The 5 Things All Successful Customer Care Professionals Do
What skills are important when recruiting and evaluating customer care professionals (aka CCPs)? How do you develop exceptional CCPs who have meaningful conversations with customers? Through extensive work with thousands of customer call center operations, LivePerson has identified the top five most important skills a CCP needs for success. Here’s our breakdown.
Own the conversation.
- Commit to keeping the conversation flowing and driving the it toward a defined resolution.
- Ask more specific questions like “What brought you to our site today?” in place of general questions, e.g., “How can I help you?”
- Summarize the conversation’s outcome to ensure nothing’s been left to interpretation.
- End the conversation politely and resolutely.
Be truly helpful at every step.
- If chat isn’t actually helpful, customers won’t use the feature again. You need to listen and respond to the customer’s needs. This requires more effort than just answering their questions. Successful CCPs read between the lines and frame answers in the most straightforward way possible.
- It’s critical to understand the situation at any given moment and know when to escalate to the next service level.
- Every message should get an immediate response, even if it’s to tell the customer you’ll get back to them. If you need to look something up, let the customer know the situation. If you leave a customer waiting unexpectedly, they may leave the conversation, and the company will lose a sales opportunity or the chance to create a loyal customer.
Communicate professionally
- Watch your language. Use proper grammar, punctuation, and spelling in complete, thoughtful sentences and use exclamation marks sparingly. You want to come across as genuine. Be careful with acronyms and jargon that a customer may not know.
- Build a rapport, trust, and credibility with customers to make them feel like they are in capable, friendly hands. Tip: Use warm language to convey your tone of voice in chat.
- Of course it should go without saying: Always avoid phrases that could be construed as sarcastic or cast a negative light over the interaction.
Multitask seamlessly.
- CCPs should be comfortable accessing and switching between tools during a conversation to to provide the most accurate and complete service possible. These tools may include CRM, a sales/lead-gen system, the company website, a product management system, knowledge base, product manuals, and paper collateral, among others.
- Successful agents have the unique ability to chat with multiple customers simultaneously, without compromising service to any of them.
- It’s also key accurately determine how much time you should spend with each customer at any given moment.
Exhibit subject matter expertise.
- CCPs need an in-depth knowledge of the business, products, processes, systems, and policies.
- Guide and mentor customers in navigating the company website, mobile app or site, and social/community properties.
- Share knowledge in a way that empowers visitors the next time they stop by — as well as during their many visits to come.
What other skills of successful customer care professionals should we add to this list? Having great CCPs on your team makes all the difference between a successful chat deployment and failure. Businesses that deploy messaging on their websites should not only make sure they hire skilled CCPs but also commit to providing complete training and development opportunities for their agent force.
Have questions about our recommendations for best practices? Comment below!
Article by Barry Lamm. Originally published on the Connected Customer blog.
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