Customer Support Skills

Empathy is the most important skill you need if you are in customer support because you’ll talk to different kinds of customers from varied backgrounds every day. Here are some tips on how to cultivate empathy.

Customers need to know that you understand how they feel and that you are on their side. They should be able to end a conversation on a happy note even when they didn’t get their way. As a support agent, you can achieve this only by successfully expressing empathy. Here are ways in which you can express empathy.

There are many occasions in customer support when you'll have turn down a customer. Maybe the customer asked for a product or a service you don’t offer. Or maybe the customer made an unreasonable or even an unethical demand. So learning to say no is an essential skill you need as a support rep. In this video, we will go over the 6 important points to keep in mind while saying no to customers.

If you are in a customer facing role, you will often have to deal with people who are aggressive, abusive, unreasonable or even reasonable people who are simply stressed out. This video will walk your through making these conversations easier and less stressful for you and your customer.

We are wired to pay more attention to negative news than the positive ones. That’s why, as a brand, it’s very important to get something as public as customer support on Twitter right. There are no hard and fast rules on how you should approach Twitter support, but there are certainly ways to get better at it and keep evolving.

Customers frequently discuss their grievances about businesses on Facebook. They also often go to Facebook to get recommendations from their friends and colleagues. This makes Facebook a huge platform to tap into which makes it important to get something as public as customer support right.

For a support agent, demotivation happens due to four major reasons:

• Repetitive nature of the work,

• general low spirit,

• lethargy and

• bad customer interactions.

In this video, we discuss the ways to overcome demotivation caused by the repetitive nature of work.

When a customer writes in with a problem, you want to do everything in your power to make sure that their problem is resolved. And you think you’ve gone above and beyond the call of duty to do the job – you replied on time, your emails were grammatically correct and you mentioned (multiple times) that you were delighted to help them out. Yet, the customer seems to like you lesser and lesser with every interaction – they’re not as happy to hear from you, they’re tweeting behind your back and they’ve gone so far as to request another support rep! How do you deal with that? How can you prevent this from happening? Learn by watching this video.

As you are in a customer facing role, you will get a lot of feedback about your product/service and your company in general. Your job of helping customers doesn’t stop as soon as you listen to their feedback. It also involves passing on the important feedback to the right owners and doing everything you can to implement it.

Now that's not always easy because more often than not, customer support teams are not in a position to fix issues like other teams (project managers, engineers, or even the marketing team). So it's important to learn how to communicate key customer feedback to the owners and help them implement it.