When you’re looking for a job, it’s who and what you know that helps you land the opportunity. When you’re hiring, it’s who you hire and how you onboard, train, and recognize and reward your employees that sets your team and company up for success. 

Learning how to hire the right people is an important skill and a competitive advantage for top-performing customer service teams. After all, CX leaders say when they bring problem solvers on board, these employees bring their A games to help improve everything from productivity to effectiveness when it comes to handling customer interactions and delivering excellent customer experiences.

Savvy hiring starts with carefully crafting the right job description to attract the right candidates. Here are the most important items to include in your listing, along with real-world examples from leading brands and Medallia Agent Connect clients Sam’s Club, Lemonade, and RevZilla that illustrate what it takes to write a standout customer service job description.

What to Include in Your Customer Service Job Description

#1: A detailed summary of the role and responsibilities

Best-in-class customer service teams make best-in-class customer experiences possible. And that comes down to making sure team members fully understand their roles and the part they play within the larger organization.

That’s why leading brands prioritize building a customer-centric culture from the ground up, right from the point of hiring.

In these examples pulled from real listings from RevZilla and Lemonade, it’s easy to get an immediate sense of what a day on the job would be like and what’s expected of both brands’ customer support and champion team members.

Both companies are clear in spelling out:

• What the position is responsible for and what the employee will be held accountable for
• Which team members the position is expected to collaborate and interact with
• Which support channels the employee will use to interact with customers

#2: An overview your company culture and what it’s like being a member of the customer service team

Educating employees about your company culture and mission is one of the top strategies for building out a successful customer service training program. After all, when McKinsey conducted an analysis of employee engagement within contact centers, they found that most (70%) team members who reported having a strong commitment to their roles and company said they had a strong alignment with their organization. Meanwhile, among employees who said they were likely to leave their current employer, only 25% reported having a strong alignment to the brand.

Take a cue from Sam’s Club and RevZilla for creative ways to start that education process right from the start with one of the first—and most important—points of contact in the employee journey, with the job listing they will see at the very beginning of the hiring process.

#3: The specific skills and qualifications candidates need to possess

We asked our Medallia Agent Connect CX Connections community about the most important customer service skills and what they look for when hiring customer service and CX managers, and some of the key qualifications they called out include:

• Strong communication and relationship-building skills
• Analytical thinking and data-driven decision making
• Being coachable and responsive to customer feedback
• Demonstrating empathy, kindness, and friendliness

To minimize agent attrition, be sure your job description highlights the traits and skills that your current top-performing employees possess.

In addition to including role-specific skills and qualifications, it’s also important to draw attention to requirements related to supporting your company’s mission and embodying your company’s core brand values, as RevZilla and Lemonade have done with their job descriptions included below.

Beyond that, as shown in RevZilla’s job description, you may also want to spell out requirements related to:

• Years of experience
• Relevant industry/product experience
• Scheduling/availability
• Unique talents, such as typing or being bilingual/multilingual
• Minimum education criteria

#4: A snapshot of the tools prospective employees should be familiar with, including:

• Internal communications tools, like Slack
• Customer support software and CRMs, like Zendesk, Kustomer, Salesforce, Freshworks, Gorgias, and more
• Data, insights, and analytics tools, like Domo and Odin Answers
• Automations platforms, like Zapier
• Productivity and collaboration apps, like Google Sheets
• …and more

#5: The best part—the benefits and perks your company offers

Does your company prioritize recognizing and rewarding employees by offering perks like team-building activities, company freebies, gift cards, cash prizes, and contests, like Medallia Agent Connect clients ESPN, Jet.com, and FabFitFun do? Is your customer service team fully remote, offering team members the flexibility to live and work anywhere? Do you support employee growth and professional development by providing best-in-class customer service training, like Medallia Agent Connect client Lululemon does?

Be sure to include all of the ways your company looks out for your most valuable asset—your employees, and the steps you take to strengthen agent engagement and motivation.

For a real example, check out the detailed overview the Sam’s Club provides about the many generous benefits and perks available to employees.

Empower Your Agents to Deliver Exceptional Experiences

Once the hiring process is complete, brands like Sam’s Club, RevZilla, Lemonade, and more position their customer service team members for success by investing in powerful tools like Medallia Agent Connect’s QA, coaching, and customer feedback platform to drive agent improvement and engagement. Get our guide to Creating a Customer Service Career Path for Your Team for everything you need to know about hiring, coaching, and leveling up your service team as you scale.

Ready to ignite agent performance? Check out Medallia’s guide, 4 Steps to Supercharge Contact Center Agent Performance, to learn how leading contact centers are putting the right systems and processes in place to achieve success.