Customer service is often a company’s secret weapon for keeping customers happy and creating more sales. When service experiences are positive, people want to keep coming back and working with that company because they feel good even when a problem arises.
If you like helping people, then customer service can be the perfect type of role for you!
However, there’s more to it than just wanting to help. You’ve also got to have the right tools, tricks, and attitude to provide that assistance and ensure it works. It can be hard to know what those are before your first customer service job, so we’ve put together 25 of the top skills and expertise in customer service that will help.
What are customer service skills and why are they important?
Customer service is the ability to provide help to customers and potential customers when they need it. You might talk on the phone or via chat or even in person. Customer service skills are all the tools that make this process go smoother and more successful. Some skills are innate, like your ability to read people or roll with the punches. Others can be entirely learned and mastered, such as active listening and mastering product knowledge. The ones we’re discussing are those most likely to help you land a job in customer service and love it.
25 essential customer service skills
Here are the 25 skills we’ll discuss. The pattern they follow is from personal attributes and relationship management through customer service skills and general business skills. Many of these areas overlap and skills are interrelated but should provide you with a strong basis for delivering high-quality customer service and helping you enjoy your work in this field.
1. Emotional intelligence
First on your list of must-have skills is emotional intelligence, or the ability to identify and manage your emotions as well as the emotions of others. Recognizing these emotions and being able to communicate them is essential because you don’t want to react with anger or frustration. You can master emotional intelligence by starting to name your emotions regularly (i.e. “I feel angry” or “I feel sad”) and writing down what these feelings look like when they occur.
2. Social intelligence
Social intelligence is another broad skill that generally covers your ability to understand someone and cooperate with them. You’ve likely heard this called “people skills” and it’s about having the ability to interact with many different types of people. One of the most enjoyable ways to build social intelligence is to play different types of interactive games with people where you have to cooperate to achieve various goals, such as team sports, board games, trivia, and more.
3. Intrapersonal awareness
Our last of these bigger skills is your intrapersonal awareness or skill set. This covers how well you know yourself and your mind, and how well you understand your actions. It works hand-in-hand with emotional intelligence because that helps you identify your feelings, while this intrapersonal awareness teaches you how those feelings manifest and impact your responses. Such awareness can help you identify if you’re angry because of your current interaction with a customer or something else, such as being “hangry” because you missed lunch.
4. Diplomacy
As we move into the great customer service skills that are directed at others, we’ll begin with a look at diplomacy. This is your ability to make a case, explain an issue, or solve a problem without hurting a customer’s feelings or ego. Diplomacy is all about passing along a message neutrally or positively.
You may have experienced this when a support agent said their company didn’t accept product returns, but they did so in a way that you understood and didn’t cause more problems or get upset. A terrific way to practice your diplomacy is to apologize when you do something wrong and work to address it without assigning blame to someone else.
Talk about these kinds of interactions in any customer service profile you create.
5. Patience
You’ve heard it said that patience is a virtue, and that’s especially true in customer service jobs. It is the ability to interact with someone and accept what is happening without getting aggravated. You need to listen and understand without interrupting or reacting angrily. Patience also includes your ability to help customers express the real issue, which some only get to after they’ve vented.
Demonstrate patience by taking your time with interviews and job discussions, without cutting off whoever is speaking. Service agents hear similar concerns often, and this practice will help you avoid interrupting a customer and creating an issue.
6. Authenticity
Authenticity is an interesting skill in the customer service world because it’s in high demand when a company has younger customers. People want to have authentic experiences, and that covers your ability to sound and be genuine so that a customer trusts what you’re saying. It’s about wanting to solve the customer’s issue and help them.
Authenticity is often about your attitude. You’ve got to be willing to help. When you are, you’re a great fit for service jobs. If that’s not your normal attitude, it may make it difficult for you to work in a service role.
7. Thick skin
Having a thick skin is important in customer service roles because you’re going to face upset people who may raise their voices. You are the person who can help them address their problem, but they may blame you for the problem, too. A thick skin is the ability to hear this and look past rudeness or inappropriate comments and not react to it.
The big benefit of having a thick skin is that you’re able to focus on the problem at the heart of the customer’s complaints. To practice it in your regular life, try to control your emotional response to any news you hear—but especially bad news. This helps you keep emotions in check and think about the bigger issue.
Now, you should never have to take abuse at work. Talk with the company and learn what their policies are for aggressive customers and how they help you reset and feel okay after a difficult call.
8. Attentiveness
Attentiveness is your ability to pay attention to a customer and indicate to them that you’re listening. This is about being fully present and not daydreaming or thinking about another issue. Being attentive can help you spot problems or avoid jumping to the incorrect conclusion about a concern.
Attentiveness is something we use in our daily lives, so there are lots of places to practice your listening skills. Think about it the next time you’re talking with friends. Get them to tell you a short story and see if you can remember and repeat the main points.
9. Active listening
Active listening is a way for you to ensure you’re being attentive. This skill is the ability to listen to what a customer says and then repeat it in a way that makes sense. You repeat their concern in your own words to demonstrate your attentiveness and understanding. It’s about getting to the root of an issue and moving beyond the confusion caused by idioms, sayings, or someone using the wrong term.
You can practice this the next time you’re having a disagreement or misunderstanding. Get them to make a statement. Then, you respond by saying “What I’m hearing you say is…” followed by a restatement of their concern. It’ll help you get on the same page and can remove misunderstandings based on the way people express themselves.
10. Empathy
Empathy is the direct skill of being able to understand another person’s point of view and emotions. People want to feel better by the end of a customer service interaction or purchase. Your job is to help them feel that way. Empathy is a great tool because it allows you to connect and address their emotional concerns directly.
Empathy can be relatively simple to demonstrate, such as by saying “I can see why that would be frustrating,” after a customer explains their issue. Being empathetic helps people trust you because they believe you understand them. That emotional connection is important to us all.
We develop empathy by listening to someone else’s feelings and emotions. You can practice it by asking people about how a situation made them feel, then use the active listening skill to repeat it until you explain it correctly.
Remember, empathy is about acknowledging a customer’s feelings. You don’t necessarily have to agree, just understand how they feel.
11. Sensitivity
Sensitivity is a skill that’s similar to attentiveness and empathy. It covers your ability to understand the emotions and actions someone is presenting and determine if those are accurate. Think of it like seeing a smiling friend but realizing they’re sad inside and need a hug.
Sensitivity is about uncovering those buried thoughts and emotions. In customer service, this helps you get to the heart of a problem quickly and discuss issues that the customer might not be addressed directly. In sales, this can include reasons why someone isn’t buying something. Service and support, it is often about determining why a person isn’t satisfied.
To work on sensitivity, start thinking about the underlying reasons why people may say certain things or act in certain ways.
12. Adaptability
As you’re talking with people and working with their emotions and statements, you’ll realize that people are quite different. You’ll discover that people don’t respond to things the same. Adaptability is your skill to read the room and adjust your language or the way you help a specific person. For call centers and support positions, this will mean changing the language of the script slightly to match how a customer talks or what they understand.
It can be as simple as dropping jargon that a customer doesn’t understand or switching to providing examples as you explain something.
For your job, it can also mean being adaptable in how you interact with people. Someone might ask a question on social, via email, using webchat, or on the phone. Think about how you’d explain something on each of those where the interactions are different.
This is a perfect skill to master by finding different customer service jobs that allow you to meet and interact with many types of people.
13. Friendliness
Do you get along with others and can you make people smile? Can you smile while talking with someone who is having a grumpy day?
Friendliness is a great skill for any customer service agent. It helps customers relax and makes them feel more comfortable getting help. Employers like it too because positive language can get people focused on resolving issues instead of their anger about the problem. Thanking customers and getting them on your side improves how long they want to keep being a customer.
The best place to demonstrate this is in your interviews. Try to be professional but friendly to demonstrate your capabilities.
14. Persuasiveness
Going beyond friendliness is your ability to persuade someone with your speaking. Persuasion is your ability to cause someone to take any action or think a certain way based on what you say and do. You get them to follow steps or change their mind. In the customer service world, this often is based on how you speak with them.
Being persuasive helps you convince a customer that their issue can be solved and that they’ll be happiest if they remain a customer. When you do it through empathy and compassion, it becomes a positive experience too.
To improve it, work on speaking confidently and discussing problems you have in other areas positively. If you focus on being kind and reasonable, without being dismissive, people are likely to find you very persuasive.
15. Collaboration
Customer service agents collaborate a lot! You’ll be working with a team to get knowledge, asking managers for help, or helping when an employee doesn’t understand a customer. Collaboration also helps you work with customers better, so you can solve their problems faster together.
Being a team player also helps share the workload and can get people to help you when you need it. It’s a great skill for any job, especially if you demonstrate a willingness to take direction and let others lead during collaboration.
Group projects and team sports are smart ways to practice and improve your ability to collaborate.
16. Tenacity
When you deal with people all day, especially angry ones, it can be discouraging. Tenacity is your ability to persist and work through those feelings to keep on providing support with a smile.
In customer service, tenacity will help you to keep working through all your tasks. It’s also useful when you have a tough client or problem, so you don’t give up before the issue is resolved. Customer service agents are often evaluated based on their ability to help a customer. Being tenacious will help you get high marks and meet your goals.
17. Task management
Solving someone’s problems or providing customer service usually involves a series of tasks. First, you answer the phone, then you chat about the issue, determine how to fix it, and finally start the process to apply that fix. Task management is your ability to handle the entire interaction and all of these connected small tasks.
While you should have help in the form of a script to follow, you still need the ability to move from one task to the next in the right order. The skill focuses you on the overall goal and how to get there, ensuring that the customer can understand each step and follow through to solve their problem.
Think of it like solving a jigsaw puzzle where you complete the border and then start working on the inside. Playing games with friends, doing a puzzle, and even cooking with a recipe are fantastic ways to practice your ability to follow these steps and manage a task.
18. Time management
Time management skills cover your ability to get everything you need to be done in a day or a period. Sometimes that means making a certain number of sales calls or answering a certain number of customer service calls. To meet these requirements, you’ll need to manage how much time is spent greeting customers, talking about their needs, and getting a resolution.
To boost time management, you’ll want to prep ahead of calls, practice email, and other responses, and learn the software you use to find answers quickly.
Time management is all about maximizing productivity. The best way to improve is to practice creating a to-do list and getting all of those items done in a set amount of time.
19. Product knowledge
You need to understand the product or service your company offers to help people. That means learning what it’s like to use it, the names for features, related jargon, and common experiences.
If you’ve landed a job or know where you’re applying, start reading the company’s site or using its products if you own them. Read FAQ documents and customer comments or watch YouTube videos to see what people say. You can demonstrate this knowledge in your interview with a company or by asking managers questions that are detailed and complex.
20. Willingness to learn
You don’t have to necessarily know everything about a product or service on your first day, but companies do want you to be willing to learn. They’ll want you to be interested in what they do or offer and see you express that interest. Discuss your willingness to learn by talking about what you’ve studied in your own time, how you learned about the products at your last job, or other times where you’ve discovered more.
21. Honesty
Being willing to learn comes with an important note: you’ll need to admit that you don’t know everything. Openness about what you do and don’t know is important in customer service because you need customers to trust you. Honesty is your ability to express that and other truthful information even when it’s difficult or may cause you a problem.
Being honest with customers can help you get to a problem faster and determine when you can or can’t help. In many cases, this is when you’ll escalate a problem to an engineer or someone with more knowledge. If you’re not honest about what you can do, then customers either don’t get a resolution or you waste a lot of time trying things that won’t work.
22. Problem-solving focus
Building on top of honesty is a focus on solving problems. What we mean here is your willingness to put the customer first and solve their issue the best way possible, and usually, companies want it done the fastest way possible too. This skill includes your ability to identify a problem and determine if you have what it takes to solve it.
This focus helps you know when to try and figure out a solution or recognize if the issue is too complex and you need help. The more you learn about a product and the more experience you have with customer service, the better you’ll be.
What you want to do is ensure that you keep the customer’s problem as your focus and work to resolve it above everything else.
23. Responsiveness
Responsiveness is your ability to react quickly and positively. It’s a broad skill that encompasses many things we’ve already discussed. Think of it as your ability to bring other customer service skills together for a single action.
So, being responsive means you’re able to listen to an issue, determine if you can solve it, and then take the best next step. The faster you can accomplish this, the more responsive you are. Part of responsiveness is how you communicate and express yourself, so the customer can follow your train of thought and get the help you’re trying to provide.
Practice responsiveness by paying attention to what people say and responding to that directly before the conversation or interaction moves on to the next topic. If you’re practicing with a friend, ask them a question and then a relevant follow-up before you tell your own story.
24. Handling surprises
Now and then, you’re going to get something that takes you by surprise. That’s okay; it comes with the job. The skill you want is to learn how to handle surprises, so you’re not shaken or prevented from helping. This covers things like keeping your cool when someone is hostile but also how you react when your computer crashes and you’ve still got a customer on the phone.
How do you stay focused when something happens that you couldn’t have predicted?
One skill to help here is your ability to stay focused and rely on training and tools to get you through. Take the initiative to stay on target and focus on the task at hand.
25. Forgiveness
Customers sometimes say mean things. They can be rude or hurtful. A misunderstanding might frustrate them, and they take it out on you. That’s part of customer service. What will help you most in these situations is the ability to recognize that they’re upset about a situation or a company policy, not at you.
And then, you forgive them for it.
Letting it go and not holding a grudge will make your work much more enjoyable. Sometimes, things are going to get through and hurt—it’s okay to be human. The skill that will help with this is learning to forgive and move on while reassuring the customer and chatting with a smile.
