With over 100,000 U.S.-based customer service representative jobs currently listed on Indeed.com, call centers clearly provide extensive full-time remote work opportunities and give employers access to a global hiring pool.
Whether you’re applying or hiring for a remote call center agent position, understanding the most important call center agent skills is essential to assembling the right team.
Here, we list the key hard and soft skills for call center agents, outline why they are important, and more.
The Essential Skills of Top Call Center Agents
Below, we've listed the most important call center agent skills in order of how often they appeared in job descriptions:
- Verbal Communication
- Comfort with Customer Databases and CRMs
- Know How to Work Independently
- Dedication to Customer Satisfaction
- Strong Writing Skills
- Ability to Multitask
- Strong Team Collaboration Experience
- Problem Solving Skills
- Organizational Skills
- Adaptability and Positive Attitude
1. Stellar Verbal Communication
The phone interview is an excellent opportunity for you to show your grasp of the most important communication technique: active listening.
Active listening means fully concentrating on what the other person is saying, ensuring and demonstrating you understand what is being said, and giving a helpful, succinct, confident, and accurate response.
To demonstrate active listening skills:
- Pay Attention: Avoid multitasking and outside distractions as much as possible
- Show Interest: Ask appropriate and relevant questions
- Clarify and Paraphrase: Ask the customer to repeat something or explain what they’ve said another way when necessary
- Empathize: Try to understand the speaker's point of view, even if different from your own
- Provide Feedback: Respond to the speaker's message respectfully, and provide more than one possible resolution
- Summarize: At the end of the call, summarize the main points of the conversation
Why Active Listening is Important
Nearly all call center operator job descriptions mention a need for strong verbal communication skills–unsurprising for a job that primarily consists of talking with customers over the phone. Good verbal communication keeps customers on the phone longer and helps develop long-term client relationships.
2. Comfort with Customer Databases and CRMs
As a call center representative, you’ll likely be asked to demonstrate your familiarity with popular CRM systems like Salesforce, Freshdesk, or Zoho.
Proficiency with a company's business software is a hard skill that helps you stand out as an applicant–as it means a smoother training and onboarding process for managers.
Customer details from CRMs help agents understand customer needs and preferences, assess effective communication strategies, and prevent customers from repeating themselves. CRM CTI screen pops provide access to this data in real-time, on or before a call. This streamlines the customer journey, increases first call resolution rates, and lets agents provide personalized customer service..
Why CRM Software Experience is Important:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software is now an essential tool for modern call centers, providing agents with real-time customer data and access to interaction history.
3. Ability to Work Independently
Show off your self-discipline and self-motivation by highlighting any experience you have in leadership positions, moments when your decision-making skills shined, and your ability to prioritize tasks. This shows you’re able to successfully manage your time and plan your workday both remotely and in-office.
Topics that demonstrate self-motivation and problem solving skill include:
- An anecdote showing how your problem-solving skills helped you adapt to and overcome challenges
- The specific approaches you take to problem-solving, including any methodologies you use (root cause analysis, brainstorming, SWOT, etc.)
- Times strong time management and team collaboration skills helped you solve a problem
- Results of your problem-solving efforts (improved efficiency, increased revenue, enhanced customer satisfaction)
- Examples of when you have taken the initiative to lead a project, learn new skills, or presented ideas to improve business processes
- How you manage your time effectively and prioritize tasks to achieve desired results
- Familiarity or experience with remote project management software
Why Self-Motivation is Important:
Remote work requires self-discipline and adaptability. To prove you can offer the same level of performance no matter where you are working, you must demonstrate your independence, problem solving skills, and assertiveness.
4. Dedication to Customer Satisfaction
Ensuring an excellent customer experience is another vital skill for a good call center agent–especially as customer demands steadily increase.
Some things to highlight in your cover letter or during an interview to demonstrate a dedication to customer satisfaction include:
- Treating customers with patience and respect
- Creative problem solving
- Going above and beyond to make a customer happy, prevent future issues, and improve a customer's impression of your company
- Empathizing with customers by acknowledging their frustrations and concerns
- Taking ownership of issues instead of passing off problems to and blaming others
- Clear communication that avoids jargon to ensure customers understand next steps
- Following up with customers promptly and making sure any issues are completely resolved to the customer’s satisfaction
Even if you haven't worked closely with customers before, you probably have an example of helping someone and making them happy. Overall, be sure to emphasize any experience you have in people-facing roles where you satisfied customers' needs with your work and efforts.
Why Customer Care is Important:
Providing high quality customer service often has the biggest impact on a company’s bottom line. As a service rep, you'll need to highlight your ability to solve customer issues, and explain why making customers happy matters to you.
5. Strong Writing Skills
As most contact center channels today are text-based, demonstrating strong writing skills is a great way to secure a call center agent position. Your resume and cover letter are your best opportunities to communicate those skills to a hiring manager.
Tips to demonstrate strong writing skills in your resume and cover letter include:
- Use clear and concise language that illustrates your ability to communicate effectively in writing
- Check for spelling and grammatical errors to show you have a strong grasp of language and attention to detail
- Keep your tone professional and engaging to show purpose-driven, authoritative writing
- Highlight any relevant writing experience like drafting proposals, social media posts, and blog content (provide links to this work or your personal website if possible)
- Mention any writing-related education or training (writing courses, workshops, etc.)
- Research the company and position you’re applying for, and include that knowledge in your cover letter
- Have someone else look over your resume and cover letter to ensure you haven’t missed any mistakes
Why Strong Writing Skills Are Important:
As more and more contact centers are utilizing omnichannel customer service solutions, today’s agents must interact with customers on a variety of channels including email, text, video conferencing, live chat, and social media messaging services. Most of these channels are text based and require strong writing skills.
6. Ability to Multitask
While you should always prioritize the call you're on, multitasking is a must for call center agents. Highlighting any experience you have working in a fast-paced environment where you have to juggle lots of projects at once will help your resume stand out.
Skills and experiences that demonstrate the ability to multitask include:
- Communicating with customers/co workers via multiple channels throughout the workday
- Navigating between different computer systems or software applications to access customer information, update records, and resolve issues
- Juggling multiple conversations at once, either by placing one conversation on hold while addressing another, or by handling multiple chats or emails simultaneously
- Entering data quickly and accurately, particularly when dealing with complex or urgent customer inquiries
- Staying organized and prioritizing which tasks need to be addressed first
Virtual call center software can be used to automate many of the above processes including data entry and app jumping, however, multitasking is still an important skill to have for call center agents.
Why Multitasking is Important:
Solving a single customer's problem might involve looking up product information, locating an appropriate help desk article, or rooting through transaction records while on the phone with them. As such, you'll need to show that you can focus on a task at hand while also being able to do minor tasks in the background.
7. Strong Team Collaboration Experience
Remote teams often have to work harder than in-office teams to stay unified because they don’t have the benefit of sharing a space. According to one study, people who perceived that they were working as a team were more resilient and productive than those who perceived they were working alone.[*]
Reaching out for help when you need it is an essential skill for any work setting, but even more so in a remote work environment when you don’t have the luxury of stepping into a colleague’s office cubicle.
In your cover letter or resume, highlight past experiences where you collaborated with others to finish a project or worked well in a team environment. Striking the balance between being able to work well alone while still playing well with others is a must for call center agents working remotely.
Why Team Collaboration Is Important:
Working remotely often means communicating more regularly with your teammates and colleagues to keep everyone on the same page. To be a successful call center agent, you'll need to be able to work well with team members especially through team collaboration tools such as video chat and group chat.
8. Problem Solving Skills
One of the main objectives for a customer service agent is to solve problems as quickly and completely as possible. Most companies have a database of common inquiries along with the best solutions, but sometimes customers call in with unexpected issues or complaints. Additionally, problems may come up that have nothing to do with the customers, such as technical or software malfunctions.
You can demonstrate excellent problem solving skills by thinking through situations in your past work experience (or life in general) when you had to come up with a solution and experienced a successful outcome. Perhaps a customer asked about installing a product you were unfamiliar with, so you looked up an online guide and then talked them through the install. Or maybe a customer had a billing question and you were unable to access their digital file, but were able to offer them a coupon code to thank them for their patience.
Why Problem Solving Skills Are Important
Customers often contact call centers with difficult issues and agents need to be prepared to use creative problem solving skills to find fast and effective solutions.
9. Organizational Skills
In order to meet benchmarks and targets, call center agents need to be able to accurately track progress, keep call records organized, and maintain a tidy workspace so they can locate important information during a call if necessary.
Agents need to be good at taking notes during calls and video meetings to customize follow ups, provide personalized customer service, and incorporate feedback and policy changes. Time management and prioritization skills help agents manage heavy workloads without becoming overwhelmed or burnt out.
Why Good Organization is Important
Contact centers can often be busy and chaotic. Agents need stellar organizational skills in order to stay on task and succeed.
10. Adaptability and Positive Attitude
Adaptability is the ability to change one’s thinking or behavior when new information arises while a positive attitude is the ability to process information in an optimistic light. Both of these are necessary in a call center environment, which often involves the introduction of new policies, products, or services. Further, a positive outlook can impact an agent’s productivity, job satisfaction, and overall success.[*]
You can show off your adaptability and positive attitude by giving your interviewer specific examples of times when you were presented with a new way of doing things and you were able to quickly and enthusiastically pivot. For example, you trained at your previous company using call scripts, but then a new policy was instituted where agents were expected to respond naturally to callers. You embraced the new policy and used your knowledge of the products to respond appropriately to customers, earning yourself several commendations.
Why Adaptability is Important
Call center agents often have to think on their feet and learn new systems, processes and product descriptions quickly. Adaptability, along with a positive attitude, helps agents to come up with personalized and effective solutions.
Do You Have the Skills to Be a Call Center Agent?
Working as a remote call center agent is far from an easy job. You’ll need to be comfortable in a flexible work environment, independently motivated, have excellent time management skills, and possess the communication and problem-solving skills needed to provide stellar customer support and service.
Call center agent skills continue to evolve well past basic phone etiquette.
The skills required for this position have evolved over the years, from basic phone etiquette to advanced problem-solving and multi-tasking abilities.
To excel as a customer service agent, you’ll need a combination of technical knowledge and soft skills. You must be able to quickly adapt to new contact center software, customer needs, and changes in company goals.
Emphasizing your desire to help others, your ability to work independently, and your passion for producing quality work makes you a competitive applicant.
