Essential Soft Skills in Customer Service and How to Measure Them

You’ll need more than quick response times and rehearsed pleasantries to build lasting trust with your audience.

What it really takes are contact center agents with strong interpersonal skills who can turn challenging situations into strong relationships.

In this guide, you’ll learn how soft skills in customer service translate to profitability, the most valuable abilities for your team, and how to measure them effectively.

What Are Soft Skills in Customer Service (and Why Do They Matter)?

Customer service soft skills are the interpersonal abilities that allow contact center agents to interact effectively with customers. They range from problem-solving, paraphrasing, and conflict resolution to speaking fluency and delivering difficult messages.

While technical (i.e., “hard”) skills focus on the “what” of a job, soft skills are all about “how”. Together, they help agents solve issues in ways that make buyers feel valued. “Skills-based hiring forces us to examine outdated job requirements. It opens up our thinking and the candidate pool by removing bias and paves the way for a truly diverse workplace. High-volume hiring demands a solution that focuses on skills to be successful on the job,” says Shelley Billinghurst, Host of The Recruitment Flex Podcast.

“Skills-based hiring forces us to examine outdated job requirements. It opens up our thinking and the candidate pool by removing bias and paves the way for a truly diverse workplace. High-volume hiring demands a solution that focuses on skills to be successful on the job,”

Soft skills bridge the gap between people’s expectations and experiences of your brand, ensuring they come away from every interaction—before and after purchase—feeling great.

For example, imagine a frustrated customer who calls for help with a product. They’re ready to write a negative review after struggling to understand a key feature.

• A customer service representative with strong paraphrasing and positive language skills calmly defuses the situation and solves the issue, reassuring the caller throughout
• The customer hangs up feeling calm, happy with the outcome, and like they matter. They review the experience positively and plan their next order, knowing they’ll have support.

Now imagine the same scenario minus the soft skills.

• The agent uses their technical skill to resolve the issue but handles the ticket bluntly and impersonally. They don’t stop to explain jargon or offer any reassurance.
• The customer hangs up feeling overwhelmed and undervalued. With more ammunition for their negative review and no plans to return, they share their disappointment on social media.

Multiply these scenarios by the monthly calls your team members handle. Each interaction is a chance to build loyalty or lose a customer’s trust and risk tarnishing your reputation.

The difference-maker: whether your agents have the right soft skills to turn customer problems into positive experiences or miss the mark with poor communication.

6 Soft Skills Every Customer Service Team Needs (Backed by Data)

Research shows some customer service soft skills are inherently more effective than others. Analyzing more than 5,000 HiringBranch hires taught us that the highest-scoring candidates for the top customer service skills proved to be the best-performing employees. 

Soft skills like acknowledgment, positive language, paraphrasing, and speaking fluency lead to the strongest on-the-job performance in customer service roles.

In addition, conflict resolution and empathy will help your team build even stronger connections, especially during difficult customer interactions.

These six skills form the foundation of effective customer-centric service. The kind that wins and retains business. 

Here they are in more detail:

1. To Validate Customers’ Needs: Acknowledgment

Acknowledgment means recognizing and validating customers’ needs during interactions. It’s an easy but powerful way to defuse tension and establish trust early on.

For example, an agent might say, “I understand how this situation might be frustrating, and I’m here to resolve it quickly.”

This humanizes the interaction, positions the agent as an ally, and paves the way to a resolution. When customers sense authentic care, they’re more likely to cooperate and less likely to complain.

Strong cooperation has a lasting impact, too. In a Twilio survey, 69% of consumers said they’re more likely to repurchase from a brand if they feel heard.

Acknowledgment isn’t just good practice—it’s efficient. It helps customer service reps navigate phone calls, email tickets, and chats smoothly, reducing escalations to keep average handling times (AHT) low.

Training customer support teams to acknowledge buyers’ concerns ultimately boosts satisfaction scores and creates more harmonious service environments.

2. To Deliver Difficult Messages: Positive Language

Positive language skills help agents deliver difficult messages while keeping customer trust intact. There’s no dishonesty—it just means reframing information to emphasize solutions and reassurance.

Consider this example:

• Negative: “I can’t process your refund until next week.”
• Positive: “Your refund will be processed first thing next week. I know how important this is to you, so I’ll make sure it’s prioritized and follow up via email.”

The second response feels proactive and gives the customer a better impression of the service interaction. It also subtly detaches the agent from the problem while making them an active part of the solution (i.e., the passive “Your refund will be prioritized” vs. the active “I’ll make sure…”).

Here’s another example:

• Negative: “The product is out of stock and won’t be available for a month.”
• Positive: “The product has been so popular but will be back in stock next month. I can notify you as soon as it’s available!”

Again, the agent delivers the same facts but in a way that’s more likely to leave the customer feeling excited about getting the product than disappointed in the delay.

Agents with positive language skills are a valuable part of any service team, seeing as most companies have unhappy or frustrated customers from time to time. Include them in your customer service training plan to strengthen your current agents’ skill sets.

3. For Gaining Clarity: Paraphrasing

Paraphrasing means restating a customer’s words to confirm understanding and show attentiveness.

For example, a call center agent might say, “So, you’re saying the discount code isn’t working at checkout? Let me look into that for you.”

This simple skill solves one of the most common frustrations in customer service: feeling unheard. According to a NICE survey, 99% of consumers have had frustrating customer service experiences. After long hold times, the top complaint is repeating information (51%).

However, by paraphrasing throughout conversations, agents create natural opportunities for correction. It ensures they act on accurate information and that interactions stay on track.

The benefits are twofold:

• Fewer misunderstandings. Clarifying upfront reduces errors and shortens time-to-resolution (TTR).
• Increased trust. Customers feel truly heard, giving them confidence in your brand and its support team.

Together, these advantages lead to smooth, satisfying customer experiences and lasting positive impressions.

4. For Smoother Interactions: Speaking Fluency

​​Fluency isn’t just about knowing the language (though that’s important). It means being able to communicate clearly and confidently without hesitation. In other words, being fully understood at all times.

Effective communication reduces confusion and builds trust. It also makes information easy to digest, allowing agents to prioritize and solve issues faster.

In their paper “How Concrete Language Shapes Customer Satisfaction”, marketing researchers Grant Packard and Jonah Berger suggest that linguistic concreteness—how tangible, specific, or vivid the words are—can influence consumer attitudes and actions. Customers are more satisfied, more inclined to buy, and purchase more when employees use concrete language.

For example, an agent guiding a customer through troubleshooting steps with calm, clear instructions shows competence and patience. Customers are much less likely to misinterpret their instructions or feel lost in jargon, so they get a resolution sooner.

Instead of saying, “You’ll need to reset the settings right now and check for compatibility issues,” a fluent tech support agent might say, “Let’s reset your user settings together first, then I’ll walk you through checking compatibility with your router.”

The first version is vague and abrupt. It also puts all the pressure on the user to solve their own problem. The second version’s clarity and reassurance make the experience much less stressful.

Fluency underpins all other soft skills on this list, creating a natural conversational flow that customers appreciate. Investing in it can make a big difference to customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores and retention rates.

5. For Protecting Relationships: Conflict Resolution

A skilled agent will de-escalate tense interactions using a positive attitude, empathy, and active listening. It’s how they turn conflict into collaboration opportunities.

For example, when a customer demands a refund (a common request in many contact centers), the agent might respond, “I understand your frustration. Let’s find the best solution.”

They present themselves as a partner, instead of an obstacle to the buyer getting what they want. The approach not only addresses the issue but also helps protect the relationship.

Conflict resolution, a problem-solving skill, can become easier over time. If agents keep delivering excellent service by pairing soft and hard skills (e.g., product knowledge), customers will become more forgiving.

Qualtrics found that 77% of consumers who rate a company’s customer experience (CX) as “very good” are likely to forgive a company for a bad experience, compared with only 15% of those who rate it “very poor”.

As for the impact on key performance indicators (KPIs), conflict resolution skills reduce escalation rates and improve team morale. Agents who feel confident managing conflicts are less likely to experience burnout, so you build a more resilient and motivated workforce.

6. To Humanize Your Service: Empathy

Empathy means seeing situations from customers’ perspectives and helping them to feel understood and valued. It’s how excellent customer service professionals transform negative and neutral interactions into memorable ones.

Imagine you run the support team for a cloud storage platform. A user calls in panic mode after accidentally deleting important files, worried they’ll never see the data again. They’re also stressed about not being able to find a solution.

An empathetic agent responds with, “I completely understand how concerning this is for you. Let’s look into this together. I’ll do everything I can to help recover your files.” 

Recognizing the situation’s emotional weight shows the caller that their problem matters and that the agent is on their side.

Empathy goes beyond solving customer issues, though: it builds valuable rapport. Even when the outcome isn’t ideal (e.g., the files aren’t fully recoverable), empathetic communication skills help people feel supported. They add a human touch to your service, which can be a valuable differentiator against competitors who rely too heavily on self-service options.

After all, in a 2017 PwC survey—one of the biggest of its kind—75% of consumers said “I’ll want to interact with a real person more as technology improves.”

Lastly, empathy also aids teamwork. Agents who practice it with customers are likely to extend the same consideration to colleagues, fostering collaborative and supportive workplace cultures.

How to Measure Customer Service Soft Skills

Contrary to popular belief, you can accurately measure candidates’ customer service soft skills. You just need the correct methodology.

That method—which we’ll explain in full shortly—sets you up to make better hires, reduce attrition, and build a stronger, more efficient team.

Having crunched the numbers ourselves (see below), we know that effective skills-based hiring reduces bad hire rates from 4.5% to 0.5%, saving businesses millions.

But first, let’s examine why some more traditional techniques don’t work for high-volume hiring teams. It’ll stop you from wasting resources on disappointing outcomes.

The Problems with Tests, Interviews, and Simulations

You’ve probably heard of hiring teams using multiple-choice behavioral tests, interviews, and job simulations. Maybe you’ve tried them yourself.

These traditional assessment methods can be helpful on some levels. But each also has significant challenges that could impact quality of hire:

• Multiple-choice tests use preset answers to assess candidates’ responses to different scenarios. The issue? Users may choose answers they think employers want to see, leading to inaccurate results.
• Pre-employment interviews explore candidates’ past experiences and handling of service situations. The issue? Inconsistent questioning and potential bias affect judgment. The more people involved, the less consistent (and accurate) the data.
• Job simulations (i.e., role-playing activities) let candidates showcase soft skills in scenarios mimicking on-the-job challenges. The issue? Setting up and evaluating simulations is resource-intensive, making them impractical for high-volume recruitment.

These assessment tactics are widely used and familiar to many hiring teams. But familiarity doesn’t guarantee effectiveness. Nor will it give you a competitive edge. 

By adopting more efficient and accurate pre-hire assessments, you’ll build a stronger team ready to excel in your sector.

How AI Assessments Make Customer Service Hiring Easy

So, how are forward-thinking organizations overcoming the limitations of traditional assessments? Many are turning to advanced AI assessment tools to recruit exceptional customer service agents more efficiently.

HiringBranch is a great example. The platform offers a scalable, objective way to evaluate prospective customer service agents in real-world contexts. 

Faced with authentic customer service challenges, candidates must craft original responses to showcase their genuine abilities and emotional intelligence instead of just trying to pick the “right” answers.

For example, in the HiringBranch assessment pictured below, the user demonstrates empathy, acknowledgment, positive language, and paraphrasing.

AI algorithms analyze these responses for tone, fluency, and relevance, offering objective scores that accurately predict on-the-job performance.

And these aren’t just any algorithms or large language models. Our native AI has been trained with public and proprietary datasets, creating the world’s first Soft Skills AI™.

The outcomes?

1. Accuracy you can trust. AI gives you a clear, measurable picture of a candidate’s strengths and weaknesses, eliminating guesswork.
2. Profit-boosting efficiency. The tool can assess many candidates simultaneously, reducing time-to-hire without sacrificing quality.
3. Bias reduction. AI-driven scoring focuses solely on the skills demonstrated, removing the unconscious biases that often creep into human evaluations.
4. Simple scalability. Whether hiring for a single position or scaling a team, AI assessments provide consistent results across large candidate pools.

By adopting modern soft skills assessment tools, companies can improve hiring outcomes and build teams ready to handle complex customer service challenges. It’s a smarter, more strategic way to recruit—with proven results.

Take the 10,000-agent contact center that ditched face-to-face interviews in favor of HiringBranch. It soon saw better quality hires and freed its hiring team to focus on other critical tasks.

The company’s operations director had this to say: 

“We immediately saw value in its comprehension capabilities. HiringBranch doesn’t just assess for language proficiency, they evaluate a candidate’s ability to understand instructions and whether they can do a job well.”

Read the full story here.

Aligning Customer Expectations and Experience

Customer service soft skills equip agents to turn transactions into relationships and challenges into opportunities.

Teams with key abilities like acknowledgment, empathy, and conflict resolution can consistently meet and exceed customer expectations, making their companies more profitable.

However, you’ll only benefit from such skills if you can effectively measure them when hiring and training. Outdated methods, like multiple-choice tests and unstructured interviews, leave too much to chance.

Open-ended AI skills assessments solve that problem, offering a more accurate, scalable way to identify good customer service talent. They empower businesses to make data-informed hiring decisions, cut attrition, and build reliable teams that thrive under pressure—all with minimal effort.

Image credits:

Feature Image: Via Unsplash/Charanjeet Dhiman

Image 1: Property of HiringBranch. Not to be reproduced without permission.

Image 2: Via NICE

Image 3-4: Property of HiringBranch. Not to be reproduced without permission.

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