Customer Service Specialist Job Description, Skills, and Salary
Are you searching for a customer service specialist job description? Get to know about the duties, responsibilities, qualifications, and skills requirements of a customer service specialist. Feel free to use our customer service specialist job description template to produce your own customer service specialist job description. We also provide you with information about the salary you can earn as a customer service specialist.
Who is a Customer Service Specialist?
A customer service specialist is a professional who is tasked with responding to inquiries, remarks, and grievances regarding a certain company. Their ultimate objective is to improve connections with one another to deliver excellent client experiences.
Customer service specialist handles concerns and complaints regarding goods and services. In addition to assisting consumers with returns, upgrades, and purchases, they frequently offer guidance and technical support. They often do their business from residences, call centers, or office settings.
Customer service specialists handle concerns and complaints regarding goods and services. They assist clients with upgrades, refunds, and purchase completion to improve the customer experience, and they frequently offer crucial technical support.
A customer service specialist, often known as a customer service representative, offers assistance and knowledge to both potential and current clients. One of their responsibilities is to serve customers by responding to inquiries regarding the business, its goods, or its policies. They might also establish and terminate accounts, solve issues, or help with billing. While some experts may deal with clients face-to-face in a store or workplace, the majority conduct all of their business over the phone.
A customer service specialist is someone who is in charge of responding to inquiries, remarks, and complaints regarding a certain company. The ultimate objective is to improve customer interactions and deliver a great customer experience.
You require high school graduation or the equivalent, as well as on-the-job training, to work as a customer service professional or representative. Some companies can choose a connection center over an associate’s degree in business administration or a comparable discipline. For this job to be effective, you frequently require phone skills.
The face of a company’s customer experience is represented by customer service representatives. Every day, they connect with consumers to respond to inquiries, handle problems, and offer general support. Their responsibility is to make sure clients have a favorable experience dealing with the business they represent, whether it is resolving a problem or providing information about a good or service.
Customer service specialists may speak with clients directly on the phone or in person, but they also spend time conducting administrative activities like making appointments, maintaining databases, and producing management reports.
Customer Service Specialist Job Description
What is a customer service specialist job description? A customer service specialist job description is simply a list of duties and responsibilities of a customer service specialist in an organization. Below are the customer service specialist job description examples you can use to develop your resume or write a customer service specialist job description for your employee. Employers can also use it to sieve out job seekers when choosing candidates for interviews.
- Respond quickly to consumer questions via live chat, phone, video, and social media.
- Serious complaints or difficulties that you are ill-equipped to handle should be escalated right away.
- Coordinate with coworkers or management to identify the best answers to customers’ problems.
- Identify whenever feasible, frequent issues and elevate them to management with any potential solutions.
- being kind, accommodating, and professional at all times.
- Obtain client input and share it with coworkers and other departments to enhance products and services.
- Become knowledgeable about fresh goods and services as they emerge.
- Attend meetings and workshops as necessary.
- Educate new customer care representatives.
- Maintain strict client confidentiality.
- Answer customer questions via phone, email, or chat in a timely and accurate manner.
- Determine customer needs and assist customers in using particular features
- Investigate and report product issues (for example, by testing different scenarios or impersonating users)
- Add information regarding technical problems and helpful client conversations to our internal databases
- Monitor social media for consumer concerns and outreach to offer support
- Share with the team feature requests and workarounds that work.
- Inform clients of new capabilities and features
- Ensure that clients’ technical difficulties are rectified by following up with them.
- Gather customer input and share it with our product, sales, and marketing departments.
- Assist in training junior Customer Support Representatives
- Make sure to offer prompt, accurate customer support via phone, email, chat, and other channels.
- Enhance customer service and corporate efficiency, and act as the point of contact between the customer care staff, management, and the customer.
- Analyze consumer issues and offer the proper remedial measures.
- Direct or lead consumers to the proper staff members for assistance.
- Track, follow up on, and promptly address customers’ unresolved complaints.
- Create customer service initiatives to deliver exceptional service.
- Prepare records of normal customer correspondence and reports for future reference.
- Help peers learn how to provide better customer assistance.
- Develop and keep up a thorough product knowledge base.
- Get feedback on the company’s service, and conduct consumer surveys.
- Inform technical and marketing teams of consumer input to help them create procedures that will better serve customers.
- Build customer service metrics and trends, and maintain weekly reports on customer questions, replies, and comments.
- Provide exceptional customer service by responding to inquiries regarding the company’s goods or services
- Give customers information about items and services
- Perform administrative work like answering phones, filing, and typing
- Address client concerns by locating the issue’s origin and offering fixes
- Make calls to customers to advertise new items or services the business is offering
- Support clients who experience technical issues when utilizing firm goods or services
- Respond to the customer and potential customer inquiries to provide information about products or services or to take orders for new products or services.
- Make recommendations to improve business operations based on customer feedback.
- Manage the delivery and receipt of goods or materials
Qualifications
- GED or high school diploma.
- It may be useful to have a bachelor’s degree in business, communications, or a similar subject.
- It could be necessary to have practical expertise with CRM software like salesforce sales cloud and help desk software like Zendesk.
- It is preferable if you have prior experience working in customer service.
- Being able to act properly under pressure.
- Excellent decision-making and problem-solving abilities.
- Speaking a second language is maybe useful.
- Positivity and the capacity to forge connections with customers.
- The ability to work erratic hours as necessary.
- Outstanding verbal and written communication abilities.
Essential Skills
- Active listening: is the capacity to pay attention to what a consumer is saying and to react accordingly. You can come into touch with consumers who are irate or irritated as a customer service professional. You can calm them down and help them with their problems by actively listening. Additionally, you utilize listening to make sure you comprehend the demands of the client and offer the appropriate answers.
- Empathy: The capacity to comprehend and experience the emotions of another person. Specialists in customer service employ empathy to make clients feel heard and appreciated. Empathy may be used to make clients feel content with the way their problems were resolved and to entice them to keep doing business with you.
- Problem-solving skill: Using your problem-solving abilities, you may locate and fix problems for consumers. This ability may be used to assist consumers in selecting the appropriate good responding tones to their inquiries, and addressing any problems they may have with their purchases. You may assist consumers with finding discounts, applying for store credit, and saving money by using your problem-solving abilities.
- Persuasion: The capacity to persuade people to accept your thoughts or conduct is known as persuasion. Customer service representatives use persuasion to persuade clients to accept the business’ solution to a problem or to purchase a product. You may use persuasion to ensure that consumers are happy with their interactions with the business and to motivate them to do so in the future.
- Organization skill: Another trait that might help you thrive in customer service is organization. You might need to maintain track of customer data, sales statistics, and other information. You can keep track of this information and locate it more easily if you are well-organized.
- Self-control: Since customer care workers frequently interact with anxious or irate consumers who are unhappy with a product, responding tersely or turning the conversation into an insulting argument truly puts the organization in the doghouse. In this context, exercising self-control simply is treating clients with respect and refraining from arguing in an impolite manner; your interactions with them must be civil. Customers are still the best salespeople for any business and should be treated with the utmost respect. Your level of self-control will determine how satisfied a customer is with your organization.
- Team Management: you’ll be working with your team members and colleagues in other units of the organization to get updates on information and products and services offered; with this skill, you can effectively understand the workings of the system and easily communicate that to customers.
All these skills are interlinked; you can rarely function effectively without all these skills combined. Critical thinking, sophisticated problem-solving, independence, and other abilities are also necessary.
- Computer skills: Since you’ll frequently need to get data from the corporate database, you should be familiar with using simple soft programs such as Microsoft Word and Excel) to quickly access data.
- Dependability: When contacting customer care professionals, individuals want to solve their problems, not merely chat for a while. Any customer service agent should make the consumer feel at ease since this encourages the customer to rely more on the agent and relax throughout a conversation. You offer value by providing each consumer with a positive feeling.
- Interpersonal skill: People skills are often known as interpersonal skills. This is a crucial ability for a customer care agent. More clients engage with the customer service department than any other department in an organization. No matter how clueless or intrusive a customer may seem, you must know about a conversation effectively with them. In other words, you should be able to interact effectively with others regardless of their origins, personalities, attitudes, or organizational expertise. You must also be friendly.
How to Become a Customer Service Specialist
- Obtain a GED or High School Diploma: To acquire the fundamental language, thinking, and math abilities, customer service representatives must finish their high school education by earning a diploma or a GED.
Some customer care agents could require some college training. As a minimum qualification for some occupations, an associate’s degree in business administration or management may be requested.
- Develop your abilities for ongoing career advancement: A customer service professional has to have a variety of talents, but among the most crucial are those related to communication, listening, and problem-solving. Customer service personnel must be able to prioritize, multitask, and manage their time well while being flexible and responsive to various individuals. Participate in the training sessions offered by your organization to keep honing and expanding your fundamental customer service abilities. Employers frequently provide support to employees with training programs that educate them on how to utilize CRM software and computer programs while also teaching them about your company’s workflow and ways to record client interactions. You will be better prepared for any future job hunt if you develop these talents.
- Obtain certifications or licenses for your profession: You may prove that you have mastered the abilities necessary for customer service reps by obtaining professional certificates. Having a professional certification might help you stand out as a top candidate throughout a company’s recruiting process, even if it may not always be necessary depending on the particular position you’re seeking for.
The Certified Customer Service Professional designation from the National Customer Service Association, the Certified Customer Experience Professional title from the Customer Service Institute of America, and the Customer Service Representative training from HDI are examples of common field credentials. You might also need to get a license if you operate in the financial services or insurance industries. The majority of license requirements while they may differ involve a written test. In some circumstances, your company could provide training for these tests.
- Acquire Experience Through Workplace Training: The majority of customer care agents receive on-the-job training. Programs for professional certification or rep-shadowing can also help you obtain experience. Though it can run as long as a few months for some occupations, training normally lasts two to three weeks.
Training frequently includes the business you work for, its goods, frequently asked questions by clients, and the tools you’ll need for the job, such as phones and computers. Before going on to more challenging queries, you can be requested to address simpler complaints or concerns when you initially start and they will supervise your skills through regular training. Even though the majority of customer service agents undergo little training, some businesses in particular sectors may insist on months of training so you can understand more intricate rules. If you work in a field where rules are complicated or constantly change, like banking or insurance, expect longer initial training and/or ongoing training.
Where to Work as a Customer Service Specialist
- Financial Institutions
- Telecommunication Companies
- Public Utilities Companies/Agencies
Customer Service Specialist Salary Scale
In the USA, the typical compensation for a customer service specialist is $39,000 per year or $20 per hour. Most experienced professionals earn up to $48,750 per year, while entry-level roles start at $32,175 annually.
In the UK, a customer service specialist makes an average income of £22,048 per year or £11.31 per hour. Most experienced specialists earn up to £26,611 per year, while entry-level roles start at £20,960.