Eight Soft Skills That Every Call Center Agent Should Have!

Call center agents are the face of every business, as they are the first ones that customers come in contact with. They are the ambassadors of your business, and they can influence your business positively or negatively.

While most call centers ensure that the agents possess all the hard skills to be successful in their jobs, they need to focus on the soft skills that help your customers perceive them positively.

Let us take a moment to define call center soft skills.

Call center soft skills are interpersonal and emotional abilities that enable agents to handle customer interactions with empathy, clarity, and confidence.

The three key attributes of a call center agent’s soft skills include the ability to listen, acknowledge the customer’s problem, and respond with empathy. There are a lot of related attributes that we will look at as a part of this article.

Now that we have spoken about soft skills let us look at how they differ from hard skills.

Hard Skills vs. Soft Skills in a Call Center

Hard skills are those that can be taught, while soft skills are those that have to be cultivated.

Hard skills are very task-oriented and are clearly measurable. This will include the agent’s product knowledge, ability to troubleshoot, and knowledge of CRM tools.

Soft skills are those that are not easily measurable, and you need to measure them through related metrics like CSAT, NPS, etc. These skills include active listening, patience, emotional intelligence, and adaptability.

Call center agents need a combination of hard and soft skills for them to resolve customer queries efficiently.

Assuming that the agents have the necessary hard skills, we will focus on the soft skills that call center agents need to have in this article.

1. Listen. Listen. Listen

Research states that 60% of business problems can be attributed to poor communication. Your ability to listen will help improve your communication.

Listening is less about the words a customer says and more about what is said in between the lines. The most important attribute is to acknowledge the customers’ problems, and trust me, as they will feel heard and valued.

A few things you should do include:

• Acknowledge the problem before moving to solutions
• Clarify your understanding by repeating key points back to customers
• Pick up on tone and verbal cues and reply accordingly.

2. Empathy

80% of customers want customer service to be more empathetic and responsive.

Empathy is about truly understanding and relating to customer concerns and frustrations. Great agents can do this effectively by putting themselves in the customer’s shoes – this greatly helps in de-escalating tense situations.

When you practice empathy, your customers will feel understood and comfortable in the resolution process.

3. Patience

Oftentimes, customers do not know how to explain their problems. Once you don’t understand the situation, how would you provide the solution?

The agents need to have patience to guide the customers step by step and understand the situation.

Let us flip this and look at a frustrated customer. You know that you are having a challenging conversation. With patience, you can guide your customers toward a solution without escalating the situation.

Patience helps customers and creates a positive environment.

4. Communication Clarity

Agents must be able to communicate clearly, understand customer needs, and ensure messages are easy to follow.

This works in close alignment with active listening. You should be able to listen to your customers and respond appropriately by following these principles:

• Adapt tone and language to customer preferences
• Avoid jargon while speaking
• Always use positive language irrespective of the situation

5. Flexibility

As an agent, you would face these situations regularly – switching tasks, handling different types of customers, and dealing with unpredictable call volumes.

You will have to be flexible enough to adapt to these changing environments. You will come across customers who are angry, frustrated, and simply unhappy. They may get in touch with you through multiple channels like voice, email, mobile app, chatbot, website, and social. The inquiries can vary from simple to really complex, and you may have to involve people from other teams to solve them.

What is that trait that would allow you to handle these situations?

It is your ability to maintain high levels of service by being flexible. The skills you may have to bring here include your ability to listen, communicate, and stay calm and patient through the process.

6. Emotional Intelligence

Agents with high emotional intelligence report a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction.

It is very easy to lose your cool with a customer who is angry and abusive. While you don’t have to take everything that comes from your abusive customers, you need to understand they probably have their reasons for feeling the way they do.

It is very important to understand and manage your emotions, as well as the emotions of others. Emotional intelligence would help in ensuring customers’ happiness.

7. Problem-Solving Skills

The agents should be empowered enough to solve problems for customers themselves. Let me give you a few examples.

• A customer books a non-refundable hotel booking through a travel portal. He checks in, and he doesn’t like the place. He calls the customer service of the travel portal and requests a hotel change. Under normal circumstances, the agent would have mentioned the portal’s SOP and refused a change of hotel. Instead, the agent checks the customer’s profile, understands that he is a long-standing customer, and makes alternate arrangements to ensure the customer is comfortable.
• My father-in-law had a subscription to an OTT platform on his mobile bill, as he clicked some links without understanding its purpose. When he called their customer service to reverse the subscription money from the bill amount, the agent checked that he had not even logged in to the platform. He happily took the request to reverse the subscription amount on his bill.

Both these examples describe the problem-solving abilities of the agents. For this, the agents need to be empowered. The agents should be trained on areas they can address independently and should also be given some discretionary powers with respect to the budgets.

8. Organization

Being organized is one of the most important skills for an agent, especially in a high-volume call center.

You should be able to:

• Handle multiple conversations
• Track follow-up tasks
• Meet deadlines and expectations
• Achieve, measure, and monitor metrics

Ensure that you have omnichannel capabilities and the ability to unify data and self-service capabilities.

How Do You Develop and Improve Call Center Skills?

Training

Conduct comprehensive induction and onboarding training. Besides, conduct regular refresher programs for your agents.

As a part of the training, get your agents to shadow other experienced and successful agents.

This would allow your agents to learn practical skills and problem-solving tips.

This would include both the hard and soft skills for agents. Monitor the progress of your agents, identify the skills gap, and take them through additional training if needed to ensure that you provide exceptional customer experiences.

Listen to Recorded Calls

Review recorded calls to understand what works and what doesn’t and identify coaching opportunities. Run analytics on recorded calls to understand recurring customer challenges and convert them into a knowledge base, FAQ, and self-service tools.

Role-Play

Use scripted role-plays of different and difficult customer scenarios. This would allow you to understand how to handle complex and challenging situations and customers while you can receive feedback in a safe environment.

Exceptional customer experiences start with exceptional agents. How do you get exceptional agents?

It comes through comprehensive training on both hard and soft skills, especially the soft skills. Investing in soft skills not only enhances customer satisfaction but also helps employee morale and retention.

By nurturing these soft skills mentioned in this article, call centers can transform routine interactions into memorable experiences for both customers and agents.