7 Essential Skills You Need to Become an Effective Manager

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Customer service management remains a somewhat elusive concept due to a large number of definitions, recommendations, and best practices characterising relationship management with brand clients. Unfortunately, this also poses some serious problems before talented newcomers interested in joining this sphere in the future.

Skills and competencies frequently take years to develop, which means that you need to know the exact areas of expertise you need to focus on in order to become an effective customer service manager.

Below, we will discuss 7 essential dimensions characterising effective specialists in this field.

  1. Emotional Intelligence

This skill is frequently defined as the capability to recognise the emotions of oneself and others. From a practical perspective, this provides the following benefits:

  • Greater empathy for other people.
  • Better self-regulation due to the understanding of one’s positive and negative impulses.
  • Increased self-awareness preventing burnout and adverse subconscious reactions to stress.
  • Improved social skills and relationship management skills.
  • Stronger motivation.

As you can see, emotional intelligence is beneficial for both your own well-being and your capability to understand your customers and colleagues. This makes the development of this skill a priority for any manager willing to become more effective in their line of work.

  1. Conflict Management

Consumers contacting customer service are rarely the ones willing to thank the brands for the superior quality of their products and services. This implies that you are going to have a number of unpleasant conversations with highly dissatisfied individuals.

Make you customers this frustrated

Conflict management skills allow you to not take their attacks personally and to find effective ways to resolve such situations peacefully.

  1. Problem-Solving

Let us face it, most clients are sick and tired of the ‘your call is important to us, please, hold the line’ approach in customer service. They are already aggrieved due to the loss of time and money that may be solely your brand’s fault. They want solutions and they want them now.

While using your conflict management skills is a good thing, do not mistake ‘please, calm down’ scripts with actually helping the customer. These messages inserted in your dialogue without actually doing something to solve their problem add fuel to the fire and quickly lead to angry clients shouting unpleasant things at you to never ever contact your brand again.

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In our own business providing PhD writing services, we try to answer all incoming messages within 60 minutes or less to demonstrate that were are always here to support our customers.

In most situations, there are some practical steps you can take to make the first steps toward solving the client’s problem:

  • Own the problem.
  • Contact your superiors and the persons responsible for the fault.
  • Identify a potential period for solving the issue and be straightforward with the customer.
  • Openly state that the situation will not be deemed tolerable.
  • Ask whether they already have some solutions they may be satisfied with.

Any service failure opens new paths to restoring consumer loyalty. In most cases, a prompt resolution of the problem accompanied by a hefty discount for new purchases or a partial refund for the problematic one may easily win you another long-term client. Everyone knows that mistakes are inevitable. It is your capability to solve them that separates the best customer service from a sub-optimal one.

  1. Brand Awareness

Most customer service managers know the famous tale of a Zappos employee going to a competitor store, buying a pair of shoes the client wanted, and sending them to the client since this size was not present in their own warehouse.

While this may sound like overkill for some companies, this example teaches us some important lessons:

  • You must know your brand’s products and services like the back of your hand as a customer service manager.
  • You must be aware of competitor offerings and their strengths and weaknesses.

This knowledge alone allows you to immediately provide solutions that your customers want instead of putting them on hold to contact some other persons who are more knowledgeable.

  1. Record-Keeping

Most firms have customer relationship management (CRM) systems but few brands are actually using them to create the synergies they promise. Most clients in the 2020s are less than impressed if you call them by their first name when they call your brand several months after your initial contact. Here are some better personalisation techniques that you can use as a product manager:

  • Keep track of the purchases made by long-term customers.
  • Record any questions asked by them previously.
  • Store all history of past problems encountered by them.
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These records may help you manage potential conflicts and personalise your communication. Make sure that these entries are made by all of your team members for all customer database accounts.

  1. Statistical Analysis

The next step following the introduction of record-keeping habits as a customer service manager is to analyse the actual patterns of customer problems:

  • Are there any problematic products and services with the highest rates of returns or complaints?
  • Are there some underperforming stores creating a large share of your problems?
  • How have the number of consumer complaints changed per each category of your offerings?

Statistical analysis is a powerful tool allowing you to recognise a number of strategic problems you may want to discuss with the senior management such as:

  • Defective batches of some products.
  • Poor handling of products at some warehouses and stores.
  • An increasing number of defective products in some categories.

This information brings us to the last essential skill.

  1. Leadership

‘Owning the customer problem’ is not limited to ‘going the extra mile to solve individual issues’. Sometimes, you encounter systemic challenges that you cannot address on your own. As a customer service manager, you need to acquire leadership skills allowing you to:

  • Contact your superiors to present your findings and solve strategic quality problems that exist outside of your area of competence.
  • Escalate customer problems to the next level of authority in some unconventional situations.
  • Manage your team in the way promoting their continued professional advancement.
  • Contact other company departments on behalf of your team to address customer issues requiring cooperative effort.

 

Catherine Smith
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