Do you regularly review how effective your customer facing staff are? Could their customer service skills be improved through training? When analyzing their abilities you need to focus in on six key skills and focus training in these areas.

1. Improved product knowledge: Employees who have a keen understanding of your products or services will be able to deal with a broader range of customer complaints. This requires ongoing training as products change and improve.
2. Advanced communication skills: Everybody understands how to talk and deal with customers but you need to foster the use of positive language in all communications (verbal, written and digital) and make sure that staff actively listen to customer requests. This is fundamental to your customer retention strategies ensuring requests and complaints are being dealt with properly.
3. An understanding of issue resolution techniques: Most interactions with customers relate to problems are issues they are experiencing. Your employees need to understand how to resolve these problems using the software systems and colleagues that are available to them. This can be formalized through different processes and procedures.
4. Increased professionalism in the workplace: Being courteous costs nothing. All employees should realize they are the face of the business when dealing with customers and need to promote a professional attitude at all times.
5. Better time management and action oriented behaviors: All employees work toward specific goals they have to achieve. This requires good time management, self-motivation and being goal oriented in order to achieve your deadlines. Training by peers is often the best way of fostering this.
6. Increase confidence levels of your employees: Confident staff are better able to establish a level of trust with your customers. These customer service skills do however require time for the employee to gain sufficient experience and product education in order to feel confident in their dealings with clients and customers.