While you should pay attention to every area of business, touchpoints your customers have with your company can often make or break the entire experience. And you will hardly find a more sensitive touchpoint than customer service. As many as 91% of customers say that a positive customer experience will make them more likely to make another purchase.
Because of this, it is essential to have a top-of-the-line customer support team. To ensure that, you should train your staff well and provide them consistent feedback, highlighting what they do great and where they need to improve – that's where performance reviews come into play.
This post will give you 20 customer service performance review phrases you can use, both when praising and criticizing customer service agents. By the end, you will have concrete examples to help you push your team forward without insulting anyone or giving vague feedback.
Positive customer service performance review phrases
Here's how to give credit to a customer service representative when the credit is due:
- You listen carefully to what customers ask and never rush to conclusions before fully understanding the issue.
- You do your best not only to collect customer feedback but to proactively implement it on the next call to ensure customer satisfaction is outstanding; keep it up!
- Being respectful towards customers and showing that you understand and care about solving customer problems is one of your strongest traits and is truly inspiring.
- The fact that you are very elaborate when communicating complex technical problems to layperson customers is very helpful, as it helps them calm down knowing they are talking to a real pro.
- You do a great job always following up, which makes our customers love our brand, knowing that we care beyond just making a sale. Well done!
- You are excellent at understanding the actual customer problems, even when they don't know how to describe them in technical terms, which shows that you understand your role and are proactive.
- Your ability to remain calm and positive even when angry customers lose their temper exceeds expectations, which is why you are on the road to becoming our top customer crisis manager. Keep it up!
- While we cherish following procedures, your extraordinary ability to think outside the box when implementing them saves an incredible amount of customer support time and allows you to close more tickets.
- Your innate ability to be energetic and remain positive and enthusiastic no matter how nervous the person on the other side of the line is makes you our go-to choice for dealing with demanding customers.
- The fact that you always ask if there's anything else you can do for the customer and actively seek feedback helps our managers to improve the overall customer satisfaction goals.
Negative customer service performance review phrases
Giving negative agent performance feedback is never easy. But, if you do it in the form of constructive criticism, you will provide a clear improvement path to your customer service representatives and help them excel in their role, which is something they are likely to appreciate:
- You have in-depth knowledge about the company's products and can provide support even on the most complex issues. Still, please try to be more understanding towards customers and listen to their questions more carefully to ensure customer satisfaction.
- While your numbers are great regarding the number of closed customer issues, we should work on the quality of customer support – try to raise your customer conversation quality score above 4.0 in the next two quarters.
- You are very compassionate and customers like talking to you, even when they experience difficulties. Still, you sometimes push the problem upstairs to the management too soon before giving your best customer service effort.
- Your technical knowledge and expertise are unquestionable, but it can sometimes make customers nervous as they can't understand you – try to communicate in a simpler language when solving customer queries.
- Politeness is one of the best traits that all call center agents should possess. However, it would be best to improve your ability to refuse their unreasonable demands when there's no way to help them, which will improve your efficiency.
- While it's true that customers can be hard to talk to, especially when they lose patience when facing complex issues, it's our job to remain polite and calm, which you should work on.
- You always listen to customers thoroughly but tend to get distracted and have too many digressions, resulting in longer than needed average response time.
- While it's essential to solve your priority tasks first, once you are finished, you should check if other team members need any assistance with their work, which will improve customer service team productivity overall.
- Unfortunately, customers repeatedly complain that your support doesn't solve their issues. Pay more attention to details, and put your best effort into learning our products in-depth – we will provide more training.
- You are very knowledgeable and polite, but you need to do a better job following organizational procedures and prioritization to ensure you give timely advice and manage customer expectations effectively.
Conclusion
We hope our article gave you enough ways to praise the performance of your support staff when they provide outstanding customer service and also guide them into making a better effort.
Eventually, support quality is always one of the key criteria customers focus on when giving public feedback. Therefore, improving customer support quality should be one of the priorities of any healthy, happy customer-oriented business.
FAQs
What should I write in a customer service performance review?
Your customer service performance review should give your call center employees a clear idea about the level of customer support they were providing in the previous period. It should cover and praise their strengths, touch on weak points, and give them a clear and concise way to improve them.
How do you write a self-evaluation for customer service?
Most good performance reviews tools will make it easy for you to start as you will already have a structure and some questions, but, in general, you should ask yourself these questions if you want to evaluate performance:
- Did customers complain about me?
- How do they respond to my support during calls?
- Do I miss deadlines often?
- Do I listen to customers' questions carefully?
- Am I proactive or do I rush for help too quickly?
- Am I always polite and patient?
What are customer service skills?
While the list of customer service skills is broad and depends on the industry, here are some of the most important ones:
- Empathy – you should be able to put yourself into customers' shoes and understand customers’ problems if you want the best possible customer relations.
- Patience – always listen to questions, no matter how silly they are if you want to provide good customer service.
- Knowledge – it's crucial to know the ins and outs of the products your company sells or the services it provides to exceed customer expectations.
- Communication – no matter how complicated the issue is, talk in clear and simple language in live customer interactions.
- Problem-solving skills – your job is to help, so don't rush to conclusions or forward the customer to the next support level before putting your best effort first.
