Call center skills are evolving faster than ever—with the dawn of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and automation technology, as well as rising customer demands, businesses need to stay ahead. While foundational customer service skills are still an essential part of delivering a great customer experience, agents need to learn new skills to keep up with the modern customer.
As a call center leader, you need to know how to strike a balance between developing modern skills in your contact center representatives, while also ensuring they have the basics to get the job done. Plus, agents need to manage both soft and hard skills too if they want to maintain service quality, efficiency, and customer loyalty.
In this article, we’ll show you the 14 most essential call center skills that your agents must have—and how you can coach each one effectively.
Active listening is the foundation of every successful customer interaction. It means fully focusing on what the customer is saying, understanding their message, and responding thoughtfully—without interrupting or jumping to conclusions.
Through agents that practice active listening, you’ll see better first call resolution (FCR) rates and customer satisfaction (CSAT). Agents that can pick up on verbal (and non-verbal) cues while practicing patience can help resolve common issues faster and reduce risk of escalations.
Here’s how you can better train active listening skills:
The modern customer expects consistency, no matter how they reach out—79% of them expect the same experience across different departments and channels. Agents need to be comfortable and capable of managing different channels and tailoring their communication to fit each one.
A customer service agent who handles a live chat during peak hours, while being able to switch to calls or email follow-ups, can drastically improve your call center’s responsiveness.
To train and coach omnichannel proficiency, try:
Emotional intelligence is a critical call center skill that helps agents recognize, understand, and manage their own emotions while navigating customer moods. It’s crucial for challenging situations full of tension or stress, where a calm, empathetic response can help de-escalate frustration.
For example, an agent who senses a customer’s anxiety and shifts to a more reassuring tone can turn a negative experience into a positive one.
You can improve emotional intelligence by:
Tools evolve, and agents need to evolve with them. They must be comfortable learning and using new platforms, like:
A skilled agent is flexible and adaptable to tools they have access to, being able to manage interactions without impacting their downtime or accuracy.
Here are some ways you can train agents to be more adaptable:
Every call is unique, and your agents must be able to assess the situation, make sound decisions, and act quickly. Critical thinking empowers agents to solve complex customer issues with no need to escalate or impact service times.
Agents who can think on their feet and come up with creative solutions and be flexible with policies (without crossing into non-compliance territory) are typically better—and more effective—at resolving complex issues.
Try to train agents in critical thinking by:
Taking a customer-centric approach means more than just being polite. Businesses that prioritize their customers can see up to a 700% ROI over a 12-year period. Agents who take a customer-centric approach understand the importance of delivering exceptional customer experiences, not just relevant information.
An agent who takes the time to respond to the customer with personalized responses (like their call history, following up with orders, or even using their name) can make a positive impact on an interaction, even if it starts negatively.
You can train your agents to take a more customer-centric approach by:
Skilled call center agents work in fast-paced environments that require them to think on their feet while also paying attention to minute details and managing multiple tools. They may be speaking to a customer, logging details into a CRM, and referencing the knowledge base all at once.
Agents should balance navigating these systems and tasks all simultaneously, through keyboard shortcuts, multiple monitors, and split screens. Being able to troubleshoot a technical issue during a screen-sharing session while also filling in customer details in the background can make the process much smoother.
Show your agents how they can improve their navigation and multitasking by:
It’s no surprise that working in a contact center environment can be stressful, when you consider how much they have to balance day-to-day. Being able to get through difficult interactions (without carrying those emotions into the next one) is an essential call center skill.
A resilient agent can handle the tough conversations that happen in call centers, and know how to reset themselves between interactions. But, they also need support from you, too—that means knowing how to recognize burnout and offering support for them.
You can help improve your agent’s resilience and stress management through:
There’s no excuse for skimping on compliance within any business—especially call centers. Whether it’s following scripts or sticking to regulations (like GDPR, CCPA, PCA, HIPAA, or any other industry-specific laws), agents need to understand and apply policies in real-time.
Ideally, agents should confidently handle sensitive data and follow internal policies—even for the simplest of interactions. Maintaining data privacy and security is a vital call center skill, as it will ensure your agents know how to stay professional and protect your business from risk.
Coach your agents to improve their compliance and policy adherence by:
The best agents aren’t just skilled, they’re able to learn and grow. Coachability means being open to feedback, learning from their QA assessments, and being actively willing to improve over time, especially as your tools, scripts, training, and customer expectations evolve.
An agent that is receptive to their QA review, adjusts their tone, and makes a noticeable improvement in their next evaluation will continue to grow and improve over time.
To improve the coachability of your agents, try:
Agents need to work effectively, not only with other agents, but other departments too (like billing, IT, or product support). Collaborative, cross-functional contact center skills mean knowing how and when a call needs to be escalated or transferred, on top of knowing the different roles of their peers and other departments.
It can even extend to sharing the information they learn from others with their own team, leading to fewer escalations and faster resolutions.
Emphasizing the importance of collaboration for agents starts with:
As AI becomes more embedded within the industry, one of the most important new call center agent skills is knowing how to work alongside these tools—not against them. That means agents need to know when they need to step in for AI tools, how to interpret AI-generated suggestions, and how to provide the human element that AI can’t.
Agents who can review AI-generated responses before sending them ensure they deliver the right tone and accuracy—and they can provide feedback to help fine tune AI models. This also empowers agents to better determine how these tools can (and should) be used.
If you want to reinforce how your agents should collaborate with AI, you can try:
High-performing agents manage their time efficiently across multiple tasks, shifts, and breaks—meaning that knowing how to do it in the first place is a vital call center skill. With solid time management, they can meet performance targets without burning out or missing the mark, especially when they need to self-manage (like in remote or hybrid settings).
Agents who can stick to wrap-up limits, follow their schedule as needed, and can stay efficient with after-call work help maintain service levels. They can also rely on idle time between interactions to learn, review, update information, and assist other agents when needed.
Best practices for coaching agents to improve their time management skills includes:
As support teams become more global, agents need to understand cultural norms, language differences, and etiquette expectations for the audiences they interact with. Cultural fluency customer service skills help avoid misunderstandings and build stronger customer relationships.
This should extend to more than just knowing how to adjust their phrasing and tone, but also when to recognize time zones, holidays, and cultural differences. An agent who knows when and how to adjust can create more respectful (and effective) interactions.
So, to show your agents how to embrace cultural fluency, you should try:
To get the most out of your team, you need to do more than just hire skilled agents. You need a system for measuring, developing, and scaling those essential skills. Coaching and QA work best when they’re structured, consistent, and built into your daily operations.
And you can assess these contact center skills by:
Establishing key skills is one thing, but you can’t do it without a solid direction. With so many contact center skills that need to be taught and reinforced, along with new tools and AI software transforming the industry, it’s hard to keep up.
Using your QA software gives you the direction you need to evaluate your agents and see where they perform best (or where they need to improve). Then, you can create a coaching plan based on the data you collect to create feedback loops and continuous improvement.
If you want to see how AI-powered QA can revolutionize your operations—and dramatically improve call center agent skills, you need the right software. With Scorebuddy, you get access to powerful Ai-powered QA tools and integrated coaching features that can make a difference.
Try an interactive demo now to see how Scorebuddy supports agent coaching and engagement with 100% QA coverage.
