The Hard Truth: Soft Skills Are Essential to Your Contact Centre
In addition to allocating more resources to new technology and multichannel outreach, unlock the hidden value in improving the “soft” skills of your agents.
Can your agents answer the phone? Can they take down information? Do they follow a script well?
If you answered yes, then great! Your team has their “hard” skills down.
Now, can they maintain professionalism in the face of an angry customer? How flexible are they in their problem solving? Do they appear on time and show a desire to improve?
These are the “soft” skills that the contact centre relies on.
Most hard skills can be learned on the job; it’s the soft skills that are difficult to develop, creating a challenge for contact centres that rely on the soft skills of their agents to create an outstanding customer experience.
The Value of Soft Skills
Your customer service team is the lifeblood of your contact centre. The success of these agents depends on their ability to effectively communicate and provide quality service to your customers.
Hard skills comprise the specific duties required to succeed at your job, while soft skills focus on general attributes that embody an employee’s attitude, workplace habits, and quality of work. When it comes to customer service, hard and soft skills are the wings of an airplane; you need both to get off the ground. Unfortunately, employers often prioritize hard skills over soft skills, creating a workplace that is unbalanced, ill-equipped to handle customer needs, and destined to crash.
Softening the Skills
KPIs, CRM systems, and concrete feedback metrics can be considered the “science” of the contact centre, but the soft skills of your agents are more “art” than science. There aren’t any numbers or metrics that can measure the personality of your employees, their ability to connect with callers, or the value they bring to an interaction.
Because of the abstract nature of soft skills, managers have a larger than average responsibility to take the helm in developing these skills in contact centre agents.
Essential Coaching
The best way to develop soft skills is to have experts supervise your team to determine how effectively they meet customer expectations. Experience alone may not be enough to elevate your team from passable agents to exemplary employees. Sometimes, a hands-on approach is necessary:
- Examine each ‘moment of truth’ of the customer experience during a call. Could the agent have done or said more to maximize the experience? The entire customer journey is critical, and poor performance in just one area of the customer service chain can be severely detrimental to the entire interaction.
- Stress the importance of specific goals or metrics that are of value to your contact centre and help your agents learn the best ways of meeting these goals.
- Listen to recorded calls to hear firsthand how well your agents are meeting your customer’s needs and review the call with them to learn how the interaction could be improved.
Customer Feedback
While employer feedback is great, feedback from your customers is equally necessary to learn how to improve your service. This is one of the best ways to provide actionable feedback that can be applied to improve the abilities of your team, all provided by the customers who need help from you. This give-and-take relationship is a fundamental part of improving the soft skills of your team.
- Provide platforms for customer feedback, whether through phone surveys, email, social media, or any other channel they might prefer.
- Learn from problems that arise during customer interactions. If callers take issue with any aspect of your service, you have found an opportunity to grow.
- Take customer feedback seriously and apply it to the specific skills of each agent to learn how to shore up unique employee weaknesses.
Hard Skills to Master
While hard skills are necessary for your agents to learn, the soft skills of your agents are what your customers will remember after the call is done. The folks at Zendesk report that 39 percent of customers will avoid vendors for 2 or more years after a bad experience.
To keep your customers happy, make sure your team is properly trained in the finer points of customer management. This includes ensuring that they are personable, creative, and willing to go the extra mile. It’s nearly impossible to find these traits in a random agent, but with the right managerial coaching and appropriate feedback to guide them, the soft skills of your team can be enhanced to provide a highly-effective customer experience.
Curious about how else soft skills can improve customer perceptions of your contact centre? Download our free white paper!