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Customer service practitioner

Customer service practitioner

Sales, marketing and procurement

Level 2 - Technical Occupation

Providing customer service products and services for businesses and other organisations including face-to-face, telephone, digital and written contact and communications.

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Reference: OCC0072

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

ST0072:

Customer service practitioner

(Level 2)

Approved for delivery

Employers involved in creating the standard:

Boots UK, Institute of Customer Service, Accelerator Solutions Ltd, Berkeley Homes Ltd, British Polythene Ltd (t/a bpi.recycled products), British Council, British Gas Services Ltd, BT plc, Carillion plc, E.ON UK Ltd, Northern Powergrid, Osborne Property Services Ltd, Superdrug Stores plc

Summary

The role of a customer service practitioner is to deliver high quality products and services to the customers of their organisation. Your core responsibility will be to provide a high quality service to customers which will be delivered from the workplace, digitally, or through going out into the customer’s own locality. These may be one-off or routine contacts and include dealing with orders, payments, offering advice, guidance and support, meet-and-greet, sales, fixing problems, after care, service recovery or gaining insight through measuring customer satisfaction. You may be the first point of contact and work in any sector or organisation type. Your actions will influence the customer experience and their satisfaction with your organisation. You will demonstrate excellent customer service skills and behaviours as well as product and/or service knowledge when delivering to your customers. You provide service in line with the organisation’s customer service standards and strategy and within appropriate regulatory requirements. Your customer interactions may cover a wide range of situations and can include; face-to-face, telephone, post, email, text and social media.

Employers involved in creating the standard:

Boots UK, Institute of Customer Service, Accelerator Solutions Ltd, Berkeley Homes Ltd, British Polythene Ltd (t/a bpi.recycled products), British Council, British Gas Services Ltd, BT plc, Carillion plc, E.ON UK Ltd, Northern Powergrid, Osborne Property Services Ltd, Superdrug Stores plc

Typical job titles include:

customer assistant
customer relations advisor
customer relations assistant
customer service advisor
customer service agent
customer service associate
customer service rep
customer service representative

Keywords:

Customer Assistance
Customer Care
Customer Relations
Customer Service Team
Customer Support

Knowledge, skills and behaviours (KSBs)

K1: Understand who customers are.
K2: Understand the difference between internal and external customers.
K3: Understand the different needs and priorities of your customers and the best way to manage their expectations, recognising and knowing how to adapt style to be highly effective.
K4: Know the purpose of the business and what ‘brand promise' means
K5: Know your organisation’s core values and how they link to the service culture.
K6: Know the internal policies and procedures, including any complaints processes and digital media policies that are relevant to you and your organisation.
K7: Know the appropriate legislation and regulatory requirements that affect your business.
K8: Know your responsibility in relation to this and how to apply it when delivering service.
K9: Know how to use systems, equipment and technology to meet the needs of your customers.
K10: Understand types of measurement and evaluation tools available to monitor customer service levels.
K11: Understand your role and responsibility within your organisation and the impact of your actions on others.
K12: Know the targets and goals you need to deliver against.
K13: Understand how establishing the facts enable you to create a customer focused experience and appropriate response.
K14: Understand how to build trust with a customer and why this is important.
K15: Understand the products or services that are available from your organisation and keep up-to-date.

S1: Use a range of questioning skills, including listening and responding in a way that builds rapport, determines customer needs and expectations and achieves positive engagement and delivery.
S2: Depending on your job role and work environment: Use appropriate verbal and non-verbal communication skills, along with summarising language during face-to-face communications; and/or
S3: Depending on your job role and work environment: Use appropriate communication skills, along with reinforcement techniques (to confirm understanding) during non-facing customer interactions.
S4: Depending on your job role and work environment: Use an appropriate ‘tone of voice’ in all communications, including written and digital, that reflect the organisation’s brand.
S5: Provide clear explanations and offer options in order to help customers make choices that are mutually beneficial to both the customer and your organisation.
S6: Be able to organise yourself, prioritise your own workload/activity and work to meet deadlines.
S7: Demonstrate patience and calmness.
S8: Show you understand the customer’s point of view.
S9: Use appropriate sign-posting or resolution to meet your customers needs and manage expectations.
S10: Maintain informative communication during service recovery.

B1: Take ownership for keeping your service knowledge and skills up-to-date.
B2: Consider personal goals and propose development that would help achieve them.
B3: Act on and seek feedback from others to develop or maintain personal service skills and knowledge.
B4: Frequently and consistently communicate and work with others in the interest of helping customers efficiently.
B5: Share personal learning and case studies with others, presenting recommendations, and improvement to support good practice.
B6: Treat customers as individuals to provide a personalised customer service experience.
B7: Uphold the organisations core values and service culture through your actions.
B8: Demonstrate personal pride in the job through appropriate dress and positive and confident language.
B9: Use communication behaviours that establish clearly what each customer requires and manage their expectations.
B10: Take ownership from the first contact and then take responsibility for fulfilling your promise

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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