A number of answers were thrown out by various customer service specialists, managers, operations staff, business consultant, business developers, etc.
Individuality, love, passion, empathy, listening, grace, loyalty, integrity, communication, ownership, care, resolution, humility, genuine, understanding, excellence, trust, compassion, attitude, reliability and the list goes on.
Of course all these are important. In fact, they are important in any job that you do, not just customer service.
If you are in sales, you need to develop a listening ear, be clear in your communication, take ownership for your job, be genuine, gain trust, have a positive attitude, be reliable and help customer to resolve his or her problem.
Most big corporations have a customer service department to take care of customers' feedback and complaints. For smaller companies, the admin or HR department will cover customer service duties.
I thought about the question for a while and answered "Shit."
I certainly hope no one thinks that I'm trying to play punk or referring to something else or trying to get attention.
But often than not, most of us view customer service as an unpleasant job. Customer service staff often have to deal with a bunch of irritating hags who have nothing better to do than to complain about being overcharged for 1 cent. Dealing with customers yelling the lung out that the machine is not working because they didn't read the instruction booklet as instructed. Getting an earful from customer because the delivery man was 20 minutes late and the problem is still not fixed. Marketing department screwed up a promotion and the customer service people get it. Billing department forget to refund a customer's account and the customer service people get it. And all things that are never the fault of the customer service staff. Every problem in the company becomes the problem of the customer service department.
When a company has a customer service department, what do you think staff in other departments will do? If there's anything related to customer issues, refer them to customer service. Anything, call the hotline.
Having a dedicated team of people to take care and look into customers' issue is important. It is more efficient and makes it easier to track and analyze the kind of problems most customers face and develop long-term solutions to such recurring issues. It also makes it easier for customer as there is one point of contact. Customers do not have to be directed to the various departments and round the building just to resolve an issue.
But it is also not uncommon to see customers being directed to contact the call center or customer service department because there's somewhere they can point their fingers to. Could it be due to their work processes that makes no sense (customers must write in for all feedback) or makes their work easier (please call our hotline)? Could it be an attitude issue (this is not my job)? How often were you asked to send in your feedback after complaining to a staff for one hour at their shop? And when someone left a complaint on a company's Facebook Page, he or she is asked by the staff to send an email. Why can't the staff send a private message to the person to find out more and follow up from there? Why ask customer to call hotline for waiver of credit card annual fee when he or she is already at the branch?
When companies recruit new staff, they look at skills and experiences. What if they focus on the mindset of the candidate instead? Not just for customer service positions, but all jobs within the company.
A staff with a service mindset will take into consideration how different customers will react to whatever processes, new product/service, project, marketing events that they are developing. The delivery team will understand the frustration of customers taking leave to wait at home for the delivery and device better delivery solutions to resolve such problem or better manage customers' expectation. They could put in place a system to update customer on the delivery status in case there's an unexpected delay.
Customer service is not just for the people in customer service department.
What is the attitude of your staff?