What To Look For When You Hire Your First Customer Service Rep

Hiring a customer service rep isn’t just a matter of giving someone a job: you’re giving them the responsibility for strengthening (and sometimes salvaging) your company’s relationships with its customers.

In the early days of starting a business, the owner might prefer to take care of any customer service issues themselves. After all, they may not have a lot of customers at that point, and any complaints or questions they hear could help them tweak their products and services.

As soon as you begin to experience a reasonable level of growth, however, troubleshooting and addressing other inquiries requires a team that can dedicate itself to the task. It might not be a large team to start with. And the first service rep you hire could set the tone for everyone else who winds up working alongside them.

You shouldn’t assume that just anyone can be a customer service rep, either. Yes, you can offer a lot of training to make them familiar with your products and serves, and policies like returns or exchanges. However today’s reps also need to make good use of digital technologies that turn data into a tool for decision-making and continual improvement.

Conduct a quick online search and you’ll find many templates with customer service job descriptions you could use in your initial posting. Bear in mind, though, that you’ll likely have specific ways in which you want certain issues handled. You’ll need to customize a posting to some extent based on the customer experience you’re trying to offer.

There are also some qualities or soft skills that are critical to success in customer service, but not as easy to get across in a job posting. They are the kind of characteristics you’ll tend to pick up on during an interview, and especially as you begin to see a rep get to work with actual customers.

Some of these traits and skills include:

Receptivity

Customers wouldn’t want to approach an employee in person who was standing with their arms folded and a grim look on their face. What they want — especially in digital channels, but even over the phone — is an open willingness to hear what they have to say.

Great customer service reps will be mindful of things like average call time, but they also have a good sense of when patience is required.

Receptivity allows a rep to gather enough information to solve a problem. It’s also a way of recognizing that customers may need emotional support and permission to express themselves about the experience they’re having.

Clarity

Working in an omnichannel environment means companies will be getting feedback and outreach from customers via many different avenues. They might use the phone one day, email the next, a social media post or even a text message on occasion.

Each of these channels has some trade-offs in terms of how much information they can convey, and what kind of help a rep can provide.

The person you hire will have to be comfortable communicating with a diverse array of tools, and to be clear enough in doing so that customers don’t grow even more confused or frustrated.

Of course, reps won’t just be communicating with customers, but internally as well. That means they should demonstrate a strong sense of how to collaborate with their coworkers, managers and even other parts of the business.

Empathy

Sympathy will only take you so far. Let’s say a customer reaches out and tells a service rep their product broke down after its first use. Responding with, “I’m so sorry to hear that,” is sympathetic. It might be the truth, but it doesn’t always come across as very credible or helpful.

When a rep shows empathy, on the other hand, they might say something like, “I can imagine how unhappy you must be, especially considering what you paid and what you’re trying to do with the product.”

Empathy shows a customer the rep is trying to imagine themselves in the same situation. It suggests they will try to help not just because it’s their job, but because they recognize the urgency and importance of having the problem resolved.

Service reps not only need a sense of empathy, but to maintain it amid multiple customer interactions over the course of a shift. This can be a tall order, which is why you should be thoughtful in the candidates you screen and ultimately bring on board.

Positivity

There might be moments when a service rep will gripe about a particularly brutal conversation with a customer, but the best ones don’t get mired in negativity.

Being a great rep means having a solutions-oriented mindset. They need to be constantly thinking about what the ultimate customer experience could look like, and then spend their time using the tools available to them to bring that experience to life.

As they do so, their positive vibes should be evident in everything from their tone of voice on the phone to the way they craft an email, text message or social media post. This doesn’t mean ignoring when customers are unhappy or angry. It’s working through those emotions by solving their problems and conveying gratitude when an issue is resolved.

Customers don’t really want to leave on a bad note, either. When a rep makes it easier to say goodbye with a smile, it benefits them as well as the company.

Conclusion

If there was one last area to think about when you’re hiring a customer service rep, it’s an ongoing interest in professional self-development.

This doesn’t mean they have a burning desire to be a manager, necessarily. They should simply be conscious and intentional about evaluating their own performance, and benchmarking it against the metrics that matter most to the business.

When you find a customer service rep with all these qualities, it won’t take long to see the difference they can make in your business. As you grow, you’ll want to recruit a growing army of reps just like them.