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Quickest Way to Advance Your Customer Service Career

Customer service4 MIN READMay 13, 2019

Quickest Way to Advance Your Customer Service Career

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Most recruiters know that customer service agents are some of the most attractive candidates for in-house hiring. Support reps come with excellent communication skills and remarkable product knowledge. They understand how the company functions and they usually get along with the rest of the team.

Moreover, support reps usually come from different walks of life with unique skills and knowledge. For example, we have seen multilingual support reps transition to product localization and former legal advisors become data officers. When you start at customer service, you have plenty of options to advance your customer service job.

Whichever road you decide to take, there’s a secure method that will help you reach your goals. Let’s dig into this.

Quickest Way to Advance Your Customer Service Career

Push for feedback, learn from it

The one thing that will help you advance in your career is feedback. We know that having someone criticize your work might feel frightening. By the way, the person doing it usually feels uncomfortable too (we’ve written about the techniques that will make it less awkward).

However, feedback is the quickest and most efficient way for professional development in this field. By doing systematic conversation reviews – i.e., letting someone read and assess your customer interactions – you will quickly get to know the areas in which you need to improve.

Should you polish your product knowledge? Maybe start with a friendlier opening line? Could you be upselling the product?

The procedure might feel intimidating at first, but you will soon realize that the proposed suggestions are usually simple things to fix. You can start making changes in your conversations as soon as you’ve read the feedback. Ask for another round of assessments and improve again. Repeat.

Look at it as a game: the more feedback you are able to collect, the more boxes you’ll get to tick, and the further you will go. So, don’t be afraid of receiving comments on your work, ask for it proactively. Push your manager to give you personal feedback or ask your team lead to implement systematic conversation peer reviews. Your fellow agents might be your best source of advice on this matter.

Quickest Way to Advance Your Customer Service Career

Advertise your competence through feedback

When you have collected your feedback and progressed in every possible field, use it for shameless self-promotion. Keep track of your progress and present it to the decision-makers when the time is right.

If you already know the career path you would like to take, concentrate on the aspects that will get you there. For example, if you would like to move to the sales team, try to upsell the product in all possible interactions. These results will impress your sales team.

Internal Quality Score will show how well you’ve done in your customer interactions according to your company’s quality standards. Great results in this metric will surely help you move forward in your career in the customer service department. High scores in a specific product knowledge category could open doors to product management.

Insist on internal customer service assessments, and you will have data to demonstrate your competence. Growth and progress are strengths, so don’t be afraid to start from the bottom.

Quickest Way to Advance Your Customer Service Career

The faster you can polish your skills based on the feedback, the easier it will be to advance in your customer service career path. Whether you are looking for ways to transition to another team or trying to climb up the ladder in your support team, the key to success is always the same: feedback.

Klaus is a tool that helps customer service teams conduct conversation reviews. It’s the easiest way to make systematic feedback a daily routine in your company.

Get feedback, learn from it. Repeat the procedure until you are ready to start negotiating for a promotion. Good luck!


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Written by

Merit-valdsalu
Merit Valdsalu
Merit is the content writer at Klaus - though most of her texts have probably been ghostwritten by her rescue cat Oskar.

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