The Most Important Customer Relations Skills for IT Professionals

As a CIO, IT manager, or MSP owner, you already know the role good customer service plays in customer retention, customer satisfaction, and customer loyalty. But what if you’re ready to take it to the next level? These are the customer relations skills to prioritize if you want to kick your IT customer service up a notch.

Customer Relations Skills Start with Active Listening

It’s one thing to improve your IT employees’ listening skills. It’s another to make sure your end-users feel heard. Teaching your IT team active listening skills is one of the best things you can do to improve customer interactions. Coach your employees to pay attention to the customer’s needs and reflect their concerns back to them. Help them learn to listen closely to customer questions rather than mentally jumping ahead to solutions, even though it takes extra time. Teach them that excellent service isn’t limited to solving a customer’s technical problem – it includes the entire customer experience from first contact through problem resolution. When a frustrated customer feels heard, an IT customer service professional can turn a tense situation into a positive customer contact. 

Empathy

Customers want to know they are understood. Empathy is a non-technical skill and isn’t traditionally taught in training programs. Empathy is the ability to put yourself in another’s position and understand their frustration or anger in a difficult situation. At the very least, empathy involves trying to imagine what the other person is going through and what they’re feeling. It involves more than just solving a problem; it goes the extra mile and makes the customer feel validated in their feelings. A good customer service representative will understand the customer’s experience and infuse their customer interactions with compassion, whether they’re dealing with happy customers or angry customers. Including empathy training for improved customer relations is a great start.

Emotional Regulation

Emotional regulation is the ability to control one’s emotional response in the face of frustration, criticism, or other challenging situation. It is a critical component of emotional intelligence and an essential customer relations skill for IT customer service professionals. Customers call most frequently when they have a frustrating or difficult situation; it’s not uncommon for those feelings to spill over into their customer service interaction. An excellent customer support representative will recognize that negative customer feedback isn’t directed at them personally but understands that customer complaints and anger have legitimate roots, and the customer service rep just happens to intersect with the boiling point. This key skill helps customer service representatives stay calm during difficult interactions and prevents the situation from escalating further.

Customer Relations Skills for IT Professionals

Level up your IT team’s performance by improving their customer service skills. Compassionate Geek’s online customer service training for IT staff is the course you need. Help your IT professionals hone their interpersonal skills to serve every customer well, even unhappy customers. Your team members will learn essential customer relations skills like active listening, using positive language, and setting appropriate boundaries with difficult customers. Visit CompassionateGeek.com and enroll your team today.

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.