Most people prefer dealing with “nice” or likable people. That is just human nature. Even if the person you are dealing with can’t help you, you FEEL better if the person you are dealing with treats you nicely, politely, with care or concern.
Can you increase your likability? Can you teach likability? Not quite, but you can increase your awareness of its importance. In his book Enchantment, Guy Kawasaki preaches increasing your likability if you want to do well in business. One of the ways is to have a genuine smile. Again, smiling is a natural act and if it does not come naturally to you, you won’t appear likable.
We have discussed it before here on ARMA’s blog: hiring the right people for customer service is crucial. Make sure to hire likable people, who do have genuine smiles. People who are not likable will aggravate your customers and make things rough when they don’t need to be.
How do you assess likability? It is obviously subjective, but a person who appears happy, smiles a lot, and is enthusiastic about his or her job is closer to being likable than someone who complains about his or her situation, and does not smile a whole lot. Certainly, there are personality tests that measure contentment, optimism and other measures of likability.
Likability should be a key attribute for any customer service professional.
Tags: customer service representatives traits, likability, personality traits of customer service representatives