a new or unique situation, then you’ll find great success in your customer support endeavors.
- Action-oriented
The heart of customer support is the resolution of an issue. When you’re action-oriented, you will always have this in mind. If you’re truly committed to resolving your customer’s issue, then every action that you take will be a step closer to that goal.
This can manifest in different ways. You might need to be persuasive if the customer needs a bit of talking to in order to understand the solution, or you might need to have self-control with a difficult customer, or you might even need to be patient with an older customer that doesn’t understand certain terminology.
- Product genius
Almost none of the above traits matter if you don’t know the product that you’re selling! All of the best customer support employees have a deep and thorough knowledge of the products that their company sells.
This means that you’ll have plenty of tips and tricks to offer to customers to help them navigate any and all problems, even the most complex of them. This will also help you to build an excellent understanding of what they might be experiencing, which will help strengthen your empathy and action-oriented approach.
- Responsiveness
Rather than being reactive, you should try your best to be responsive. This goes beyond just getting back to customers as quickly as possible (although that’s important too!); being responsive means that you are thoughtful and measured when you reply to customers.
Responsiveness also means that you take into account who the customer is and what they might be saying without explicitly saying it.
- Communication skills
Following being responsive, communication skills are closely related. The most important among them would be being able to let the customer know what they need to do in order to solve their problem in a way that’s concise, effective, and clear.
Customers don’t need a million words to solve their problem. They just need to know either exactly what to do, or exactly what you’re going to do for them. The best customer service professionals know what to say without leaving any room for doubt, disappointment, or frustration.
- Curiosity
And finally, the best customer support comes from people who are genuinely curious about a problem and what they can do to solve it. A natural curiosity goes hand-in-hand with empathy, because it means that you want to truly understand where they’re coming from and why they’re having these problems.
Great online customer support can be difficult to master, and great customer support employees can be even more difficult to find! Why not let us do it for you? She Helps can provide your online business with comprehensive, world-class customer support, entirely done for you. Get in touch with us today to find out more!
