“Soft skills” have traditionally been undervalued, and that’s slow to change. But more companies are realizing their worth. And even if the skills themselves are difficult to quantify (how much more likeable is Job Applicant A than Job Applicant B?), their effects aren’t.
The soft skills CX professionals possess directly affect metrics like:
- Net promoter scores
- Customer satisfaction scores
- Customer effort scores
- Qualitative survey feedback on customer support interactions
- Qualitative data gleaned from online customer reviews
- Number of referrals and recommendations
Human-to-human interactions can make or break those scores, generate referrals or cancellations, and either fuel word-of-mouth growth or silence it.
But before you break out your old copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People (a classic for a reason), I’d like to talk about why I’m reading more articles now on “soft skills” as they apply to customer service, customer success, and customer experience.
Because we need them more now than ever.
“So let’s uncomfortably call them real skills instead. Real because they work, because they’re at the heart of what we need to today. Real because even if you’ve got the vocational skills, you’re no help to us without these human skills, the things that we can’t write down, or program a computer to do.” – Seth Godin
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