Customer Service Skills is All About Attitude

Anyone who is involved in interacting with others should be fully aware of customer service principles. Many people think that customer service is only applicable to a shop assistants. Indeed, shop assistants must possess good communication and customer service skills, though this is not limited only to them. When you interact with others there is always a potential to exchange products or services whether money is involved or not. In general, you may interact with the following types of people:

• External paying customer. This is the most common type which comes to mind. A customer who pays to receive a product or service certainly deserved to be treated well.
• External non-paying customer. Some customers may not be paying to you directly, though they still need to be treated like a valuable client. For example, a tourist approaching the tourist information centre doesn’t usually pay but should be treated as a customer. Similarly a parent is a customer of a teacher, though there may be no direct payment involved.
• Internal non-paying customer. Just as you might have external customers, you may also get internal customers who are interested in your services. For example, an IT engineer who supports the staff’s computers can treat the staff as his or her customers.
• Internal paying customer. Even though you might be dealing with an internal customer, there could be a transaction involved, such as inter-department payments. The payment may also be time-based rather than money based. For example you may charge another project for the time you spent to consult them. This way, as a paying customer they may have certain expectations and you need to handle this with customer service skills.

Now that you know how customer service relates to various situations, a natural question is how best to deliver it. Indeed there are many guidelines you can follow that help you to perform better. As the most important skill, good customer service comes down to a correct “attitude”. With the correct attitude, you can automatically adopt critical roles, smile genuinely, show openness naturally, use correct body language and present a confident yet helpful image to a potential “customer” of your products or services.

This attitude starts from believing that you are here to help others. People are extremely sensitive to manipulation and exploitation and since customer service has always been involved in the art of hard selling, people can be naturally suspicious of any advances.

The solution is that you must believe in your mind that your whole existence is about helping others and a need to provide a ”fair” service. This way you will automatically do the best you can to help others while also taking steps to understand their needs. In other words, you will be putting “effort” in helping others while “respecting” them for their needs at the same time. These two principles sit at the heart of customer services and it actually is not that difficult to implement. If you are a good intentioned person with the best of people in mind, you will have no problem achieving this.