Summary

The main purpose of a customer service specialist is to be a ‘professional’ for direct customer support within all sectors and organisation types. You act as a referral point for dealing with more complex or technical customer requests, complaints, and queries. You are often an escalation point for complicated or ongoing customer problems. As an expert in your organisation’s products and/or services, you share knowledge with your wider team and colleagues. You gather and analyse data and customer information that influences change and improvements in service. Utilising both organisational and generic IT systems to carry out your role with an awareness of other digital technologies. This could be in many types of environments including contact centres, retail, webchat, service industry or any customer service point.

Knowledge

Business Knowledge and Understanding

• Understand what continuous improvement means in a service environment
• Understand the impact your service provider has on the wider organisation
• Understand your organisation’s current business strategy in relation to customers
• Think about the future when taking action or making service-related decisions
• Understand a range of leadership styles and apply them successfully

Customer Journey Knowledge

• Understand and evaluate the end-to-end experience and when to escalate complex situations for specialist attention
• Understand the business processes that support you in bringing about the best outcome for customers
• Understand commercial factors and authority limits for delivering the required customer experience

Knowing your Customers and their Needs/ Customer Insight

• Understand the internal and external customers may require different approaches from you
• Understand how to analyse, use and present a range of information to provide customer insight
• Understand what drives loyalty, retention and satisfaction
• Understand different customer types and the role of emotions in bringing about a successful outcome
• Understand how customer expectations can differ between cultures, ages, and social profile

Customer Service Culture and Environment Awareness

• Understand regulatory considerations in relation to how you deliver to customers
• Understand your business environment and culture and the position of customer service within it
• Understand your organisation structure and what role each department needs to play
• Understand how to find and use industry best practices to enhance own knowledge

Skills

Business Focused Service Delivery

• Demonstrate a continuous improvement and future-focused approach to customer service delivery including decision making and providing recommendations or advice
• Resolve complex issues by being able to choose from and successfully apply a wide range of approaches
• Find solutions that meet your organisation’s needs as well as the customer requirements

Providing a Positive Customer Experience

• Question and listen to negotiate mutually beneficial outcomes
• Manage challenging and complicated situations within your level of authority and make recommendations to deliver service changes
• Provide options and solutions to influence and help customers make choices
• Demonstrate a cost-conscious mindset when meeting customer and the business needs
• Identify where highs and lows of the customer journey produce a range of emotions in the customer
• Use written and verbal communication to simplify complex information to deliver positive customer outcomes

Working with your Customers / Customer Insights

• Gather customer feedback and evaluate the implications
• Analyse your customer types and their potential needs and expectations when providing your service

Customer Service Performance

• Maintain a positive relationship even when you are unable to deliver the customer’s expected outcome
• When managing escalations take into account historical interactions to determine the next steps

Service Improvement

• Analyse the end to end service experience, making recommendations to enable improvement
• Make recommendations for changes in line with new and relevant legislation, regulations and industry best practice

Behaviours / Attitude

Develop Self

• Proactively keep your service, industry and best practice knowledge and skills up-to-date
• Consider personal goals related to service and take action towards achieving them

Ownership / Responsibility

• Take ownership for actions to resolve customer issues
• Be creative when identifying solutions to customer and organisational issues
• Make realistic promises and deliver on them

Team Working

• Work effectively and collaboratively with colleagues at all levels to achieve results.
• Recognise colleagues as internal customers
• Share knowledge and experience with others to support colleague development

Equality

• Be positive and open-minded to tailor your service to each customer
• Be adaptable to your customer needs

Presentation

• Demonstrate brand advocacy, values and beliefs to build trust, credibility and satisfaction
• Ensure your personal presentation reflects positively on your organisation’s brand