3 Important Qualities of Customer Service You Can’t Do Without [100%]

If you discover the 3 important qualities of customer service, which your competition dread? Will you incorporate it into your customer service immediately?

Indeed, anyone can set up a business. Even without a degree. But did you know that serving your customers right is where the real business is? And it’s unfortunate to admit that thousands of businesses have shut down. Because of the inability to treat the first thing first.

But you sure don’t want that for yourself. Nor for your business. Thus, in this article, you’ll learn about:

• 3 important qualities of customers, and you incorporate them in serving your customer base.
• Making your business a go-to brand each time your customers need the category of products or services. By applying skills for customer service.

So read with care. Chew and digest every word like a piece of cracker in your hands.

 

3 Important Qualities of Customer Service

1. Adopt Professionalism

Do you want to project your brand as the best or one of the best? Then, professionalism is an element you shouldn’t joke about in your customer service.

Adopting professionalism in your customer service shows if you treat your customers with respect. It’s also about paying attention to their queries and complaints and communicating with them in clear terms, as you help them solve them with a creative juice.

2. Apply Patience

Remember, the last time you shopped online and ordered something valuable. But only to discover a fault after the delivery guy had left your doorpost.

You felt like venting your anger and dissatisfaction, right? And you wished you could grab your phone and shout at the customer service representative.

That’s the same way a dissatisfied or frustrated client of your company would feel. And you must understand this to make your customers’ service effective.

But, in dealing with customers, you need to know that your customers are different. So, it will require you and your customer service team to be patient. As you treat each one with empathy and be sensitive to their needs.

 3. Abide by the people-first principle

No dissatisfied customer would want to get piqued any more. Not even by any staff of the customer service unit of a business. But the truth is that some customers can be frustrating to handle. Especially when they are unhappy with your service or product offerings.

But for a super-effective business customer service, you must uphold the people-first attitude.

With that, you’d get powered up to serve your clients better. As their interests and the satisfaction of their needs become your priority.

 

The 3 Important Qualities of Customer Service [Explained with Bonus Tips]

 

 1. Professionalism in customer service

What impression do you give your customers the first time they find you? Do they see you as a professional brand or not?

To answer these questions, you see the significance of having a professional image. And remember that first impression lasts long.

In other words, you show the extent of how professional you’re in the way you treat or deal with your customers. Both in your attitude and behaviors. To every person that comes across your shop online or at your physical office address.

In many instances, dealing with frustrated customers is a test of professionalism in your customer service. And without doubt you know how the feelings of these customers can be. Some can get out of their way to break the nose of your customer service representatives. If it were possible.

As their name implies— customer service representatives— they’re the face of your business. And the way you relate with your clients can have a profound impact on your business success.

In simple terms, you can have effective communication with your customers. By displaying professionalism in your customer service.

When you improve your customers’ satisfaction, they become your loyal buyers. It helps you build the confidence and trust of your consumers in your brand.

Bonus Tips: Professionalism in Customer Service

• Recruit competent professionals and then give them top-notch training.
• Have a dress code that sets your brand apart and projects a professional image to your customer base.
• Feedback is key. But a quick response makes all the difference. As a call of duty, provide swift responses to your customers’ queries and complaints.
• Follow-up with your customers
• Customers’ experience should serve as a strong basis to seek and pursue improvement.

2. Patience in Customers Service

It may take professionalism to attract a customer. But you’ll need more to develop and maintain the loyalty of your customers to your brand. And over and over, that involves patience in your interactions with them.

With patience in your customer service, you help resolve your clients’ issues without souring a long-term business relationship with your customers.

And that may need your customer service representatives to have some essential qualities. Which we’ll look at pretty soon in this write-up.

Yet, you practice patience in your business customer service with ease. By following the tips below:

• Be flexible and willing to attend to the concern of your customers. Even if it means, sometimes, going out of your planned business protocol.
• Help your customers to get out of their challenges and issues. But you must know that your customers are not the same. As may need you more time to address an issue Mr. A. is facing than you’d spend resolving the same for Mr. B
• Providing exceptional customer service to your clients can be demanding and mentally draining. For you and your team. But to admit this truth is not enough. You need to ensure the practice of self-care amongst yourselves.

3. Imbibing people-first attribute in your customer service

Jorge Paulo Lemann once stated that “the greatest asset of a company is its people.” That’s true for both your customers and employees— and how you treat them. But you must know, you’ve got no business without having people you can call your customers. Even with the best team in the world. You can read that again.

On this note, you should try to hear and grasp the concern of your customers. Let them know that you appreciate and value your business relationship with them.

Sure, you can practice a people-first attitude in your customer service. But it often starts with empathizing with your customers.

Besides showing empathy to your customers, you can give your customers a personal experience in their connection with your brand. The essence is to let your customers know that you understand what interests them. And, of course, value their support. More than your competitors

Thus, you can devise ways to give them things (as gifts) that they’ll value. It doesn’t mean you should get them gold. Far from that. But you can create a golden and personalized experience for them. And such efforts can come in the following ways:

• Sending them wishes on their birthdays.
• Give them gifts with your brand customized on them. It could be a candy jar or even a simple office supply that they can use every day.
• You can also give them gifts. That will help them build affinity with family members while they have fun together. Thus, it could come as a free pass to see a movie at a cinema, or to an amusement park, or as the case may be.

Sally Gronow quoted:

“Good customer service costs less than bad customer service.”

 

Qualities of a Good Customer Service Representative

1. Communication

As a customer service representative, you must have excellent communication skills because they deal with members of the public. And without effective communication skills, you can’t better understand your customers. Neither can you assimilate their queries and complaints. Let alone resolving them.

2. Patience

Dissatisfied customers always feel they’re entitled to their anger. But you must be able to exercise patience with them. As a good customer service representative, you should be calm and listen to them. As you attempt to provide solutions to whatever issue they’re facing.

3. Empathy

Empathy is the ability to relate with the experience of someone through identifying with their emotions and putting yourself in their shoes. So you must have this quality to achieve the goal of every customer service effort.

So, say, a customer called in to make a complaint about a wrong set of goods supplied to her. And she has decided to return them back to your company in anger.

As a good customer service representative, your response may be wording like this:

“Hello Jane, I can imagine how you feel. Sorry for the inconvenience…”

4. Active listening

Active listening is an important life skill. But customer service representatives need it to save their company from enormous losses. That’s true. And beyond helping customers resolve whatever issue or complaints they have, they’re a good source of valuable information that can profit your business to achieve improvement and advancement.

5. Adaptability

Adaptability means the ability to welcome change or new development without any adverse effect on the efficiency and performance. Thus, you must be flexible enough to adapt to new situations as a customer service representative. Even as it relates with the relationship of your customers and your business.

6. Attention to detail

This quality of a good customer service representative connects to active listening. Yet, attention to detail is the ability not to look over any detail. Even in your relationship and conversation with your customers. Not even the minutest detail while you engage in active listening.

It will help you understand your customers’ concerns and challenges and solve them.

7. Social skills

Customer service representatives attend to tons of people via email and calls. Thus, you must have an excellent interpersonal relationship skill. To be effective in customer service delivery.

8. Friendliness

Friendliness is one of the qualities of being sociable. And it’s a sign of strong interpersonal skills. Thus, it’s a quality a customer service representative should have. Because nobody likes to talk to a hostile person, even if he’s part of your customer service team.

9. Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is the ability to take charge over your emotions and feelings. No doubt, customers will talk to you in ways that you don’t like. But as a good customer representative you must have emotional intelligence. But how? By not being reactive or trying to exchange words or get into verbal combat with your clients.

10. Knowledgeable

Every customer wants reassurance from you and your team. And that comes by educating them about things they’re not clear about or are in doubt. Thus, as customer service representative, you’re expected to be knowledgeable.

In other words, you must have a sound knowledge of your company operations and its product offering. That will allow you to attend and respond to many customer queries with expertise and lucid detail.

11. Time management skills

Every goal-oriented person should grasp the famous business adage, “Time is money”. And as someone who attends to many customers daily, you must display a high level of time management skills as you try to get the best from your customer service efforts.

12. Confidence

People sense the way you speak, and they can always tell if you’re confident or not from the tone of your voice. Hence, as the face of your company’s brand, you must be bold yet respectable in dealing with your clients. Remember, confidence breeds trust. And people want to do business with people they can trust.

However, confidence is outcome you get from building an excellent self-esteem.

13. Responsiveness

How long does it take your business to reply to the queries submitted by your customers? Fast and early, or late? Your response to this question will determine if your business is on its way to parking out of business.

That’s enough reason to strive to give your customers prompt responses to their queries and complaints. Because the decisions your customers will take in the end depend on your feedback to them.

 

Skills Needed for Customer Service

The qualities and skills of a good customer representative are quite interlaced in themselves. But the seven skills below are the competencies needed for an effective customer service:

1.  Persuasion skills

As a person in the business of customer service, your work involves subtle forms of selling. That’s to say, you may not be a member of your sales team, but you need persuasion skills. Your role is to make your clients want your brand above other competitions.

So while you’re trying to answer your customers’ queries, you can apply wit in influencing them to buy from you—and your business.

2.  Ability to use positive language

The choice of language of your customer service unit shouldn’t only be effective but positive, too. For instance, a customer may want to place an order for a product currently out of stock.

Instead of making a statement like:

“Hello Andrew, we don’t have what you’re looking for”

You can say something like:

“Hello Andrew, we are delighted in your interest in getting (the name of the product). We’ll process your order as soon as inventories get into our stores. Thank you for choosing us.”

3.  Ability to read customers

Reading customers has to do with the ability to understand the psychology of how and why people act the way they do—and the nature of man. Thus, having the ability to read and understand your people (your customers) will help you serve them better.

When you’re sensitive to your customers, you get to know what they want and then channel your effort towards satisfying their needs.

4.  Product knowledge

You’ll often get tons of emails or calls from customers submitting queries or complaints about your company products and its operation. Thus, as a good customer representative, you need to have sound knowledge of your firm products. That will help you serve your consumers well.

5.  Writing skills

Speaking is a crucial skill for customer service. But you can’t overstate the importance of writing skills. Because you’d always have reasons to communicate in writing with your customers, in one or the other. Hence, if you’re a business owner, ensure that you hire people with impressive writing skills into your customer service department.

6.  Problem-solving skills

Business is all about identifying problems and providing solutions to them. The same for customer service. Thus, every customer service person must be able to think through customers’ situations and be able to proffer solutions to them.

7.  Willingness to learn

Like every other business function in customer service, you must always be ready to learn. While this sounds like a general skill, it strengthens others. That’s because you can’t improve any skill without the openness to learn new things. Readiness is learn is a deep life lesson. Anyone who has achieved success in his career understand this. 

 

Conclusion

No doubt, customers are essential to your business success. And in this article, you’ve learned that you don’t have a business without people that you can call customers. Thus, you should work on these 3 important qualities of customer service. So that you can build a good and satisfied customer base.