What are Soft Skills in Call Center
Call Center is a customer-driven industry. The more a customer is happy with a brand’s customer service, the more the chances that that brand becomes famous among the people.
Today most companies, especially new startups, are very watchful about customer service, which is why almost every small and big company is outsourcing its customer service segment to a good call center or BPO.
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| What are Soft Skills in a Call Center |
The main reason why most enterprises prefer to outsource their customer segment to a BPO or a call center is because of a dedicated quality team a BPO has who rigorously monitors every interaction of agents with customers and if required shares stringent feedback with the customer service expert on customer handling skills.
Customer handling skills include communication, writing, and soft skills.
In today’s segment, we will discuss soft skills in call center and how to train agents on soft skills.
Without further ado let’s start with the topic ” Soft Skills in Call Center “.
What are Soft Skills in Call Center?
Although, now with the advancement of technology, there are multiple channels e.g. chatbot and other AI (Artificial Intelligence) models, by which a customer can interact with the call center, however, 50% of customers prefer to interact with a live agent and that is because of an emotional connection that a call center agent can generate with the help of effective communication and soft skills.
We can define call center soft skills as a ”Characteristic or attribute which is helpful to deliver a high-quality customer experience’‘.
Moving ahead, let’s understand 5 common soft skills in call center on which agents must be coached or trained if a call center aims to generate high customer satisfaction.
1. Empathetic Skills:
One of the main soft skills in call center on which agent should be trained is Empathetic Skills. The empathetic skills of a call center agent can be understood as:
“Sensing someone’s emotion and responding in the way as if you are feeling the same emotions and sadness.”
In customer service, empathetic skills are very important. A call center agent or a customer service representative has to handle multiple calls or chats in a day. Sometimes he/she has to experience an irate customer or a customer who is suffering from any loss e.g. financial, health, or any beloved one. In such cases, the agent should handle the case very gently and should show empathetic skills before handling the main reason for the call.
Call center agents can use the below scripts as well to show their empathic skills.
“Sure Mr. Customer I can understand the pain and if I had been in your place, I would have felt the same.”
2. Effective Communication Skills:
Often, people relate communication skills to proficiency in the English language and think that the one who has a good command of the English language has effective communication skills but this is a complete myth.
The fact is that there is no relation between effective communication skills and the English language. Effective communication means how well a person or an agent is able to effectively deliver his message to the customer, irrespective of the language. Successful Effective Communication means a customer has zero doubts about the message delivered by the agent.
“For a good customer effort score, a call center must train its agents in Effective Communication Skills.”
3. Active listening Skills:
Listening skills are one of the major soft skills in a call center. Active listening skills mean an agent is not involved in any other activity when interacting with customers and listening to their issues with great attention. By following active listening skills an agent can understand the customer’s issue in detail and the customer does not have to repeat the issue again.
Not listening to customers’ issue carefully and asking them to repeat the issue again, not only makes the customer angry but also increase the chances of customer dissatisfaction, resulting in a low NPS score.
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4. Good Listening Skills:
The other soft skill in call center, which is often overlooked by the call center is Good listening skills.
Good listening skills mean listening to the customer without interruption. This helps a call center agent to understand the customer’s concern in a better way which results in a quick and effective resolution.
Often people get confused about the difference between active and good listening skills and used both the term interchangeably when both terms are different and have different meanings.
5. Problem-Solving Skills:
The problem-Solving skills of a call center agent mean understanding the customer’s problem and root cause. brainstorming it with the available resources and trying to resolve the issue effectively.
Sometimes the resolution of the problem may not be available immediately then seeking help from the floor supervisor is the best option to opt for.
Importance of Soft Skills in Call Center
Now let’s see what is the importance of Soft Skills in a Call Center.
- To Improve Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score.
- To Improve the call/chat quality scores of a call center
- To Improve the Net promotor Score (NPS) of a call center.
- Develop customer handling skills as a call center agent.
- With the improvement in metrics it also results in high revenue generation for the call center.
So, Readers, these are some major soft skills and their importance that every call center needs to take care of to improve their customer satisfaction and NPS goal. These soft skills must also be developed in every agent if you are looking to improve the quality score.
I hope that the content of the above article has definitely helped in understanding soft skills and their importance in call centers. If you like this article then do share your opinion in the comment box.
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