Customer Service Representative
Resume Example

A customer service professional is a whiz at satisfying customer needs and providing them with pleasant interactions with your company.

Because society hasn’t yet reached a point where services can be provided with no human contact, the customer representative is still a growing field, with roles forecasted to increase by 13% by 2022.

If you are a customer service professional, or looking to enter the industry, you may be writing a resume to:

• Find a new work environment
• Earn more money
• Land a managerial role elsewhere

Our tips below will teach you how to write a stellar resume rich with the customer service skills necessary to leaves a good impression on customers.

If you’re short on time, our online resume building tool can also help you make an excellent customer care resume in minutes.

1. Include These Five Strong Customer Service Skills

What skills are hiring managers looking for on your customer service resume? They are looking for both directly relevant and transferable skills. These include:

1. Customer Care: Do you have experience interacting with customers, whether you were a waiter, a front desk worker, an ice cream scooper, or a salesperson? Although having directly relevant experience would make your resume the strongest, any interactions you’ve had with customers on a professional level are considered transferable on a customer service resume.

2. Technical: This includes anything from knowing how to use:

• Customer Support Software
  • LiveChat
  • Zendesk
  • SupportCenter
  • C-Desk
  • Blazedesk
  • (and many others).
• Customer Support Hardware
  • Laptops (Mac or PC)
  • Microphones
  • Headphones
• Microsoft Office Suite (Data Entry)
  • Excel
  • Word
  • Outlook

3. Interpersonal: Do you have a friendly and positive personality? Are you a skilled communicator — able to speak clearly, authoritatively, calmly, and persuasively? How well do you handle conflict and anger? Think about how you’ve displayed these traits in your previous work experiences, and include them in your resume. If you have no previous work experiences, you’ll need to write a persuasive cover letter.

4. Competence: Have you been rewarded for your past performance? Are you tasked with training new recruits? If you’ve been reviewed or rated before, how did you stack up in comparison to with your co-workers? Are you frequently complimented by customers for your service? Reviewing these questions and including your responses in your resume will indicate that you are a competent employee.

5. Management: Even low level employees may be asked to complete tasks that display management skills. Training other employees is a good example (it shows competence and the ability to manage other people.) An ideal customer service manager is one who can conceive new methods to:

• Increase efficiency (decrease customer wait time, increase issue resolution rate, resolve problems faster)
• Increase customer satisfaction ratings
• Increase sales (via upselling, discounting, pitching)
• Reduce costs (training, labor, equipment, software, etc.)

The ability to execute a new project idea, measure the effects, and fine tune is what separates a manager from the rest.

How Should I Proceed?

Take the time to research what skills you’ll need for your job, and reflect on how your relevant or transferable skills can best be displayed on your resume for maximum effect. Click the following link to find out what other skills for your resume you can use to describe your abilities.

2. Write Strong Bullet Points

Your resume will be much stronger if you quantify (add numbers) to it. With numbers, you can give the hiring manager a clearer idea of your achievements — which is what all resumes should aim to do. How can you quantify your own resume?

First, let’s examine how this applicant quantified his resume:

• Handle 90+ calls daily, with duties including signing up new customers, retrieving customer data, presenting relevant product information, and canceling services

• Received an average 85% customer satisfaction rating to date, 15% higher than company average

• Suggested a new tactic to persuade canceling customers to stay with the company, resulting in a 5% decrease in cancellations

• Trained two new employees in how to use Kayako, entering customer data and organizing customer interaction logs

Why Are These Good Examples?

As you can see, Andrew quantified how many staff members he trained, how many calls he handled daily, how much he decreased cancellations by, and the customer satisfaction rating he achieved. This helps the hiring manager grasp his skills, and the scope of his abilities more quickly.

Think about your own work experience, and where you can quantify it. How many customers did you deal with daily? Did you receive customer commendations, or achieve a high customer care rating? If you doing sales, how much did you earn per day? Were your earnings higher than company average — and by how much? Did you train any employees – how many?

Note: Throughout we have highlighted the word “trained” in red, because it’s an excellent resume builder to include. If you trained other employees, it indicates that you have management ability, and a lot of experience.

An Example of a Poorly Written Resume Bullet Point:

Here’s how you shouldn’t write your bullet points:

That is a weak job description for a customer service sales resume. Ideally, here’s how it SHOULD be written (pay attention to the bolding):

3. Include Action Verbs for a Customer Service Resume

Action verbs add a will add “punch” to your resume that will help you stand out from the crowd. Here are a few action verbs commonly associated with customer care:

Answer	Listen	Resolve
Communicate	Maintain	Respond
Conduct	Manage	Sold
Consult	Post	Supply
Implement	Provide	Train

Need more action verbs? We have you covered! Stop by our longest action verb list in the universe.

Remember that the resume is only the first step in your job search — check out our job resources page to learn about cover letter and thank you writing, interview skills, and more.