Emotional Intelligence: A Key Ingredient to Good Customer Service

By Lynn Musa

MIAMI, March 21, 2018 —  Good customer service representatives often share certain characteristics. None of these is more important than having the ability to intuitively understand a customer’s needs. This characteristic is especially vital when dealing with customer complaints, where a high-level of emotional intelligence is essential to successfully remediate grievances.

Without a doubt, emotional intelligence is the foundation of successful interpersonal relationships. It is the crucial factor that distinguishes good customer service specialists from great ones.  

According to Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter more than IQ, individuals with mature emotional skills are more content and efficacious in their lives. As a result, they are able to empathize more readily and achieve greater productivity. According to Goleman, “people who cannot marshal some control over their emotional life fight inner battles that sabotage their ability for focused work and clear thought.”

Emotional Intelligence primarily consists of recognizing, understanding, and properly managing one’s own emotions in relation to others. In addition, it is the ability to perceive the intentions of others so that interpersonal relationships are strengthened.

One of the major challenges customer service representatives face is remaining cool and collected when an angry customer passionately unleashes their wrath and uses foul language over the phone in an attempt to express their frustration.

Customer service specialists must possess keen problem-solving skills and the ability to remain calm under pressure. In order to successfully polish these skills, the agents must learn how to detach themselves on a personal level from the customer so that the problem they’re  experiencing can be fully identified and solved. Once the problem has been identified, an emotionally intelligent agent will show respect, compassion, and empathy towards the client by verbally stating in a calm and soothing tone that they fully understand and apologize for the inconvenience at hand.

The next step, of course, is to find a solution to the customer’s problem. Great customer service reps know how to assist the customer every step of the way by implementing active listening, understanding, and identifying the problem and then providing an immediate solution to the dilemma. Without emotional intelligence, this is an inevitably impossible task.

govWorks.com and its brands TravelVisa.com, PassportCenter.com, and PassportRenewal.com have seen explosive growth since its launch in January 2018. The volume of business govWorks has received has greatly surpassed what had been anticipated, so having good customer support has been paramount to keeping customers satisfied.

As a company continues to expand and become highly profitable, so does its demand for highly-qualified customer service agents. As a result, top-notch companies that want to be recognized for great customer service must deliver excellence and implement strategies to hire the best candidates.

For example, one of these strategies includes pre-employment testing. Pre-employment tests are utilized by companies to determine an applicant’s personality type, language proficiency, emotional intelligence, work skills, and overall cerebral capacity. The full exertion of these tests allow a company to save time and capital in the selection protocol, reduce the company’s turnover rate, and deliver excellence by hiring highly-qualified candidates that are suited to successfully execute the tasks at hand.

As has been noted, emotional intelligence is extremely important in order to cultivate long-lasting and fruitful interpersonal relationships in the workplace. And it goes without saying, it’s good for business.

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