Your customer service or customer experience team is often the first line of defense when delivering your products or services to your market. Customer service representatives are, at times, the only contact that a consumer of your product or service will have with your company. This makes customer service skills very important.
This article summarizes essential customer service skills that are essential for your customer service team to continue delivering effective service during the covid-19 pandemic.
1. Adaptability Skills
Adaptability is a soft skill that means being able to rapidly learn new skills and behaviors in response to changing circumstances.
The direct impact of Covid-19 to most businesses is the loss of direct contact with the customer. With the ministry of health encouraging people to work from home, and lock-downs or cessation of movement, companies are being forced to look for alternative ways to engage their customers remotely. Use of basic automation systems will enable your team to continue engaging your customers remotely and thus sustain your business.
Your customer service team needs to easily adapt to the ever changing and rapidly growing customer experience related technology such as live chat, online messaging, chatbots, CRM systems, and other systems that help to maintain or enhance continuous engagement with your customers remotely.
2. Collaboration Skills
Collaboration skill is an integral part of delivering quality customer service to your customers. Collaboration skills enable your customer service staff to successfully work together toward a common goal. During the COVID-19 pandemic, your staff are likely to be forced to work from different locations. Some may work from home due to being sick and/or quarantined while others may be affected by government measures such as lock-downs.
Your customer service staff will need to enhance their collaboration skills to ensure that in all instances, your customers receive the best service whether by those working from home or those working at the office. Use of technology is also paramount to enhance your customer service team's collaboration skills.
3. Communication Skills
Communication is one of the most crucial customer service skills for any customer experience team. Communication skills help your customer service staff to give and receive correct and useful information to your customers. A customer service team that has perfected its communication skills easily understands and can empathize with any customer’s needs which is very important when handling customers.
Communication skills enable your team to effectively engage with the customers and eventually resolve their issues or enable the sale of your products or services.
4. Empathy
Empathy is the ability to understand your customers' emotions and their point of view. During the Covid-19 pandemic, your customer service team may need to be more empathetic since the effects of the pandemic vary from one person to another. Your customer service team needs to understand that your customers may be going through hard times psychologically and may need closer attention than usual. Understanding your customers' emotions will always enhance the chances of them buying your product or service.
Corporate Team Building and Corporate Staff Training In Kenya
At Smart Skills trainers we provide corporate team building and staff training programs suitable for customer service and customer experience teams in Kenya. We have a variety of team building training and corporate staff training venues in Kenya for organizations that prefer outdoor team building activities. We also provide indoor team building and adventure team building programs for customer service teams. This unique diversity ensures that we meet each customer service team's specific team building needs based on it's demography and objectives.
