Skills Needed for Customer Service Staff

An obsession with customer experience is becoming a strong competitive advantage for many businesses, while the lack of it could be fatal. The trend is warranted, according to Microsoft’s 2018 State of Global Customer Service Report, 56% of customers reported having higher expectations for customer service now than they did the previous year and this number jumped to 70% for customers ages 18-34.

In our real-time, always-on, digital world, customer expectations continue to rise. Outstanding customer service is the key to retaining and delighting your customer base. Exceptional customer service allows companies to resolve customer issues, increase cross-sell and up-sell opportunities, and nurture a loyal customer base. Loyal customers refer new customers, serve as case studies and testimonials, and write positive public-facing reviews. They’re essential to your company’s word-of-mouth marketing.

Skills needed for customer service roles are both soft skills-based and technical. For businesses to keep up with the rapidly increasing role of customer service in their long-term success, human resources (HR) leaders need to build strong customer service teams. Accurately identifying individuals with the required skills is critical to realizing a return on investment in human capital.

Utilizing a data-driven hiring process, HR teams can lead a strategic approach to find the most qualified staff. Leveraging eSkill’s library of customer service soft skills and subject-based assessments, you will be able to identify candidates who possess the aptitude needed for customer service positions, increasing the employee retention rate and productivity, while saving time and money.

Injecting ‘People’ Skills

Sometimes, in our pursuit of higher customer satisfaction, we forget the people who are ultimately pushing scores higher: employees. While technology supports customer service reps, the human behind the technology is ultimately what drives positive customer experiences. eSkill offers a variety of customer service technology skills tests, that not only evaluate candidates’ ability to operate modern technology like virtual chat but to assess soft skills.

eSkill’s customer service skills tests integrate questions and simulations that measure soft skills to acquire a real, measurable analysis of candidates’ personality traits. These assessments use non-obvious statistical correlations between how an applicant responds to specific questions and their on-the-job performance. Quantitatively measuring behavioral intelligence takes the guesswork out of determining if candidates’ personalities are the right fit for a customer service position.

Subject-Based Skill Assessments

eSkill offers a variety of subject-based skills tests that measure candidates’ likelihood to thrive in specific customer service positions. Below is a look at common job-based skills needed for customer service positions

• Basic Financial Skills
  • eSkill’s ‘Customer Service – Financial’ assessment covers common financial issues, decision-making scenarios, financial operations, and the ability to work well in a team.
• Sales and Presentation Skills
  • To truly excel in customer service, reps need to have some mastery of persuasion to convince interested prospects into purchasing a product or service.
  • eSkill’s ‘Sales Concepts’ assessment covers building relationships, closing, communications, handling objections, professionalism, profiling prospects, strategy, and tactics.
  • eSkill’s ‘Presenter Skills’ assessment addresses presentation challenges, etiquette, goals, methods, and setup.
• Customer Service – Hospitality
  • eSkill’s ‘Customer Service – Hospitality’ assessment covers basic hospitality tasks, basic hospitality terms, booking issues, handling guest complaints, and hospitality and teamwork.
• Typing and Data Entry
  • Typing and data entry are apart of almost every customer service reps’ workload.
  • eSkill offers a wide variety of typing and data entry assessments, including form-fill data entry, general typing, call center typing, financial typing, 10-key data entry, and contact data entry.
• Virtual Chat Skills
  • Live chat is increasingly popular among customers as a means of asking questions due to its convenience and efficiency.
  • eSkill’s ‘Chat Simulation’ assessment covers candidates’ ability to manage multiple chat messages at the same time, and perform different tasks like responding to customer inquiries, process orders, respond to customer requests, and resolve customer disputes.
• Email Etiquette Skills
  • According to a recent report, 54% of customers surveyed reported using email to access customer service.
  • eSkill’s ‘Email Etiquette’ assessment covers content and formatting, email functions, terms and tactics, email tone, how to address emails, and salutations and sign-offs.
• Call Center Skills
  • For more complicated issues, such as payment disputes, 40% of customers reported that they prefer to talk to a person over the phone.
  • eSkill’s ‘Call Center’ assessment covers attitude on the phone, communication, customer service, inbound call center procedures, outbound call center procedures, professionalism, and listening.
  • In addition to the ‘Call Center’ assessment, eSkill offers both an inbound call center simulation as well as an outbound call center simulation. These simulations evaluate candidates’ ability to handle complaints and requests and the ability to fundraise, make sales calls, and complete phone surveys, and telemarketing skills.

Recently, a survey found that the majority of executives surveyed believe intelligent technologies will create new opportunities for work in the next five years, and it will be critical for employees working in customer service to learn new skills to work with these technologies.

Job-Based Skill Assessments

Easily combinable with any subject-based assessments, eSkill’s job-based assessments provide an ‘out-of-the-box’ solution for evaluating customer service manager skills or other career-specific skills. Below are two of the job-based skill assessments commonly used in the customer-centric hospitality industry.

• Hospitality Manager
  • eSkill’s ‘Hospitality Manager’ assessment covers many topics, including customer service, food, and beverage knowledge, event planning skills. It can be used as a skill assessment for restaurant manager, kitchen manager, restaurant general manager, or restaurant area supervisor.
• Food and Beverage Manager
  • eSkill’s ‘Food and Beverage Manager’ assessment covers many topics, including management and leadership skills, event planning, and customer service and business communication skills.

Whatever skillset is needed for a customer-facing position, it is possible to test it with eSkill’s wide variety of simulation and multiple-choice skills tests and assessments. eSkill offers hundreds of single-subject skills tests related to the hospitality industry. eSkill’s skills tests and assessments can be customized to match the processes and procedures of your business, creating an optimized approach to vetting candidates. Using pre-employment assessments to make hiring decisions supported by data will increase employee retention rates, ultimately saving your organization the agony of costly turnover.

Interested in Customer Service Skills Tests and Behavioral Assessments?

Learn about the benefits of using eSkill’s customer service skills tests and behavioral assessments to find qualified candidates quickly.

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