Customer service resume—writing tips for getting hired

Career Builder

Customer service representatives are on the front lines of a company. CSRs deal directly with customers and often have to diffuse stressful situations and solve problems quickly and calmly. If HR teams make poor hiring decisions for their customer care teams, then they could end up with employees who make the situation worse and isolate customers. This is why the hiring and training process is so lengthy and involved for customer service representatives.

Include customer service experience on your resume

When possible, include quantifiable information about your performance and your company within your resume. This helps HR departments understand how you performed at your job and what your workload looked like. While customer service is similar across companies and industries, each company has its own distinct expectations, too.

By sharing your personal customer satisfaction rate and listing how many calls or complaints you solved monthly, it's possible for your employer to understand how effective you were as a customer service agent. Your time on each call could also be an important statistic to include if it took several minutes or an hour to solve your customers' problems within that industry, in order to explain why you only helped about a dozen customers per day.

Specify the technology you know

Historically, customer care representatives (CCR) relied on phone banks to receive their calls while upper management monitored their performance. However, today's customer care teams are responding to calls, answering emails, and engaging in customer chats all throughout the day. To manage these multiple forms of communication, companies have started to invest in various software programs like FreshDesk or LiveAgent.

Some of these software platforms actually use machine learning to move customers further down the sales funnel, so customer sales teams receive information about customers and potential solutions to their problems before they even say a word to them. If you've worked with technology like this before, it's important to list it on your resume.

When you start working at a new company in the customer service department, you will likely be trained on their software and internal tools. If you're already familiar with them — or have used similar programs — hiring managers could see you as an asset because you will pick up the job faster and will be less of a burden on the training teams.

Describe your customer service skills

According a CareerBuilder survey, 77 percent of hiring managers value soft skills in an employee (i.e., the less tangible skills associated with an individual's personality) just as much as technical ability. This number might even skew higher for customer service agents who require strong soft skills to solve problems while representing the company.

Skills to put on a customer service resume

As you build your resume, try to mention a few of these soft skills along with the technical experience and training that you have. Many of these traits are actually keywords for a resume that hiring managers will be looking for when considering bringing you in for an interview. For example, you could say that you:

Listened to customer feedback and compiled reports for your managers.
Brainstormed creative solutions to customer problems that benefitted them and the company.
Led training exercises within your team to improve communication when relaying problem customers to upper-management.

While you're technically discussing your experience and sharing what you did in previous jobs, you're also highlighting your listening skills, creativity, leadership, and communication ability — all of which are soft traits your future employers will be looking for.

List leadership opportunities or promotions

When you're writing your resume, you want to prove that you're dedicated to the companies you work for. No company wants to hire employees who will do the bare minimum and spend their days counting the minutes until it's time to go home. Instead, companies want people who will do their best and motivate those around them. If you're able to show that you're a dedicated employee, then your resume has a higher chance of making its way to the top of the stack, above applicants with the same skill set.

The average employee stays with a company for 4.6 years, with young people between the ages of 25 to 34 staying with companies an average of 3.2 years. Not only do hiring managers want someone who will stay for several years (and therefore reduce turnover and training costs), but they also want potential leaders. If your customer service manager selected you for training or a leadership seminar at your last job, be sure to mention it in your resume. This shows that you're willing to stay at a company and that your manager thought of you as a key candidate for promotion.

The Provide Support blog describes how to encourage remote customer service employees—don't forget to include your successes in work-from-home jobs too.

Maintaining a basic resume is important when applying to jobs; however, most career specialists recommend creating industry-specific resumes to appeal to the managers and human resource representatives who are reading them. Here's an example customer service cover letter.