Customer service skills are a combination of abilities and traits that equip you to interact with customers effectively and deliver a positive experience. These skills are necessary for anyone working in all industries, especially for call centers, where they need to contact customers or clients frequently.

What are important customer service resume skills? How to word customer service skills on resume? If you’re trying to figure out or simply looking forward to developing these abilities, this ultimate guide from Solvea is what you need.

What Are Customer Resume Service Skills

Customer service skills for a resume are a mix of communication, problem-solving, and even technical abilities that help agents resolve customer issues and build meaningful connections. Here are soft and hard skills for customer service resume.

What Are Hard Skills for a Customer Service Resume

Hard skills for customer service resumes are usually specific and teachable abilities that can be defined and measured. These skills involve technical knowledge and expertise with certain tools or systems, such as CRM system proficiency, product knowledge, bilingual communication, order processing expertise, digital literacy, etc.

What Are Soft Skills for Customer Service Resume

Customer service soft skills are all about how you build positive relationships with clients. For example, interpersonal abilities that help you understand customers’ needs and build trust. Some of the important soft skills include clear communication, problem-solving, patience, adaptability, active listening, and so on.

17 Customer Service Skills to Highlight on Your Resume

It’s vitally important to highlight your unique customer skills when applying for the role. This is because lots of companies use the applicant tracking system (ATS) to automatically scan resumes and narrow down candidates. If you want to pass the job application, you need to describe your customer service resume skills using clear and concise words.

The following 17 common skills to put on a customer service representative resume can help highlight your experience.

1. Effective Communication

Strong communication skills are key to fulfilling customers’ needs and resolving issues while establishing a positive brand image. So, make sure to highlight this skill that convinces the hiring manager you are the best for the customer service role. To master these skills, you need to have a deep understanding of:

1. Which communication channel works best in each situation?
2. How to respond to customers’ specific questions quickly and accurately?
3. When to escalate a trouble ticket and who will handle it?
4. How to communicate openly with customers and strike the right tone?

2. Active Listening

Active listening means taking time to pause, fully understand, and act on what the customer needs. When talking to customers, it’s crucial to listen closely and ask questions to better grasp their concerns and respond with empathy. Here’s what you can do to improve this skill:

1. Take a moment before responding to ensure appropriate tone and clarity.
2. Ask open-ended questions to uncover underlying frustrations.
3. Stay calm even when customers get dramatically upset.

3. Empathy

As an interpersonal skill, empathy is one of the most important traits for successful customer service reps. Showing customers that you understand their situation and feel their emotions is a necessary condition of a positive customer experience. This means you put yourself in their shoes and build the relationship with patience, kindness, and respect.

4. Problem-Solving

For customer service representatives, problem-solving skills mean diagnosing issues promptly and thinking critically about customer complaints, then offering workable solutions. It usually involves actively listening to customers’ needs, analyzing root causes of problems, and resolving them by turning to the products or services of your company.

5. Teamwork Ability

Internal collaboration ability across teams is also a critical skill needed for customer service. Agents need to collaborate with other departments or colleagues, especially in remote and hybrid working environments. This may require them to master certain customer service software and management tools to collaborate seamlessly.

6. Efficiency and Productivity

It’s a common situation that customer service agents are often overwhelmed by uncompleted tasks. However, the efficiency and productivity of agents directly affect the operational costs and the key performance metrics (KPIs), such as average handle time (AHT), customer satisfaction score (CSAT), customer effort score (CES), and more.

Many companies and organizations have deployed AI customer service agents to help improve efficiency and productivity. Solvea is one of the best choices that can handle complex situations with human-like smarts. It comes pre-trained for specific industries and has AI Safeguard to follow platform rules.

7. Adaptability

The adaptability of customer service means that agents need to deftly switch between channels, including SMS, email, messaging, and live chat. More importantly, they need to adjust to new market trends and more personalized customer needs with the emergence of omnichannel customer service support.

8. Stress Management

Customer service can be stressful sometimes, especially when facing fussy and difficult customers. Some customers take their frustration or anger out on you. As a customer service representative, strong stress management skills help you balance your emotions and customers and handle their issues with a positive attitude.

9. Time Management

Strong time management skills shouldn’t go unnoticed for customer service agents. It helps agents lower stress levels, reduce their workloads, and achieve faster ticket resolutions, especially when lots of calls come in or during busy sales seasons. It’s also beneficial to meet service level agreements (SLAs) for the agent.

10. Product Knowledge

A deep understanding of your company’s products and services is essential for any customer service role. When applying for the role, you should express that you’re willing to consistently invest time to familiarize yourself with the company's provides and keep your product knowledge current. This skill ensures that you can handle customer inquiries smoothly and deliver better customer service overall.

11. Customer Relationship Management

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system proficiency determines whether you can document customer interactions and find desired data quickly, and even customize resolutions. The customer service role often relies heavily on workplace skills, but the CRM experience is a hard skill that hiring managers value.

12. Dedication and Diligence

When working with customer services, it is crucial to stay at ambitious standards, complete tasks on time, and maintain a professional demeanor. Dedication and diligence are soft customer service skills on a resume that show your attitude toward work and determine whether you can consistently deliver positive customer experiences and even exceed expected quality levels.

13. Warmth and Friendliness

No customer wants to speak with anyone who does not genuinely care about their needs. That is why showing warmth and friendliness in your customer service is important. It is the first step to building positive interaction with customers. When customers feel you are trustworthy and capable of helping them, it can contribute to a more efficient customer experience.

14. Data Analysis

Data analysis is an overlooked customer service resume skill. In fact, customer service representatives often analyze customer data and collect actionable insights that help them offer a personalized customer experience journey. For example, agents can use these data to identify customer purchasing behavior, preferences, and even personality.

15. Digital Literacy

Digital literacy is a hard skill needed on a customer service resume. As a technical skill, it’s required to find, access, and respond to online-based inquiries. The proficiency of the skill impacts whether you can effectively communicate with colleagues and customers, and master agent tools and other digital resources.

16. Proactive Mindset

A great customer service agent can proactively anticipate customer concerns or issues based on historical information and address them before customers even ask. So, highlighting this skill on a resume means that you can quickly offer resolutions and eliminate customer concerns, improving the overall customer experience.

17. Open-mindedness

Customer service agents who often use inclusive language are viewed as honest, trustworthy, and dependable. This significantly impacts customer satisfaction and loyalty. This open-mindedness refrains you from hurried judgment and considers multiple perspectives before making decisions.

How to Word Customer Service Skills on a Resume

After learning the necessary customer service skills, the more important part is how to word them effectively on your resume. Let’s get started.

1. Mention Your Customer Service Skills on the Resume Summary

The resume summary is a short or three-sentence paragraph that will quickly attract the hiring managers’ attention. So, make sure you mention all required customer service skills that align with the company in this section. For example, you can describe them in a resume summary like this:

I have 6 years of retail experience in responding to customer inquiries. My career highlights include 99% positive customer survey results and a five-star customer service rep in previous jobs. Looking forward to having the opportunity in [company name], where my CRM system, interpersonal, and problem-solving skills can be leveraged to achieve a high level of customer service.

2. Showcase the Right Customer Service Skills

The role requirements may vary across different industries. For instance, a B2C sales team may require excellent communication and upselling skills, while healthcare industries require empathy and active listening. So, another key point is to list all customer service skills that are relevant to the role based on the job description. Here’s what you need to do:

1. Analyze the job requirements carefully.
2. Single out the skills you actually possess instead of adding every single skill mentioned in the job description.
3. Categorize them by soft and hard customer service skills.

3. Prove These Skills in Your Work Experience Section

Finally, don’t forget to prove the customer service skills for the hiring managers you mentioned in the resume summary. After all, anyone can claim that they have customer service skills. Using facts or data in the work experience section can make all the difference. For that, you can:

1. Personalize your work experience according to the job description.
2. Emphasize your key achievements instead of your responsibilities.
3. Quantify these achievements with data-backed evidence.
4. Use action verbs and power words.

3 Customer Service Representative Resume Examples

This part summarizes three commonly seen examples of customer service representative skills.

Call Center Customer Service Resume Example

Call center representatives usually interact with customers via phone, email, SMS, or chat, which requires strong communication skills, empathy, and patience. This job also requires hard customer service skills, like CRM proficiency, data entry, and product knowledge. Both soft and hard skills should be detailed in the call center customer service resume. Here’s a resume template from beamjobs regarding a financial services call center rep resume.

1. When writing this type of resume, you can focus on the sections listed below:
2. Format your resume correctly, including length, bullet points, contact, and education.
3. Emphasize skills and experience that your employer really prioritizes.
4. Add relevant education and certifications.

Retail Customer Service Resume Example

Most retail customer service roles share common foundations. So, a winning retail customer service resume should emphasize your work experience and sales achievements in addition to soft skills. For example, you can refer to the following resume template from beamsjob.

Here are the best tips that can help you design a compelling retail customer service skills resume.

1. Showcase your retail and sales skills in a customer service role.
2. Cite specific data to prove your past achievements.
3. Position your resume with the right format.
4. Offer relevant skill certifications.

Remote Customer Service Resume Example

A remote customer service agent often works from home or other remote locations instead of traditional office settings, which requires you to be proficient in various communication channels. This role may also require the mastery of certain software related to remote work and CRM systems, such as Slack, Zoom, Zendesk, and Microsoft Teams. Let’s have a look at the remote customer service skills resume from beamjobs.

For a remote customer service resume, you can follow the top 4 tips below:

1. Matter both communication and technical skills.
2. Aim for one page in resume length.
3. Use reverse chronological order to list work experience.
4. Action words make examples more engaging.

Customer Service Skills Resume FAQ

1. How to list customer service skills on a resume?

To highlight your unique advantages, you can list customer service skills on a resume by tailoring them to the job description, showcasing key achievements in the experience section, and using action verbs, such as “resolved”, “assisted”, or “improved”.

1. What are the 5 most important skills in customer service?

The customer service skills required may vary depending on specific industries. For example, the 5 most important skills in retail are usually persuasive speaking skills, upselling skills, adaptability, self-control, and patience, while healthcare industries need active listening, empathy, responsibility, internal process knowledge, and conflict resolution.

3. What are the 7 qualities of good customer service?

The 7 qualities of a good customer service representative usually include empathy, friendliness, fairness, self-control, alternatives, information, and time.

4. What is an example of excellent customer service?

An example of excellent customer service often appears when the agent needs to spare no effort to resolve a complex issue. For instance, the agent might respond to remove negative comments from customers, send marketing messages, or offer unexpected discounts or refunds for frustrated customers.