Customer Service Manager Skills to be best on the Job
You need to have certain skills and qualities to be effective as a customer service manager.
This post shares fifteen skills and qualities that can help you to perform at your best as a manager of customer service.
Before we check them out, let’s get to know who a customer service manager is:
Who is a Customer Service Manager?
A customer service manager leads and motivates a team of staff to make sure they render the best customer service.
Customer service managers perform various duties, which include helping to build good customer relations, arranging staff meetings, training and development, arranging promotional events, and sorting security issues. See detailed customer service manager job description.
They work in different environments, operating customer service management job for both individuals and organizations.
15 Skills and Qualities to be Effective as a Customer Service Manager
1. Communication Skills. Effective customer service management involves vivid communication to lessen misinterpretations and misconceptions, and improve customer satisfaction. Proper grammar is required in the use of email, chat, and IM. Customer service managers need the ability to express their thoughts clearly, listen attentively, and respond appropriately.
2. Leadership Skills. Being in control of the team requires team motivation and guideline to make sure they abide by all company policies and procedures. A good customer service manager coaches and trains their team to always have respect for customers and carry out their requests.
3. Interpersonal Skills. Working well with people is part of effective customer service management. Therefore, managers must learn to control their anger and avoid jealousy and frustration so as not to allow these get to customers. They must also manage conflict well, identify the needs, and viewpoints of others, and be able to build very strong relationships with others.
4. Time Management Skills. A customer service manager should have limited time frame to spend with a customer. He/she should make sure that the customer is provided with whatever he/she needs in an effective and satisfactory way. Instead of spending too much time with a customer when you don’t know how to solve his/her problem, the best thing to do is to refer the customer to someone else who is capable.
5. Innovative Skills. A customer service manager with good innovative skills can easily improve in his/her field. With this skill, the customer support in terms of voice calls and emails is mostly enhanced for both the employees and the customers.
6. Patience. Sometimes, the customer might be so angry or confused that he/she does not know who a friend is. It is only patience that can help you stay calm, even in difficult situations.
7. Persuasion Skills. A customer service manager must be persuasive enough to be able to convince customers who only want to get information about the company’s product into making an order for the company’s product. With the mastery of persuasion, customers would hardly slip away. The skill helps managers in creating compelling messages that can entice customers into purchasing the company’s product.
8. Problem Solving Skills. The customer service manager’s main concern and desire should be to solve customers’ problems.
9. Professionalism. Managers responsible for customer service need to be professional in their comportment and speech. This helps them in building a very strong relationship with their customers. The customers will have positive thoughts and feelings about the company and its products when they see a professional attitude in the team members.
10. Good Listening Skills. Without good listening ability, a customer service manager cannot communicate effectively, both verbally and in writing. The manager is able to collect all important information for him/her to make efficient decision, if he/she can listen well to every side of a situation. This will help to build a very strong relationship between the manager and customers.
11. Attention to Details. Customer service managers with good listening skills can easily pay attention to the customer to understand what they are actually saying. Listening skills and attention to details go hand-in-hand, and they help in building a strong customer service team.
12. Critical Thinking Skills. Customers hate to be snubbed just because of a simple question they need an answer to urgently. The critical thinking skills enable the manager and his/her team to approach work with the mentality of appeasing customers and solving their problems.
13. Compassion. The customer service management is a vocation that requires the practice of compassion at work, and this brings a greater sense of purpose and dedication. Though associated with empathy, compassion is actually a different skill that helps relieve someone of their suffering.
14. Positive Thinking. Customer service managers should be positive in their thinking and ready to bring solutions to the table. With this skill, they are more likely to satisfy the needs of every customer.
15. Empathy. It is empathy that makes you to feel the customer’s pain and look for a way to solve their problem. A great product would reduce pain and give relief to the agonized customer. Empathy is a soft skill that every customer service manager should have because it plays a big role in their job if properly applied to win the heart of customers.
Customer Service Manager Skills for Resume
If you are making a customer service manager resume, you can use the above skills and qualities if you have them in creating the core competence section of the resume.
The core competence or skills section of your resume is where you highlight the best skills and qualities that you are bringing to the customer service manager position to succeed in it.
Conclusion:
If you are a customer service manager, developing the above skills and qualities will help you to be best on your job.
An employer who desires to hire a good person for the position of customer service manager can make the above skills important requirements for candidates for the position to meet to access the job.
Did you find the above skills useful in becoming a good customer service manager? Please leave a comment about this post in the box below. If you have other skills and qualities that have helped you succeed as a customer service manager, please share them too.