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8 Soft Skills Proven to Improve Customer Service
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by
Steph Lundberg
December 22, 2023
· Updated on
There’s a saying in the support world: no one majors in customer service.
Which is to say, that there’s no single educational or career path that will prepare you specifically for this kind of impactful work. Most of us go on a professional journey before arriving at our final destination of a customer support career.
It also means that we pick up the excellent customer service soft skills we need to do our jobs along the way, sometimes formally (through college education) or informally through direct work in different customer-facing fields.
That was definitely true in my case. My college and career journey has spanned everything from journalism to public health to logistics. While my career hasn’t been a direct path, it’s proven over and over how soft skills are in customer service.
It’s also reinforced an important point over and over: it’s never too late to improve your soft skills.
Whether you’re a college student working part-time or a career customer support person, this post will help you understand more about the skills that are so important to customer service — and why you should invest time and effort into mastering them.
Table of Contents
Soft skills are commonly distinguished from “hard” skills on the grounds that they have to do with things like emotional intelligence and communication ability, while “hard skills” are more technical competencies like coding or accounting. Ostensibly, hard skills are measurable, whereas soft skills are more abstract.
But here’s where I have to break with common wisdom (a bit).
As a longtime customer support professional and as a hiring manager and leader, I don’t think there’s anything “soft” about the support agents need to do their jobs well in customer service. Many software engineers couldn’t handle a phone call with an aggressive customer — there’s nothing “soft” about the skills needed to calm them down and find a path forward.
I also disagree with the idea that soft skills aren’t measurable, particularly in the realm of customer service.
Do you have a best-in-class customer satisfaction (CSAT) rating? That’s a measure of your support team’s empathy and care.
Do you have a high bug fix rate and feature release tempo? That’s a measure of your support team’s problem-solving skills, their ability to build productive and healthy relationships with other teams, and to advocate on your customers’ behalf.
Do you have a high Net Promoter Score and retention rate? That’s a measure of your customer support team's active listening skills and their ability to anticipate and address your customers’ needs (i.e., their emotional intelligence).
Do you get an outpouring of understanding and support from your customers following major outages? That’s a measure of your support team’s positive attitude, helpfulness, conflict resolution, and de-escalation skills.
I could go on. Suffice it to say that while it’s okay to use the term soft skills as a categorization method, it’s important to remember that they’re just as vital and valuable as any other skills.
If you’re still not convinced, let’s go over some hard numbers:
All of these points are somewhat related to customer service agents’ soft skills. Their ability to remain calm even when a customer is rude, be empathic, and understand your customers’ problems will directly impact their experience with your brand.
In sum, soft skills in customer service will help keep customers happy, loyal and even make them spend more.
Ok, this is kind of three skills in one. But they’re so related and interconnected that separating them is difficult.
Customers are often contacting us in moments of real need and frustration. Sometimes they just won’t be at their best.
Empathy and compassion are required in order for us to truly understand their problems and make them feel heard. Through showing empathy, you also give customers permission to express themselves honestly, so that they can trust you to fix their problems.
Patience is crucial in all customer interactions, regardless of the product or service you’re offering. Customers may not have the technical understanding of why something isn’t working, so your support agents have to be capable of kindly drawing out the information you need or guiding them through a solution, without pressure or judgment.
Customers don’t reach out for customer service because they enjoy it — they reach out because they need help. And while abusive customers can happen at times, most customers aren’t overly aggressive. They’re just regular people working through frustration, stress, fear, pain, and probably other private struggles you’re not privy to.
And if they’ve had poor customer service experiences with other companies, sometimes they’re coming to you conditioned to expect the same poor treatment. That makes it extra important to be able to hear and constructively address a customer’s feelings without taking it personally or making judgments about it.
This reduces stress for both you and the customer. It shows them you see their humanity and helps them trust that you want to help.
By remaining calm and de-escalating conversations, you create positive associations with your company. You help customers get to a place where they can share what’s really going on.
Customer perception can form instantly, and when customers are frustrated or when a problem can’t be solved right away, a positive and friendly attitude can work wonders.
Simply reframing the language you use to be positive instead of negative can have a big impact.
For example, instead of saying, “I’m sorry, I can’t offer you a refund,” you could try, “I can get that product replaced for you, would that help?”
The second option offers a solution and asks for the customer’s input, rather than providing a dead-end that the customer has to figure out how to get around.
Similarly, putting a smile and warmth in your voice when you speak to customers over the phone or appropriately using emojis over chat builds a customer’s trust and good feelings about the company’s brand. It’s a bit of a cliché, but people can often tell if you’re smiling when you answer the phone.
Effective communication fosters understanding and builds emotional connections with your customers. These two things are core to creating an engaging experience that’s catered to each customer’s needs.
Customer service agents must be able to explain information clearly, concisely, and at the customer’s learning level. They need to be able to guide customers through tasks like troubleshooting step-by-step, so customers don’t get confused or frustrated. Reply templates can help, but they’re best used as a starting point.
Clear and effective communication is vital no matter the support channels you’re using — whether you’re talking to customers over the phone, managing your team inbox, or handling live chats.
It really is the core of the job.
The ability to be present and listen actively to customers is a key skill for any customer service agent.
By actively listening, you can often glean insights from what the customer’s not saying or how they’re conveying information to you, which means you can ask more informed and relevant questions that will get you to a solution faster.
Moreover, customers hate having to repeat themselves. By actively listening, you can show your customer that you value their time as well as their business.
It’s not unusual for support agents to run into situations or issues they’ve never encountered before — in fact, that’s pretty much status quo for customer service professionals.
When a customer brings us a gnarly problem or asks about a part of the product we’ve never even heard of, we have to be able to respond with curiosity and flexibility (not panic). Resilience is just as necessary because sometimes you just have to buckle down and work on an issue until it’s resolved without getting tired or flustered.
When even the most unpredictable issues are handled calmly and confidently, it builds customer confidence in your team and your brand.
It’s not enough to be curious about a new topic or bug. You have to know how to work the problem and go about finding answers within a reasonable amount of time, so that you’re not leaving customers hanging with no resolution or explanation.
This could mean having god-level Google-fu, or having a tried-and-true troubleshooting methodology. It might also mean knowing what tool or database to query for answers, or knowing who to ask for help (and when).
The greatest customer service agents are super sleuths, tracking down answers with creativity and determination.
Speaking of asking for help, customer service agents should be a customer’s greatest advocate.
While support agents may handle dozens of customer conversations each day, they’re probably only interacting with each customer once. Here’s what that means:
What’s routine for you is rare for your customer.
Your support team does two things when they take ownership of each customer’s problem:
Creating opportunities for advocacy across your customer service team makes them more than just a transactional machine handling routine questions. Instead, they become an invaluable asset to your company. They become your customers’ champions.
Did you read through that list and come across a few skills you’d like to work on or to help your team improve in?
Being a good customer support agent means always being open to growth, and although there’s no degree in customer service (yet!), there are many ways you can beef up your customer service skills.
As the customer service profession has grown and evolved, so have the resources available to us for learning and improving our most important customer service skills.
You can find professional education and courses on all the skills we covered in this article on training platforms like LinkedIn Learning, Coursera, Udemy, Skillshare, and more.
Customer service professionals and leaders have also written many books covering these soft skills and related topics, including some of the tougher competencies to build on like empathy, growth mindset, and adaptability. Some recommendations include:
Finally, your peers and leaders are excellent resources for developing your customer service soft skills.
Take advantage of peer feedback and mentorship your team can offer. Role-playing customer interactions with your team is a great way to practice conflict resolution and active listening in a low-stakes environment.
Customer service professionals are the living embodiment of why it’s important to maintain a balance between soft skills and hard skills.
We keep customers happy by understanding their problems, solving them, and listening to their feedback.
We keep our product and engineering teams happy by understanding and valuing their work, translating customer needs into business objectives and technical requirements, and helping those teams fulfill their commitments to the product and customers.
If I can share maybe the most pivotal lesson I’ve learned in my customer service career, it’s that there are no hard skills without soft skills.
It’s a symbiotic, mutually beneficial relationship, and when you find someone who can demonstrate both skill sets, it’s a beautiful thing.
May 14, 2025
6 Ways to Use AI in Your Email Inbox
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
AI and email management go hand in hand.
There are AI tools dedicated to helping you clean your inbox (like SaneBox) and plenty that help you draft emails better and/or faster.
In a world where new AI tools are releasing every day, we're going to share some practical ways to use AI within email and your inbox.
At the end of each section, we'll cover some of the best AI email tools and AI assistants that can help you be more efficient in your inbox—whether you're a Gmail or Outlook user.
Here at Missive, our users get a lot of emails—100+ in a day in some cases. We crowdsourced the most practical, helpful AI suggestions that real businesses are using to maintain a clutter-free, productive inbox.
Before we jump into the examples, these are the three broad buckets where AI is used within inboxes:
For cleaning emails, there is usually a deep purging functionality (i.e., archive all emails before a certain date) as well as a new system to keep your inbox clean after the purge (i.e., auto-categorization into folders/labels). SaneBox is a great example of this bucket.
For drafting and writing emails, you can create prompts that take into consideration your writing style, structure, and tone and add in resources for AI to pull context from—most commonly, your knowledge base or website.
For kicking off other tasks—this is the most exciting part of AI within your inbox. Certain tools (like Missive's AI-powered rules) allow you to automate a set of actions based on the context of an email. Imagine every email gets assigned to the right people, a set of tasks is created, a label or folder is applied, and an entry is made in your CRM—without a single human interaction. That’s magic!
Let's get to the AI-powered magic.
We're highlighting Missive's AI-powered rules in the examples below, but you can create your own AI email automations with your favorite tools, and we include some recommendations.
Here are the 6 best AI email workflows.
Our inboxes get inundated every day, but not every email deserves equal attention. A clean inbox needs a system of categorization.
Historically, you could set up automations based on sender, message content, etc.—but now with AI, you can understand the context of emails, which changes email management entirely.
It's like having an AI assistant read each email and then categorize it based on the context within. It's far more robust than just looking at the sender domain.
If you don't already have some form of auto-labeling, auto-folder categorization, or archiving automation running, here are a few examples to get you started:
By auto-filing certain emails out of your inbox using AI, you'll be able to focus on the ones that need your attention. And when you have some free time, you can visit your newsletter label to catch up on industry insights.
Most modern email clients have some version of this built in. If you're looking for an add-on tool for Gmail or Outlook, we cover those below as well.
Missive — Inbox collaboration for teams
Superhuman — Great for keyboard shortcut lovers
Shortwave — For an AI-first inbox
SaneBox — AI email organizer that integrates with your existing client
Unroll.me — Alternative to SaneBox, bulk email cleaner for any provider
AI can save time inside your inbox—but using it to trigger external workflows is where the magic really happens.
Example: A real estate business receives emails from both buyers and sellers in a shared inbox. Their workflows are completely different, so we used AI to identify the intent and trigger specific assignments, tasks, and summaries for the right team members.
If you have different workflows depending on the email, you can use AI to detect the context and automate accordingly.
Relay.app — AI-first workflow builder
Zapier — Classic builder, now with AI
Missive — AI rules built into the collaborative inbox
Inbox maintenance is like pruning a tree—it requires regular attention.
With AI clients, workflow builders, or Missive rules, you can automatically clean up emails without manually clicking "unsubscribe."
Set it up narrowly (specific senders or domains) or broadly (based on open behavior, like emails unread for 30+ days).
Solutions like SaneBox include versions of this, though some manual training may be required.
Say you run an accounting firm where each client has a dedicated team and inbox.
Most messages are about invoices, but occasionally, an urgent email from the CEO arrives that needs management's attention.
AI can identify urgency and escalate the message automatically to the right person.
Other tools can do this too—but may require you to create specific folders/labels and rely on manual monitoring.
This works best if you have a large, public knowledge base or help center that the AI can reference. If you do, you can use one of the newer AI models that allow you to search the web.
Here's the prompt we use at Missive for our support team:
You are an expert customer support specialist for Missive, the collaborative team inbox platform. Your job is to draft accurate, empathetic, and clear replies to customer inquiries based only on official Missive documentation.
Note: Keep all responses strictly tied to Missive's documented functionality.
Now, if you want to get crazy with it. You can create an automation where a draft is created every time an incoming email fits a specific criteria. And you can use AI to help you determine which email triggers the automation.
Don't want to pay for contact enrichment tools? Use AI to summarize new prospects.
It adds context directly to the email thread, so you can start conversations better informed.
For more robust enrichment, tools like Clay or CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce offer AI-powered data collection.
We hope these ideas help you clean emails, draft faster, and automate smarter.
All the tools mentioned above offer a “fresh start” feature to deep clean your inbox and begin anew.
Whether you're using SaneBox with your current client or switching to an AI-first inbox—there's no reason your email shouldn’t flow to the right people and places automatically after setting a few AI-powered rules.
If you're looking for an AI-powered email client uniquely designed for teams—give Missive a try. No credit card needed, and our free trial includes access to AI rules.
February 5, 2024
How to Set Customer Service Goals for Success
Learn how to set customer service goals for success
When I took over the customer service team at my last company, it was during a period of transition.
We’d just gone through an acquisition which, although welcome, meant we needed to reassess our resources, our tools, and our team’s strategy for the foreseeable future. I was also stepping from a senior role into a management role, and while neither management nor the team were new to me, the situation was changing quickly.
This presented a challenge: quickly leading the team through setting new expectations and requirements, while still delivering the same excellent customer service experience for our customers.
It also gave us an opportunity to move from good to great — by understanding where we were, where we wanted to go, and how we might get there.
Maybe you’ve also just taken over a new team, or you’re also going through an acquisition or reorganization. Or maybe you’re just looking to level up your support team.
Regardless of why you’re here, this article will help you understand what SMART goals are in the context of customer service and how to define SMART customer service goals for your team. It includes some examples of great customer service goals, and it will show you how to measure the success of your goals so your team can continue to grow and adjust your customer service strategy as needed.
Table of Contents
Being on a ship with no destination is unpleasant and nerve-wracking for everyone aboard.
Setting solid customer service goals for your team provides a common purpose and keeps everyone moving in the same direction. It improves your odds of reaching your destination: consistent excellent customer service.
And beyond the psychological benefits of having clear goals, there are plenty of more tangible benefits too.
Clear customer service goals ensure that your team’s efforts align with the broader objectives of the company, so it’s clear how your team is contributing to business growth.
It also means both you and the company can make more informed decisions about budget and resource allocation, using the real data and trends you glean from measuring your progress against your goals.
Goals focused on customer satisfaction directly contribute to improving the overall customer experience. Satisfied customers are more likely to be loyal, to make repeat purchases, and to recommend your business to others.
Consistently meeting and exceeding your customer service goals also builds your company’s reputation for reliability and trustworthiness, which is essential for long-term brand success.
Setting specific goals and measuring how each member works toward these objectives allows customer service teams and managers to identify strengths and weaknesses. It also allows individual team members to understand and direct their own professional development.
Well-defined goals also provide teams with a clear sense of direction and purpose. Team members who understand how their work contributes to larger goals are happier and more committed to the company’s success.
You’ve probably heard of SMART goals before. It’s a handy mnemonic tool that reminds everyone that effective goals are:
But why do the goals you set for your customer service team (or that they set for themselves) need to be SMART?
The point of setting goals is to be as clear as possible about expectations:
There shouldn’t be ambiguity in customer service goals. That’s because while a well-defined goal tells your team members what success looks like, it also acts as a catalyst or guide to help you get there.
This may be from a customer standpoint (satisfaction, response time, self-service, etc.), from an individual perspective (performance or professional development), or from a company perspective (cost per customer, retention rate, expansion rate, etc.).
First, keep in mind that you usually can’t jump right into creating a goal. There’s always an assessment period first.
You need to spend some time figuring out what the current state of your customer service team is.
Some questions you can ask to guide your assessment:
Your assessment will be highly dependent on your team and company, but these questions should give you an idea of the things you should consider as you work to define your goals.
Once you’ve done the foundational work to understand what your team needs to improve on, you can begin using that information to define your goals.
Let’s break it down in the context of a real customer service SMART goal.
Any goal you set should be clear and well-defined. For example, “answer customers faster” is a nice aim, but what are the channels where you want to answer customers faster? What does “faster” mean?
A more specific goal for reducing customer wait times would be to set a target first response time for a specific channel, such as: “Send a first response to customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”
Depending on your needs, you could get even more specific: “Send a response to customers inquiring about their order status in 60 seconds or less.”
Any customer service goal should be measurable, so you can understand whether you’ve achieved the goal (or not) and adjust your strategy appropriately.
Taking our example from above, a measurable target chat response time goal could be: “80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds.”
This is the point at which your initial assessment becomes really important.
“80% of customers will receive a response to their initial chat message within 60 seconds” may sound like an achievable goal. It might be doable if you have a simple product or many agents trained and available to handle chats.
But what if you have only two chat agents and are receiving hundreds of chats each day?
Of course, you still want to strive to improve their first response times, but you’ll have to set reasonable expectations to give your agents a fair shot at success.
An attainable goal in this context might instead involve increasing the initial chat response time or decreasing the percentage of customers you’re targeting, like this:
Your context will determine what makes the most sense for your team. Just remember to aim for a goal that’s stretching, yet realistic.
This is another area in which your foundational assessment is key.
First, are your proposed customer service goals aligned with your customer service values and company’s objectives? If not, they won’t be effective or successful, no matter how well they fit the SMART parameters.
Secondly, are your goals relevant to your team? For instance, a manager with a high chat volume might adapt our example to involve implementing a chatbot in order to hit their desired initial chat response time goal.
But a manager with a low ticket volume probably can’t justify the time and expense of implementing a chatbot because the benefits will never outweigh the costs for their team.
This parameter is closely tied to being measurable. You won’t be able to determine whether you’ve succeeded unless you know when the goal needs to be achieved.
To make our example time-bound, we could edit it to read: “By the end of Q2 2024, we’ll be responding to 80% of customers within 60 seconds of their initial chat message.”
Customer service goals aren’t just about how your agents interact with your customers. Surveys have shown again and again that customers want the option to solve their own problems.
A goal for developing effective self-service could be:
“By [DATE] we’ll have launched a knowledge base with articles answering our 10 most frequently asked questions about [PRODUCT], resulting in at least a 10% reduction in tickets about those issues.”
Many knowledge base tools will have built-in ticket deflection tracking features, such as giving you the number of views for an article and the number of tickets created after the article was viewed.
You can also measure the success of this goal by tracking ticket volume for a specific category or tag over time.
Implementing a quality assurance program is a great way to improve overall customer satisfaction, response and resolution times, and brand recognition. It’s also a more objective way to measure and track agent performance and to kick-off conversations about professional development with your team.
It might look like this:
“In January 2024, develop a draft QA scorecard based on ticket reviews from the previous 3 months, so that we can begin calibration sessions with the team in February 2024.”
In this case, measuring success is relatively simple: is the draft scorecard available by February 2024 when calibration conversations must begin?
Customer satisfaction (CSAT) is crucial to your support team’s success, but also the overall success of the company. To build a customer-first organization, improving or maintaining your customer satisfaction score should be one of your main goals.
A sample goal for CSAT could be:
“Each month next quarter, maintain an overall CSAT across text channels (chat and email) of 85% or better.”
You can gather CSAT ratings using built-in tools on your customer communication platforms, or through a dedicated CSAT tool to send customer surveys. Most tools will calculate your CSAT score or percentage automatically.
As we’ve already covered, customer service agents are most engaged when they understand what their role is and can see how their contributions matter (both to their entire team and the company).
A goal for improving your customer service team’s overall engagement could be:
“Have a monthly one-on-one with each agent on my team and arrange at least one team social event a quarter, with the aim of reducing employee turnover by 10 percent by the end of the year.”
As you can see, this goal includes multiple conditions for success, and the team turnover rate is a metric that can be directly measured.
As a customer service manager, you get an especially broad view of how customers use and feel about your product. You also have the ability to take that customer feedback and put it in the hands of those who need it: your product team, your engineering team, your marketing team, and so on.
This can be as simple as implementing a public customer feature request tool where your customers can share their feedback and vote on what they want to see, or as complicated as setting up an internal, cross-functional customer feedback process.
The goal for becoming the voice of your customer could be:
“Have a bi-weekly Voice of the Customer meeting with the product development team, leading to at least one product bug fix and one new customer-requested feature release every quarter.”
You could measure this goal in a number of ways, depending on your strategy. If you have implemented a dedicated customer feedback tool, you can track customer usage against the rate of product releases and bug fixes. You could also track ticket volume in a specific category as well as any impact on CSAT ratings.
Everyone has their specialties and their weaknesses, and your customer service agents are no different. Quality assurance programs are a great way to identify areas for improvement, but you may also uncover opportunities during performance and career development conversations.
Your customer service reps can improve by seeking training in special topics, professional development courses, and peer support. Working with each team member to set and achieve goals for improvement fosters a culture of continuous learning and improvement.
A good example of goal for your agent could be:
“Get training on my weakest skills as identified by our QA reviews during the next month so that my average handle time goes down to [TARGET] by the end of the quarter.”
They can measure the success of this goal through attendance and completion of training, as well as by looking for improved QA scores and handle times.
The more customer service agents take ownership of their customers’ experience, the happier both they and the customer will be.
Owning the customer’s experience will mean something different for every team. It may look like being the customer’s one point of contact for an issue, or it may mean acting as the customer’s guide as they move through the escalation process.
It may look like answering every CSAT rating, good and bad, to thank the customer for their thoughts and solicit more feedback. Or it may mean reviewing their own customer interactions, identifying missed opportunities for exceeding customer expectations or anticipating customer needs, and devising strategies for doing so in the future.
A goal for owning the customer experience could be:
“I’ll reduce my ticket escalation rate by X percent in Q2 by being the primary agent on tickets about Y topic.”
Measuring your growth at owning the customer experience will depend a lot on what specifically that means for your company. For the example above, you’d measure the achievement by looking at the percentage of tickets you’re still escalating on the specific topic.
As you’re building out goals for yourself or your customer service team, remember to take a step back occasionally and look at the big picture.
Are these goals aligned with your company and your team’s vision? Are they clear or confusing? Are they too inter-dependent, so that if you fail at one, you fail at them all?
There’s nothing magical about setting SMART goals. They’re a fantastic tool for customer service teams, but the real key is in making goal-setting a discipline and a habit you’re regularly engaging in. Setting goals is not a one-time task — it’s an ongoing process of adaptation and growth.
The landscape of customer service is always changing, and your goals will need to evolve with it.
