Thanks to the rise of e-learning tools, employee training is now in the reach of organisations of all sizes.
As an obvious result, today, more organisations are investing in the professional development of their employees than ever before.
Unfortunately, when most organisations think about employee training, all they can think about is technical skills.
Sure, training these ‘hard’ skills important for your business to progress and of course, these skills are also desired by employees, in the hopes of pushing themselves further up on the corporate ladder.
However, the truth is that no matter how technically qualified your team is, without the presence of basic soft skills, it will not be able to function efficiently.
The importance of developing soft skills is especially high for customer service professionals. This is because soft skills are people skills and the customer service representatives of your business deal with the most important people for your business- your customers.
Thankfully, training customer representatives has become easier than ever with the rise of elearning tools like learning management systems.
For instance, Docebo LMS pricing is set keeping the bootstrapped training budgets of small organizations.
So what soft skills are relevant for customer service professionals?
Let us find out:
Communication Skills
This is an obvious one.
Communication skills are perhaps the skill you may already be judging while conducting interviews for customer service positions.
However, can you say with confidence that your current team has exemplary communication skills?
If not, it is time to teach your customer service staff the art of effectively and politely getting their point across. At the same time, it is also important to ensure that they are good listeners.
In fact, listening and effectively communicating are the kind of skills that should be taught to all employees within your organisation.
With a workforce that can communicate effectively, you can be sure that you will see a boost in efficiency and productivity.
Organisation
Customer service reps are some of the busiest professionals in any organisation.
Dealing with a high and intense workload throughout their day, it is imperative for customer service professionals to stay organised.
This is because managing multiple customer interactions, following up service requests, providing solutions to grievances, and staying on top of new support requests can be an overwhelming administrative nightmare.
The only way to manage such a workload is to be efficiently organised.
Thankfully, besides soft skills training, you can also implement a number of automation tools like GanttPRO that will make it easier for your support staff to stay organised.
Stress Management
As mentioned in the previous point, customer service representatives deal with a lot during any given work day. Often, managing so many things at once can turn out to be stressful business.
In such a scenario, if an employee does not know how to deal with the stress, they may not be able to withstand the intense work pressure and may go through a mental burnout.
Avoiding this burnout is important for your organisation because it doesn’t just leave you with fewer resources, it also affects the morale of the rest of your team.
Conclusion
Besides teaching your customer service employees about stress management, organisation, and communication, you should also be on the lookout for resources that already display a honed set of soft skills.
This is because other attributes of a successful customer service rep, like empathy, enthusiasm, and emotional intelligence are not things you can teach with employee training programs.
