Hiring the very best customer service candidates for your company or call centre is a goal that, if achieved, bears fruits for all parties, including the employer, employee, and customer. Brand reputation and KPIs such as customer satisfaction and sales improve while customer churn, employee dissatisfaction, and complaint escalations decrease.
However, recruiting the right talent for customer services can feel like a challenge, with many steps in the hiring process. It helps to tackle these one at a time, and the first task is writing customer service job descriptions that will define the role and engage your target audience.
Here we take you through the process with an overview of how to write high-performing job descriptions for customer service jobs.
What goes into a job description?
A job description that is intended to advertise your customer service roles needs to include five elements:
- The duties and tasks of the customer service role
- The job responsibilities and goals
- Practical skills a candidate must possess
- Desirable personality traits
- Must-have or preferred professional qualifications
By collating these elements, you can define both the role and the candidate specification you seek. The job applications you receive will be of higher calibre and match the position, saving valuable resources and time throughout the recruitment, interviewing, and onboarding process.
As you formulate your customer services job description, consider your audience (the job seeker) at all times. It helps to ask yourself these five questions:
- Is your aim to hire from within the company or customer service industry?
- Could a candidate from another business sector with transferable skills bring valuable knowledge and experience?
- Is the position for a junior-level or senior-level role?
- What is the company culture and mission?
- How do your values align with those of employees and customers?
Customer service duties and tasks
Duties and tasks are similar, but duties are the priority as they are the must-do of the job. Tasks usually support the duty and are needed to complete it or for compliance, regulations, data protection, etc.
Duties and tasks list:
- Fielding incoming calls
- Answering customers’ questions
- Resolving customer complaints
- Selling products or services
- Updating customer records
- Processing payments and refunds
- Responding to emails and online chat
- Promoting company or industry news
- Adding or removing subscription features
- Liaising with sales and marketing teams
- Attending team meetings
Job responsibilities and goals
Job responsibilities often refer to the chain of command. A customer service rep will be responsible for the customer and report to a team leader. A team leader is responsible for customer service reps and reports to a manager.
Goals give meaning to responsibilities, duties, and tasks, giving them a measure that defines success and is used during appraisals and performance reviews.
Responsibilities and goals list:
- Supervising the customer support team
- Achieving individual or group sales quotas
- Maintaining customer satisfaction above x%
- Answering x number of calls per shift
- Completing customer engagements within x minutes
- Maintaining an x% or lower escalation figure
Customer service skills and qualifications
Skills and qualifications are either soft skills, such as desirable personality traits, or hard skills, such as a diploma, degree, or equivalent proven experience.
Skills and qualifications list:
- Oral and written communication
- Active listening
- Decision making
- Problem-solving
- Target-driven
- Detail-oriented
- Time management
- Team-working
- Motivational
- Presentation skills
- CRM system proficiency
- Level 1 Certificate in Customer Service
- Level 2 Certificate in Contact Centre Operations
Bringing it all together
The sentences and paragraphs of your job description will read well when the duties, goals, and skills are linked to each other. For example, ‘You will resolve customer complaints using excellent communication skills to keep escalations below x%, improving the customer experience, reducing churn, and raising customer loyalty.’
You need to include additional information to complete your high-performing customer services job description and make it ready for use as a job advert. The extra information will consist of the job title, and this should be carefully considered for it to be recognised by candidate search enquiries.
Stating an average salary has been proven to increase appropriate applicant numbers and job offer acceptance. Focusing on candidate expectations is also vital and may include how your organisation supports the work-life balance and your flexible, remote, and hybrid working policies.
Actioning these steps will help you combine all the elements needed to write a high-performing customer services job description and put your job offer in front of the talent that will help you drive your business forward.
Danny Aldridge
Owner
Space Recruitment
