In addition to rising customer expectations, increased investment in self-service channels and capabilities has enabled many customers to resolve their simple issues on their own. As a result, the most challenging and complicated issues are ultimately left to live representatives to solve. These new realities have significant talent implications for service leaders, making it even more imperative that you have the right reps with the right customer service skills.
- Gartner client? Log in for personalized search results.
Leading a Customer Service Talent Management Strategy
Resources to identify customer service representative skills your team needs to be successful
Changes in customer behavior and service technology are impacting talent needs
Attract, retain and hire the best candidates for today’s frontline customer service representative job
Even with advances in self-service, frontline reps continue to handle most customer contacts. Gartner research has found that contrary to popular belief and traditional management preference, empathetic representatives are not the most effective in today’s customer service environment. Instead, Controller reps — with the customer service skills to “take action” and actively guide customers through interactions — deliver the lowest-effort customer service experience.
Customer service insights you can use
Gartner research helps organizations recruit, develop and retain employees who deliver high-quality, low-effort customer service by showing leaders how to attract the right individuals, measure performance and encourage accomplishment.
Identify and Hire High-Performing Reps With Key Customer Service Skills
The controller rep is most effective at delivering low-effort customer service experiences. But do your current hiring practices enable you to find these reps? Use this interview guide to identify controllers among your job candidates with the ideal customer service skill set.
The Winning Management Style to Drive Service Rep Productivity
Gartner studied manager approaches to employee coaching and development to understand which style best improves service rep performance. The results were slightly unexpected, but provide relief to service leaders and managers who may feel stretched thin.
Recommended QA Competencies
To keep up with a more complex world of customer service, companies should modernize the way they evaluate their reps. Download our one-page overview of recommended quality assurance competencies.
Make Life Easier for Service Reps and Customers Win
Evaluating your customer service representatives’ perspectives on serving customers, coaching effectiveness and productivity practices is key for your organization to equip them to provide a low-effort customer experience. Download a sample report of the Gartner Rep Experience Survey.
Questions about becoming a Gartner client?
See the customer service research
Gartner Customer Service & Support Webinars
Become a world-class customer service leader with insights and strategies delivered straight from our experts.
Dig deeper with Gartner
Smarter With Gartner
Gartner is an objective resource for 15,000 enterprises in 100+ countries.
Gartner for service provides service and support leaders with insights, advice and tools to address their mission-critical priorities.