5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service Listening Skills

In IT, your customer could be an end-user, your coworker, or your boss. You are the bridge between the systems you support and the people who use them. Your ability to listen effectively to understand the problem or service request from the customer’s point of view is key to your success as an IT professional. Whether on the phone, in person, or even in writing such as email or chat, your listening skills can make the difference between a satisfied or a dissatisfied customer. Improve your customer service listening skills with these five techniques.

Here are five Customer Service Skills for effective listening:

#1: Commit to Listening

Be present. Minimize distractions to avoid delivering bad customer service and spoiling your company’s or department’s customer service reputation. Your sole focus should be on listening well. Customer service professionals provide authentic customer service by listening to their clients, their problems, their issues, and improving the customer journey.

Good listening is one of the 5 Principles of IT Customer Service Success. It’s one of the critical customer service skills. Whether you’re a front-line support technician, a network manager, or a coder, your role requires interacting with real people. Your work is about crafting creative technical solutions to perplexing human problems in the workplace. Certainly, front-line support personnel will have more frequent interactions with people than most coders. Even coders, however, must use good listening skills to understand what an app must do from a business standpoint.

#2: Be Articulate

Articulate customer service professionals are more likely to communicate well with customers. That leads to increased customer loyalty. People who are articulate are able to tailor their communication skills to match the people with whom they’re speaking. They’re able to choose the right words for any situation. Articulate people’s customer service skills help them coordinate with coworkers to help prevent problems from occurring and solve them when they come up.

#3: Ask Questions

Asking relevant questions is a core component of active listening. Your ability to ask relevant questions will help you determine the cause of technical problems and assure the other person that you care about their issue and are focused on finding a solution. Effective questioning is a key customer service skill.

#4: Empathize and Provide Solutions

Empathy is also one of the 5 Principles of IT Customer Service Success. Look for common ground. Try to imagine how you would feel if you were in your customer’s position. Look for ways to relate with customers and empathize with their problems. When you’ve been a customer with a problem, what did you want from the tech support person or the customer service rep. That’s probably similar to what your customer wants.

#5: Summarize and Take Action

When you’ve made the commitment to listening well, chosen the right words, asked the right questions, and empathized with the other person, it’s time to summarize and take action. That means you recap your understanding of the issue and gain agreement from your customer, then take action to resolve the issue.

Next Level IT Customer Service Training

Enroll your team now in Compassionate Geek IT online customer service training so they can work together, get things done, and take care of customers.