22 Key customer service skills and how to develop them for success in 2025

Even though customer service roles tend to see the highest turnover, with some of the lowest wages, customer service skills are nonetheless not the easiest to acquire or develop.

There aren’t exactly many options for formal schooling in “customer service” and the title doesn’t come with a ton of prestige—yet customer service teams are essential to almost every business in every industry.

So, which customer service skills are the most important? Which ones should you look for when assembling a team of agents for your business?

Here at Dialpad, we have a large customer support team that’s distributed around the world, and we provide support to our customers over voice and live chat, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That means our agents have to be skilled at both written and verbal communication, and solving and de-escalating issues for businesses of all sizes from startups to enterprise clients.

In our experience, here are some customer service skills that we’ve found to be most crucial.

What is customer service?

Customer service is the act of helping your customers and solving their problems whether that’s troubleshooting a technical issue or answering a question about how your product or service works.

Traditionally, customer service was mainly provided over the phone or in-person when someone comes into the store but today, customer service occurs across a range of online and offline channels including social media, live chat, and messaging apps like WhatsApp.

If you’re using an omnichannel contact center solution like Dialpad Support, your agents should be able to support multiple voice and digital channels simultaneously:

What are customer service skills?

Customer service skills are the different abilities that an agent or support rep has—to effectively help customers with their problems—and can include a mix of both hard and soft skills.

Customer service hard skills

Hard skills are often technical or practical skills—in other words, skills that can usually be objectively measured and/or are related to knowing how a specific product or feature works.

An agent with good hard skills is someone who knows all the ins and outs of how, for example, your software works and can clearly communicate that to a customer who may be having issues with it.

Customer service soft skills

On the other hand, soft skills are less by the book. They’re more related to how the agent makes a customer feel—for example, are they a good listener and communicator? But it’s not just about empathy or emotions either. Adaptability is a good soft skill, and so is time management. Is your agent a quick thinker? Do they get overwhelmed easily, or can they keep their cool even when a customer is getting frustrated? These are soft skills too.

Why are skills for customer service important?

Customer service skills are crucial because handling customer interactions is one of the most challenging tasks in a business. Every customer comes to you with a different problem—some much more serious than others—and every customer has a different temperament.

Having a skilled customer service team is vital to keeping your customers happy and positively impacting other crucial metrics like the ones below.

Increased customer retention (and lifetime value)

A good customer service team that can solve issues respectfully and effectively is its own form of marketing. Customers feel confident that even if they do have a problem, you can solve it promptly, which makes it more likely that they’ll stay with you over the long term.

Positive word of mouth

Zappos built an entire business model off of their support team’s ability to delight customers. They were selling the same shoes as everyone else. The only difference was their customer service team and the skills they hired for and their approach to CX. At their height, it made Zappos a billion-dollar company.

Employee satisfaction and engagement

There’s no point sugar-coating it—customer service can be a slog. There’s high turnover, agents typically go from one company to another once they’ve burned out, and from a business perspective, it’s bad for your bottom line.

Why? Because you’re spending more money on re-hiring and training new people to replace the previous ones. What if you hired a team with the basic skills needed for customer service, and took the time to develop them with the goal of keeping your agents happy? Not only would they be able to serve your customers better, they’re also more likely to stick around, which reduces employee attrition costs.

What are the principles of good customer service?

When it comes to good customer service, your team of agents will all bring different skills to the table. But there are a few key pillars that they should align to in order to provide the best experience possible. Good customer service should be:

• Personalized: Today, 71% of consumers expect companies to deliver personalized interactions. It’s not just a nice-to-have anymore. And businesses have the tools to provide these personalized conversations, with CRMs and contact center solutions that can pull all of this information into a convenient overview for agents.

• Proactive: In the same vein, customer service should also be proactive. For example, if there are industry updates or regulatory changes that impact your customers, don’t just wait for them to come to you. Proactively send out communications and prepare your agents to handle an influx of questions.

• Convenient: In a word, omnichannel. Customers don’t just call anymore—they want to be able to reach you through different channels. Make it easy for them to do that.

• Confident: This might be the most overlooked pillar, but confidence is crucial to providing customer service. If agents are stumbling as they explain how to troubleshoot a problem or unsure about your latest feature updates, customers will pick up on that, and it’ll affect their experience—even if your agent ends up solving the problem for them.

22 best customer service skills for success in 2025, plus examples

Now, let’s look at 22 of the top skills that good customer service requires and what to look for as you’re putting together your customer service team.

1. Empathy

Can your agents put themselves in your customers’ shoes, see problems from their perspectives, and be sensitive toward them? An empathetic agent isn’t just solving a problem—they can also show support effectively and build rapport with someone who often is coming to you in a frustrated or confused state of mind.

Example: A customer calls to report a lost package. The agent responds, “I understand how frustrating this must be, especially if it was something important. Let’s get this sorted out together as quickly as possible.”

2. Problem solving

This is the ability to find the best possible solution to the customer’s problem—and ideally in the first interaction. The ultimate goal of customer service is to solve customer problems, which means anticipating the issue, finding possible solutions, and executing them (or helping customers take the necessary steps).

Example: A customer reaches out with a payment issue. The agent identifies the source of the problem, provides immediate troubleshooting steps, and escalates to the billing team for a permanent resolution, keeping the customer informed throughout the process.

3. Communication

An agent with good communication skills can interact with customers in a clear and confident manner, and help them understand the issue and how to resolve it. Calling and messaging are both popular channels for customers, which means agents have to be good at communicating both verbally and in written form.

Example: In a live chat, an agent summarizes the customer’s concern: “Just to confirm, you’re looking for a refund for the wrong item delivered. Let me check the order details and process that for you now.”

4. Active listening

Most customers are frustrated already when they come to you and don’t want to repeat themselves. This is where active listening is crucial because it leads to asking the right questions—and responding with the correct answers.

Example: A customer explains a technical issue in detail. The agent listens carefully, paraphrases the issue to confirm understanding, and says, “Thanks for sharing that. Let me guide you through the steps to fix this.”

5. Collaboration

Collaboration can be your team’s biggest asset. There are times when agents have to communicate with multiple departments (like Sales, Finance, and Product) to solve a customer query.

Agents often also have to collaborate to share workloads, ask for help, and so on—which makes collaboration skills very important to productivity (and also team cohesion and morale).

Example: An agent involves the technical team to resolve a complex query while keeping the customer updated, ensuring a seamless handoff and resolution.

6. Technical or product knowledge

Your customer service team should possess, at the very least, basic knowledge about your industry and an in-depth understanding of your products or services.

This isn’t something that can be done in just one day—agents will need extensive ongoing training to become familiar with product specifications, usage guidelines, purchasing processes, troubleshooting methods, and more.

Example: An agent quickly identifies a software bug and guides the customer through a temporary workaround while escalating the issue to the product team for a permanent fix.

7. Attention to detail

Attention to detail is important because it ensures agents can catch key information, minimize errors, and follow processes consistently to provide reliable support. As a side benefit, it helps build trust with customers, too.

Example: While resolving a query, an agent notices an account discrepancy and addresses it proactively, preventing potential future issues for the customer.

8. Patience

Patience might often be seen as a personality trait, but it can be a skill, too. Agents should be able to keep calm and respond with understanding when customers get flustered or angry. It’s not always easy to recognize your own triggers and maintain composure, but customer service agents can’t afford to lose their patience in these situations. Help them build this skill with role-playing exercises and well-written scripts.

Example: A customer repeatedly asks the same question out of confusion. The agent stays calm and rephrases the explanation until the customer feels reassured.

9. Tenacity

Tenacity reflects an agent’s determination to see a problem through to resolution, no matter how complex or prolonged it is. Agents with this skill make sure that no customer is left without a solution.

Example: When an issue requires multiple escalations, the agent tracks its progress persistently and updates the customer daily until the problem is fully resolved.

10. Adaptability

Customers are full of surprises. This is why agents have to be able to adapt to different situations and mold their responses based on customers’ needs and moods.

Example: When a customer switches from frustration to gratitude mid-conversation, the agent adjusts their tone accordingly, celebrating the resolution together.

11. Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness is about finding creative solutions when no standard answer exists. Often, agents with this skill are good at using the tools and knowledge they have to deliver unexpected results.

Example: When a customer needs urgent service that requires another team to be involved, the agent identifies an alternative solution until that team becomes available.

12. Positive attitude

Customers need trust and support from your CX team. The best way to show this, no matter how difficult the problem, is to have a positive attitude towards the situation.

This could involve reassuring customers that their issue will be addressed—if not immediately, within the shortest possible time—or even just keeping customers updated about ticket resolution to reduce their stress.

Example: “I know this process feels lengthy, but I appreciate your patience. I’m here to make sure it gets resolved properly for you.”

13. Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence involves recognizing, understanding, and managing emotions—both your own and the customer’s. This skill helps agents handle tense situations calmly and de-escalate conflict effectively.

Example: An agent senses the customer is stressed and says, “I can tell this has been frustrating for you. I’m going to work with my team to get this fixed as soon as possible.”

14. Writing skills

Good writing is especially important today with so many customers preferring to use live chat and messaging channels. Scripts can be very helpful because they provide a shortcut, but agents should be regularly trained on written responses to ensure they’re clear, professional, and concise.

Example: “Hi Alex, I’ve processed the refund for your order and it should reflect in your account within 3-5 business days. Let me know if you have any other questions—I’m happy to help!”

15. Persuasion skills

Persuasion is about guiding customers to solutions, purchases, or actions in a way that aligns with their needs and preferences—and also benefits the business.

Example: “I recommend our premium plan—it includes all the features you said you’re looking for, plus it’s discounted if you upgrade this month!”

16. Time management skills

This is a crucial soft skill for any agent. Customers can easily abandon conversations when they feel like they’re being put in the back seat, even if it’s for a few seconds.

That’s why it’s so important that agents learn how to strategically keep certain customers on hold and balance wait times between simultaneous conversations. Not only will it help them manage multiple tasks more effectively, it can also improve the customer experience.

Example: An agent handles multiple chats by setting realistic response expectations and rotating between them efficiently.

17. Goal-oriented focus

A goal-oriented mindset ensures agents prioritize tasks that lead to customer satisfaction and overall team success. Setting clear goals for agents can help them hit the most important business-level metrics more consistently. For example, if your goal is to significantly improve your team’s CSAT score, and you can have slightly longer average call durations to do this, communicate that to your agents!

Example: An agent consistently meets their daily resolution targets while maintaining high customer satisfaction scores.

18. A methodical approach

A methodical approach involves following structured steps to resolve problems efficiently and avoid overlooking details. To help agents build this skill, help reinforce content and training materials that share important processes and troubleshooting guidance.

Example: A financial services contact center agent uses a predefined troubleshooting guide to resolve a client’s credit card issue without skipping key fraud checks.

19. Willingness to learn

Agents may all start with different experience levels and skills, but coachability is a skill that will help them adapt more easily to new tools, processes, and customer expectations.

Example: An agent completes optional training sessions to improve their proficiency with your company’s CRM platform.

20. Artificial Intelligence

Understanding how to leverage Ai tools for faster resolutions and personalized customer experiences is increasingly vital. For example, our own agents use Dialpad’s Ai Assistant feature to get instant answers to common questions and speed up resolution times:

Example: A SaaS company’s support agent uses their Ai-powered knowledge base to instantly provide accurate answers to customer questions.

21. Omnichannel awareness

Omnichannel awareness ensures agents can provide seamless support across multiple communication platforms. For example, an agent with good omnichannel awareness knows how to adapt their tone or the details in their responses to provide the best experience for the customer.

Example: A customer transitions from chat to a phone call, and the agent seamlessly picks up where the conversation left off by quickly scanning the customer’s previous interactions with the support team.

22. Multilingual skills

This skill is pretty straightforward. Being multilingual allows agents to assist a wider audience effectively—if you have a customer service team in different regions and customer bases around the world, this gives you a lot of versatility when scheduling shifts.

Example: The agent switches to the customer’s native language mid-call when they notice the customer struggling with English.

What if someone on your team needs to improve on this list of customer service skills?

With so many potential skills that can empower agents to provide better customer service, it’s not realistic to expect every agent to join your contact center with all of these abilities under their belt. The good news? That’s where your training and development strategy can shine.

How to improve customer service skills: 3 best practices

Helping your agents uplevel their skills and customer service techniques is a key part of call center workforce management. Here are a few ways to coach and guide them:

Give your team clear feedback

Your customer service team can leverage three types of feedback to improve their customer service representative skills: direct customer feedback, manager feedback, and customer feedback reports.

Giving them a mix of all three will help them reflect on their performance from an objective standpoint and determine their highs and lows. They’ll also understand the reason behind unsatisfactory experiences (if any) and take measures to work on specific skills.

Provide ongoing training

Although agents should practice core skills themselves, you could help them by continuing to provide customer service skills training—for example, by:

• Conducting customer service training games like role plays to give agents an opportunity to practice scenarios where they might lose patience or where empathizing with customers could be a challenge.

• Taking recorded calls that show how agents handled different situations well, and using them as examples that the rest of the team can follow.

Set them up for success

Training and feedback are both great, but agents also need the right tools and technology to do their jobs, and these tools can help with everything from content organization to time management.

For example, an Ai-powered contact center platform can automatically search and pull up documentation or important content that can help agents with different customer questions, which can save them a lot of time when helping a customer.

Master the most effective customer service skills with Dialpad

Having great customer service skills is important, but no matter how many skills you add to this list, your team needs to be equipped with the right tools to provide a great CX.

Dialpad Support empowers your customer support leaders to manage your workforce’s schedule, plan activities, coach agents more effectively, and more. See how companies like RE/MAX and Randstad are using the platform now!