<h1 class='title'>5 Essential Call Center Skills You Wouldn’t Learn In College</h1>

Ain’t college just great! You learn tons of useful stuff that you can use in real life like Integral Calculus, Differential Equations, Thermodynamics, Quantitative Chemistry, and other really useful stuff. I loved solving trigonometry problems like “How long is it going to take a car traveling 50 KPH to reach the next town 50 Km away?” or “What time of the day is it when my shadow is 8 feet long?” I enjoyed those subjects so much I just had to take them twice!😉

Personally, the only subjects I felt were most useful to me in my professional life are Mathematics, English, Science and Literature. Definitely you need to be good with numbers and the ability to quickly manipulate numbers in your head while talking with your clients. Talking with your clients, more often than not, requires you to communicate effectively in English to get your message across clearly. Negotiations are won or lost by how you use or fail to use the power of Math and English. Science and Literature lets your mind travel to times and places you can only find in prose and poetry, and in tales of discoveries and explorations that allow you to expand the limits of your imagination.

So far, I’ve had over thirty years working in different trade areas including six years in the call center industry and honestly, I never had the chance to apply Integral Calculus, Thermodynamics, or any of that geeky stuff I learned in college. Maybe I’m in the wrong industry. On the flipside, in the six years I've had in the call center industry, I did learn a lot of call center skills which I never learned in college and this is what I would like to share with you in this article.

There are actually so many skills you can learn working in a call center environment but we’ll just limit this article to 5 call center skills that you probably wouldn’t learn in college.

5 Essential Call Center Skills You Wouldn't Learn in College

Active Listening

College teaches us to speak our minds, to convey our thoughts to others. We learn to be articulate. We learn to debate and defend what we strongly believe in. We learn how to construct proper sentences. We learn to be proficient speaking the English language although there still is much room for improvement, as what I wrote about in another ARTICLE. But one essential skill we wouldn’t learn in college is how to listen actively. Mostly, we listen not to understand but to rebut. We hear one keyword from the other person and then we stop listening and start formulating our response. Active listening is an essential call center skill that enables us to keep our mouth shut, listen intently, and understand exactly what the other person is saying before responding. Active listening is a foundation for effective communication. Unless we clearly understand what the other person is trying to say before responding, we might as well be speaking in Cebuano to a customer in Rhode Island because you still wouldn’t be communicating on the same frequency.

Right Choice of WORDS

In college, when our prof asks us a question, normally we would say the first answer that comes to mind. Not that there’s anything wrong with that but what if there was a much better answer? Worst scenario is our prof would just say, “Thank you for your answer. Anyone else?” In the real world however, our answer can spell the difference between a happy customer and an irate detractor. Even if we gave the correct information but delivered negatively, our customer may still perceive our answer negatively. Another essential call center skill that we probably wouldn’t learn in college is the ability to deliver our answer using the right choice of words. It takes skill to say what we want to say in a much better way. Some call it positive scripting. Others call it being tactful. The best call center agents have the special skills to deliver even the worst news and make it sound pleasant or at least acceptable for the customer. For example, instead of saying “Mr. Customer, the reason you have no service is because you did not pay your bill…” we can choose our words and instead say “Mr. Customer, I see your concern and the good news is we can immediately restore your service after we take care of your bill which you may have missed. Will that be with the same card we have on file?” Sounds so much nicer, don’t you think?

EMPATHY

Honestly, this is one word I never encountered until I joined the call center industry. I’ve been in manufacturing, I’ve been in sales, I’ve done consultancy but it was only when I got into customer service as a call center agent that I heard about “empathy”. In college, we had “ENTHALPY” in Thermodynamics but definitely no “empathy”. Call center agents have this essential skill called “empathy” that allows them to identify with the customer and make the customer feel that the agent understands how the customer feels about their situation. A word of caution about empathy: we should use this skill with sincerity. Nothing can be more irritating to a customer than to hear an empathy statement that sounded like we were just reading a script. And empathy doesn’t necessarily always have to be sad. We can also empathize with a customer who’s feeling happy. Just make sure we laugh WITH the customer and not laugh AT her.

Patience… lots and lots of Patience

Nowadays, there are probably just two types of people who have the patience of a saint: husbands who live with their in-laws, and call center agents (who live with their in-laws). Some say patience is a virtue. Call center agents say patience, lots of patience, is an essential skill necessary to survive every shift. Imagine eight hours talking on the phone trying to de-escalate irate customers most of whom would spit venom at you and call you by so many colorful names. And then there are the occasional granny calls and calls from customers who can barely talk English. Remember Khamaka “ek-ek” BREKKER?

You need a ton of patience dealing with customers like these every shift. College never really taught us much about patience mainly because there was nothing to be impatient about college other than waiting for weekends and sem break.

Failure

Mainly because they all expect us to be successful, College never really taught us much about failure and even less about how to cope with failure. You can always drop out of any subject rather than risk getting an “F” and just try again next sem. Sadly, that’s not how it works in the real world where failure is always an option. Call center agents have learned over time that failure is omni present and have developed the essential skill of coping with failure and bouncing back. There are only two ways to deal with failure: either you quit while you’re ahead or learn from your failure and bounce back on the next round. Call center agents are not known for quitting. Even if today sucks, there’s always tomorrow to look forward to.

There you have it, 5 essential call center skills you wouldn’t learn in college. It had been at least thirty years since college and I’m not privy to how much change college curriculum has gone through, if any.  I’m pretty sure there are a few more skills out there. If you have any in mind, by all means please let me know through your comments. If you felt this article made sense, don’t forget to LIKE and SHARE.

Thank you so much for dropping by today. See you on our next post, y’all have a great shift!