When we think about support, we often think about soft skills first—but we can't ignore the importance of hard skills for customer service. It’s natural that people pay more attention to how agents act in conversation, but the foundations of top customer service come from technical skills.
And with advances in tech like GenAI, VoIP systems, CRMs, and more, mastering these technical skills is more challenging than ever. Pair this with growing interaction volumes (and customer demands!) and it’s clear that a balance of technical and interpersonal skills is critical.
Whatever the obstacles, we must strive to deliver excellent customer service, because 88% of consumers expect fast, consistent, and personalized expectations in every interaction. This is the difference between retaining customers and losing them to your competitors.
Are your agents equipped with the right abilities? Let’s dive in and find out exactly how to develop the most important customer service hard skills.
Hard skills for customer service generally refer to the technical abilities agents need to support customers. This includes proficiency with software, the ability to navigate call center systems, computer/digital literacy, and more (which we’ll explore below).
Unlike soft skills (which are things like active listening, communication skills, and empathy), hard skills tend to be more focused on the technical execution of support tasks.
It’s incredibly important that your agents master these more technical skills, as they’re fundamental to delivering efficient support, staying productive, and letting those eye-catching soft skills shine.
This is how well agents understand your company's products and services, and your industry. They must know about:
Customers expect expert-level advice, and when agents fully understand the business, they can meet these expectations, delivering more accurate solutions, faster responses, and higher CSAT scores.
Imagine a customer calls about a software bug. An agent with strong product knowledge can quickly identify the issue and offer a solution, reducing the resolution time and leaving them satisfied.
How can you ensure strong product and industry knowledge in your team? Empower your agents with regular training sessions, in-depth product demos, and access to a comprehensive knowledge base.
Omnichannel knowledge is about understanding how to manage customer interactions across every channel (email, live chat, phone, SMS, or whatever it may be).
A seamless omnichannel experience is vital to the modern consumer, with 71% preferring different channels depending on context, and CRMs make it much easier for agents to jump between channels. Your CRM can provide:
Getting a handle on these CRM tools is vital, as a seamless, personalized experience can significantly improve customer loyalty and retention.
To support your agents, invest in training courses on how to use CRMs and omnichannel software. Give them the time they need to become familiar with these tools, and emphasize the value of using CRM data to personalize interactions.
Computers and other information and communication technologies (ICT) make up a significant portion of an agent’s toolkit, so they must know how to use them. Beyond the basics, agents should have a firm grasp on all software, hardware, and digital tools in their work environment.
Agents need to quickly adapt to new tech, systems, and tools that power the customer service process. Strong digital literacy allows agents to navigate these systems efficiently, improving response times and reducing average handle time (AHT).
Make software-focused training and workshops a regular feature in your organization, and offer tips during performance reviews to improve efficiency with these tools.
As you can guess, the ability to communicate fluently and clearly in the languages spoken by your customers is essential for delivering good service. This doesn’t mean soft skills like carrying conversations and active listening—it’s about literally speaking the same language.
Effective communication is critical to resolving customer issues quickly and accurately, and helps build customer rapport. Multilingual agents also enable you to serve a broader audience, allowing for global business growth.
The ability to assist customers in their native language is essential to preventing the kind of communication barriers that result in escalations. Encourage language-learning courses in your organization, or get multilingual agents to mentor their peers and bring up your team’s language skills over time.
Reps must be able to write clearly, concisely, and professionally. With so much text-based communication powering support operations these days, subpar writing won’t cut it. Your agents need to write messages that are:
Customers expect clear, timely responses—especially through digital channels—and poor writing can lead to misunderstandings and frustration. Plus, well-written notes help other agents better grasp ongoing situations and customer histories, enabling more efficient service.
Try setting up workshops where agents are given text-based scenarios to play out. Additionally, you can create templates for common scenarios, so agents don’t have to overthink their writing process on a day-to-day basis.
Data entry and analysis are essential hard skills for customer service, simply due to the amount of information call centers and support teams generate. This can cover anything data-related, including:
Accurate data entry ensures easy access to correct customer details, speeding up future interactions. And analyzing this data helps your team make informed decisions to improve service quality and efficiency.
Thankfully, teaching agents how to do this is pretty straightforward:
This is the ability to understand and troubleshoot the nitty gritty functionality of your company's products and services. Agents who understand the technical side of things can identify and resolve issues without extra assistance or escalations, leading to:
To help agents become more familiar with your offering and any common issues, you should provide training programs and hands-on product testing. Better yet, try some role-playing exercises that take them through the ins and outs of the troubleshooting process.
More and more call centers are adopting artificial intelligence, but 60% of employees don’t know how to use AI effectively. Knowing how to get the most out of these tools is quickly becoming a necessary hard skill for customer service.
AI tools can streamline customer interactions and handle routine queries while agents work on more complex issues. They can also help agents resolve issues by pulling from internal knowledge bases, like an extra set of hands in a conversation.
Providing workshops and tutorials on how to use these new AI tools as they’re rolled out is a great way to improve customer service skills. Ideally, you should also have a detailed knowledge base available, so your agents know where they can verify information if needed.
Industries change constantly, including tools, workplace operations, and customer expectations. And this means that your requirements for customer service hard skills are likely going to change too.
Using QA software, you can track and measure agent performance across your entire call center. Plus, you can create specific scorecards for agents and teams to assess their hard skills. That way, you can spot where you’re lacking (and design a plan for improving).
Scorebuddy offers the QA tools you need to evaluate and improve customer service hard skills. It empowers your call center with AI-powered QA support, custom scorecards, an integrated learning management system (LMS), tools for coaching, and more.
Ready to elevate your team’s skill set and your entire QA process? Get your demo today and see how Scorebuddy can help enhance efficiency and CX.
