Contact centers rely on agents to provide great customer service with every interaction. Without productive and skillful agents, you risk losing clients, your reputation, and your revenue, and delivering a bad customer experience. If you do not want these, you should employ call center agents with necessary skills, but what are these skills? Now, it is time to focus on significant characteristics of call center agent and call center skills and abilities!
Being Friendly
Call center agents have a big role in presenting a great customer experience, and they should use gentle spoken language when providing the experience. The positive spoken language should take with amiableness for reaching better results in terms of customers, so call center agents should be friendly. Generally, customers prefer friendly and warm call center agents for solve their issues, so you should employ this type of call center agent. On the other hand, your call center agents should not cross the line of customers, and they should keep the necessary distance while communicating with customers.
Effective Communication Skills
Effective communication skills for call center agents are very important in the call center world because their main job is communicating. In other words, when you think about the best skills for call center agent, you should focus on communication skills because the call center agents who have top-drawer communication skills can do their job in a good way.
When communication skills are mentioned, a lot of people focus on only talking, but that is not the exact situation. Communication also involves understanding and meaning, so there are main elements of communication which must be considered by call center agents. The elements of communication are source, message, channel, receiver, feedback, environment, context, and interference, and these all elements should be known by call center agents; call center agents can be the source or receiver, so they can both send the main message to the receiver and give feedback to the source. Due to the circumstance, they should shape their words according to their role in communication. Furthermore, they should always use simple and apprehensible words when they try to understand customer issues and produce proper solutions to these issues. Also, active listening skills for call center agents can be covered by effective communication skills because call center agents must listen customers to learn their problems in a good way. Otherwise, they cannot provide customers with quick and logical solutions if they do not listen to customer issues actively. Generally, call center agents should listen, speak, and produce effectively and properly to make customers happy. Hence, the importance of good communication in BPO companies should be realized while employing a call center agent.
Technical Skills
Dealing with call center software without a lot of problems is too important for offering better customer experience, so technical skills for call center agents should be listed and tested in a detailed way by employers. In the contrary case, a huge waste of time and unhappy customers will be encountered.
Being Empathetical
Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another person, and the ability is a significant skill for call center agent. Customers can phone call centers for their different problems and request fast solutions to the problems. Although there are customer situations that do not require quick solutions, call center agents need to empathize with customers and try to solve these problems as if they are solving their own problems. Moreover, call center agents should use empathetic sentences, like ‘’I am sorry to hear that. Let me see what I can do.’’. If agents show empathy to customers, both customer satisfaction and the number of customers increases. Also, customers do not feel like they are talking to a robot, and they become happy.
Being Detail-Oriented
As you can predict, call center agents must pay attention to the details in the statements of customers. Generally, similar complaints are mentioned on the phone with call center agents, but these complaints can involve different details, so they may need different solutions. If a call center agent approaches what every customer says in the same way, s/he cannot find the right solutions for different issues, and customer satisfaction decreases. Because of the circumstance, call center agents should be detail-oriented and seek clarification. As an employer, you can analyze the resumes of call center agent candidates; if a resume does not cover important details, and it looks sloppy, you can understand that the owner of the resume is not a good candidate because s/he does not pay much attention to details.
Organizational Skills
When the subject is the qualifications for a call center agent, organizational skills should not be missed. As mentioned above, call center agents deal with different duties, and, most of the time, they should handle multiple tasks at once. Because of the situation, they must be organized and have necessary organizational skills. If they utilize their organizational skills, they can complete their duties at the right time and increase customer satisfaction. In other words, they can decrease the number of errors when they take care of customer needs if they make their organizational skills active.
Being Creative
One of the important skills in call center is creativity because customers can come up with compelling issues, and call center agents should produce the best solution for these issues. If call center agents are not creative, they cannot find the best solution, and customer satisfaction cannot increase. Hence, call center agents must use their creativity while they are trying to produce effective solutions. With effective solutions to customer problems, the probability of doing business again with the customers increases.
Problem-Solving Skills
For finishing the list of call center agent requirements, problem-solving skills, that are one of the important call center soft skills, should be mentioned. One of the parts of call center agents’ job is solving customer problems, so they must have necessary problem-solving skills. Customers can present different problems, so every solution cannot work efficiently for every customer. Due to the circumstance, call center agents should create different solutions according to customer issues with the help of their problem-solving skills. Also, call center agents should support their problem-solving skills with critical thinking. If you want to increase customer satisfaction, you should employ call center agents with problem-solving skills and the ability of critical thinking because your agents will not encounter common problems everytime.
Call Center Studio offers a platform that gives the ability of checking on call center agents’ performance and reporting. With this platform, you can focus on the details of your agents’ performance and satisfaction. If you want to improve your agents’ skills by utilizing the details, feel free to request a demo.
