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Customer service specialist

Customer service specialist

Sales, marketing and procurement

Level 3 - Technical Occupation

Dealing with customer queries, purchases and complaints.

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Reference: OCC0071

Status: assignment_turned_inApproved occupation

Average (median) salary: £22,640 per year

SOC 2020 code: 7211 Call and contact centre occupations

SOC 2020 sub unit groups:

  • 7211/00 Call and contact centre occupations
  • 1139/03 Complaints and customer service directors
  • 4143/01 Call centre managers
  • 7111/00 Sales and retail and assistants
  • 7220/00 Customer service supervisors

Technical Education Products

ST0071:

Customer service specialist

(Level 3)

Approved for delivery

Employers involved in creating the standard:

Boots UK, Centrica, Institute of Customer Service, Accelerator Solutions, bpi.recycled products, BT, Eon Energy, Osbourne Property Services, Capita, Northern Power Grid

Summary

Overview: The main purpose of a customer service specialist is to be a ‘professional’ for direct customer support within all sectors and organisation types. You are an advocate of Customer Service who acts as a referral point for dealing with more complex or technical customer requests, complaints, and queries. You are often an escalation point for complicated or ongoing customer problems. As an expert in your organisation’s products and/or services, you share knowledge with your wider team and colleagues. You gather and analyse data and customer information that influences change and improvements in service. Utilising both organisational and generic IT systems to carry out your role with an awareness of other digital technologies. This could be in many types of environment including contact centres, retail, webchat, service industry or any customer service point.

Employers involved in creating the standard:

Boots UK, Centrica, Institute of Customer Service, Accelerator Solutions, bpi.recycled products, BT, Eon Energy, Osbourne Property Services, Capita, Northern Power Grid

Keywords:

Business
Complaints
Customer Service
Customer Service Specialist
Procurement
Sales
Service

Knowledge, skills and behaviours (KSBs)

K1: Business: Understand what continuous improvement means in a service environment and how your recommendations for change impact your organisation
K2: Business: Understand the impact your service provision has on the wider organisation and the value it adds
K3: Business: Understand your organisation’s current business strategy in relation to customers and make recommendations for its future
K4: Business: Understand the principles and benefits of being able to think about the future when taking action or making service related decisions
K5: Business: Understand a range of leadership styles and apply them successfully in a customer service environment
K6: Customer Insight: Know your internal and external customers and how their behaviour may require different approaches from you
K7: Customer Insight: Understand how to analyse, use and present a range of information to provide customer insight
K8: Customer Insight: Understand what drives loyalty, retention and satisfaction and how they impact on your organisation
K9: Customer Insight: Understand different customer types and the role of emotions in bringing about a successful outcome
K10: Customer Insight: Understand how customer expectations can differ between cultures, ages and social profiles
K11: Customer Service culture & environment awareness: Keep current, knowledge and understanding of regulatory considerations, drivers and impacts in relation to how you deliver for customers
K12: Customer Service culture & environment awareness: Understand your business environment and culture and the position of customer service within it
K13: Customer Service culture & environment awareness: Understand your organisation structure and what role each department needs to play in delivering Customer Service and what the consequences are should things go wrong
K14: Customer Service culture & environment awareness: Understand how to find and use industry best practice to enhance your own knowledge
K15: Customer Journey: Understand and critically evaluate the possible journeys of your customers, including challenges and the end-to-end experience
K16: Customer Journey: Understand the reasons why customer issues and complex situations sometimes need referral or escalation for specialist attention
K17: Customer Journey: Understand commercial factors and authority limits for delivering the required customer experience
K18: Customer Journey: Understand the underpinning business processes that support you in bringing about the best outcome for customers and your organisation

S1: Business focused service delivery: Demonstrate a continuous improvement and future focussed approach to customer service delivery including decision making and providing recommendations or advice
S2: Business focused service delivery: Resolve complex issues by being able to choose from and successfully apply a wide range of approaches
S3: Business focused service delivery: Find solutions that meet your organisations needs as well as the customer requirements
S4: Providing a positive customer experience: Through advanced questioning, listening and summarising negotiate mutually beneficial outcomes
S5: Providing a positive customer experience: Manage challenging and complicated situations within your level of authority and make recommendations to enable and deliver change to service or strategy
S6: Providing a positive customer experience: Use clear explanations, provide options and solutions to influence and help customers make choices and agree next steps
S7: Providing a positive customer experience: Explore and interpret the customer experience to inform and influence achieving a positive result for customer satisfaction
S8: Providing a positive customer experience: Demonstrate a cost conscious mind-set when meeting customer and the business needs
S9: Providing a positive customer experience: Identifying where highs and lows of the customer journey produce a range of emotions in the customer
S10: Providing a positive customer experience: Use written and verbal communication to simplify and provide complex information in a way that supports positive customer outcome in the relevant format
S11: Working with customers/customer insights: Proactively gather customer feedback, through a variety of methods. Critically analyse, and evaluate the meaning, implication and facts and act upon it
S12: Working with customers/customer insights: Analyse your customer types, to identify or anticipate their potential needs and expectations when providing your service
S13: Customer Service performance: Maintain a positive relationship even when you are unable to deliver the customer’s expected outcome
S14: Customer Service performance: When managing referrals or escalations take into account historical interactions and challenges to determine next steps
S15: Service Improvement: Analyse the end to end service experience, seeking input from others where required, supporting development of solutions
S16: Service Improvement: Make recommendations based on your findings to enable improvement
S17: Service Improvement: Make recommendations and implement where possible, changes in line with new and relevant legislation, regulations and industry best practice

B1: Develop self: Proactively keep your service, industry and best practice knowledge and skills up-to-date
B2: Develop self: Consider personal goals related to service and take action towards achieving them
B3: Ownership/Responsibility: Personally commit to and take ownership for actions to resolve customer issues to the satisfaction of the customer and your organisation
B4: Ownership/Responsibility: Exercises proactivity and creativity when identifying solutions to customer and organisational issues
B5: Ownership/Responsibility: Make realistic promises and deliver on them
B6: Team Working: Work effectively and collaboratively with colleagues at all levels to achieve results
B7: Team Working: Recognise colleagues as internal customers
B8: Team Working: Share knowledge and experience with others to support colleague development
B9: Equality: Adopt a positive and enthusiastic attitude being open minded and able to tailor your service to each customer
B10: Equality: Be adaptable and flexible to your customer needs whilst continuing to work within the agreed customer service environment
B11: Presentation: Demonstrate brand advocacy, values and belief when dealing with customer requests to build trust, credibility and satisfaction
B12: Presentation: Ensure your personal presentation, in all forms of communication, reflects positively on your organisation’s brand

Occupational Progression

This occupational progression map shows technical occupations that have transferable knowledge and skills.

In this map, the focused occupation is highlighted in yellow. The arrows indicate where transferable knowledge and skills exist between two occupations. This map shows some of the strongest progression links between the focused occupation and other occupations.

It is anticipated that individuals would be required to undertake further learning or training to progress to and from occupations. To find out more about an occupation featured in the progression map, including the learning options available, click the occupation.

Progression decisions have been reached by comparing the knowledge and skills statements between occupational standards, combined with individualised learner movement data.

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eco

Business and administration

Sales, marketing and procurement