Last week, we wrote about the Sales job position. This week we would like to share more insights on the job segment called: Customer Support.
In a fast-pacing world, customer support is key to be more successful than your competition. There is nothing worse than being on a hotline for hours and wait for somebody on the other side to help you, because you have a problem or need an appointment urgently. Even worse, when you wait or hold the line for (felt like) hours and then an underqualified and not at all motivated person is at the other side of your phone. This can really have a bad impact on your business and that is why we call the customer support a very important job position that needs to be filled with highly motivated people.
As you can see, the responsibility of a person working in customer support is not as little as it sounded when you only hear the words “Customer support”. You are in charge of happy and satisfied customers as well as support the rest of your team by working hand in hand with them.
You will work closely with the sales and with the technical department, as you need to know everything about the current projects and customers, so you have a little background of the person that is calling you in search of help.
If you have a management or leader position within the customer support segment your task won’t stop by supporting the customers only. You also have to write analyse the products and complaints of the costumer to give that feedback to the technician and overall CEO. Reporting malfunctions and monitoring them with a company software will also be your task as well as leading your team, training new employees and speak to the CEO about specific customer related problems and solutions as well. Therefore, if you aiming for this position, it would be best if you already have some years of experience and knowing what this job position is demanding of you.
Hard-Skills
It is not always easy to find out what the current problem of your customer is, so you need patience and strong technical knowledge to assess what the problem maybe is and from there on start thinking of problem-solving steps.
Further Hard-Skills that you need are: You must be able to work with a PC and the software system that the company you join will have. Either you are open to learning these software’s quickly or you research beforehand what kind of customer related software’s are mainly used by the big companies you would like to apply at and then do a course on them so you will have at least basic knowledge of it.
Also, you should have a good knowledge of the solar systems that your company is selling and a basic understanding of technologies so you can understand the problem of the costumer and if you can not help out right at the moment, go to your technical department and ask the technical manager to give you advice on what the customer can do or if technical support from the company side is needed.
Soft-Skills
First of all, you should be a person that likes to help people and search for solutions to their problems. Being patient and a very good listener is a great asset. Of course, great communication skills, team working ability and great empathy for your customers are important. If you have this set of skills, you have the basement of being a good customer support agent.
As you can see, Customer Support is very important and can be crucial for the success or fail of a Solar Company. Next week we are happy to share with you a detailed description of the Solar Designer / Solar Draftsman. Stay tuned!
As always, if you have any questions please write to blog[at]maxx-energy.co.za and let´s talk about it!
