Customer Service Representative Resume Example

In looking for a job as in the customer service representative field, there are plenty of hard skills jobseekers should highlight in their resumes, including experience with point-of-sale software, telephone systems, and customer management software. To find out what the technical requirements are for the role to which you are applying, comb the job ad for clues about skills and certifications that will resonate with the ATS.

What many jobseekers forget is how essential soft skills are in the field of customer service. Soft skills are the hard-to-measure traits that make you great at your job. These include stellar written and verbal communication, past customer service experience, conflict resolution capabilities, and excellent listening skills, and calm and compassionate way of expressing yourself.

Soft skills are highly sought after by employers because, unlike computer programs and other measurable skills, they are challenging to teach. So, it’s much better to hire someone who has these soft skills instinctively, or who has gained them through years of experience as a customer service representative. Highlight your soft skills to get ahead of the competition by placing them prominently in your Skills section. Not sure how? See our customer service representative resume sample for ideas on how to incorporate soft skills into your application materials.

While the look of your resume for a customer service representative is important, the content is critical. Choosing a resume format that’s appropriate for the industry is essential, but it’s what’s inside that resume that will get you the interview.

Employers want to see a solid mix of hard and soft skills on your resume, so study our customer service representative resume sample to get ideas for what to include. Demonstrating a solid work history is also important, so consider choosing a chronological resume format to flaunt your past roles.

If you have limited (or no) work experience, don’t fret. Customer service offers many entry-level opportunities for those new to the workforce. The key to writing a resume if you have limited work experience is to focus on transferable skills, or the talents and abilities you developed in school, internships or volunteer work that are relevant to customer service.

Examples of transferrable skills included are teamwork, time management, problem-solving, and communication. Also, if you’ve held a leadership role in a school organization or as a volunteer, employers will be eager to learn about the skills you added in those roles employers will be interested. Include them in your resume to show that you have what it takes to manage a team.

When organizing your resume, you should first choose a format. There are three main resume formats: chronological, functional, and a combination of the two. Which format you choose will depend on your work experience and career stage, but the preferred format by recruiters is the chronological format, which clearly shows your work history and career trajectory.

Once you’ve picked a format, you’ll need to structure your resume. As you’ll see in our customer service representative resume sample, there are five major sections of a best-in-class customer service representative resume. Stick with these basic sections, and you’ll be sure to cover all of your bases as you learn how to write a resume: . Here are the sections and what belongs in each:

1. Heading. This is the section appears at the top of your resume and contains your name and contact information.
2. Professional summary. This section includes a few lines under your heading that introduce what you have to offer an employer, your most relevant skills, and, if possible, a metric that shows off a notable achievement.
3. Skills. This section should highlight the hard and soft skills that you’ll bring to the job.
4. Work History. This section should list your past work experience in reverse chronological order, starting with your current or most recent role.
5. Education. This section showcases your classroom credentials including degrees, licenses, and certifications.

The main goal when writing a resume is to make yourself stand out from the competition. When it comes to For the customer service representative roles, the focus should be on showcasing your ability to please customers and communicate all types of information.

The best way to convey this information is to highlight your soft skills. When adding soft skills to your resume, list them in the Skills section of your resume, but also strive to give examples in your Work History section. If, for example, your past job was working as a customer service representative at a mortgage company, you might write:

“Compassionately assisted 35 customers per month to refinance their mortgages during trying personal financial situations.”

Also, employers want to see the impact your work has had. So rather than wasting your valuable resume real estate on a boring list of job responsibilities, punch them up with metrics. For example, rather than merely listing that you were responsible for answering customer inquiries in a call center, consider writing:

“Charged with handling up to 150 customer inquiries per day on a variety of topics, including resolving complaints, providing additional product details, and adjusting orders.”

By adding these additional details, the jobseeker has demonstrated both the volume of calls handled and the variety of customer issues they managed in a single bullet point.

For more ideas on how to make your resume stand out, study our customer service representative resume sample.

Another trick to resume writing that many jobseekers miss is to include quantifiable achievements in your customer service representative resume. As mentioned earlier, listing job duties isn’t enough to impress a recruiter. To get the interview, jobseekers must show off the impact their work has had on their past organizations’ success.

Here are three examples of quantifiable achievements you might use on a customer service representative resume: For ideas about how to work these data points into your resume, check out our customer service representative resume sample.

• Exceeded sales goals by 15% through effective up-selling of company’s products
• Boosted company’s customer base by 65% in Q4 through stellar communication and effective resolution of customer complaints
• Improved favorable customer service ratings by 25% thanks to the implementation of a new training protocol for team members

Getting into the interview chair requires that jobseekers today be savvier about how they construct their resumes and more strategic about their applications. Research shows that 75 percent of employers use some type of applicant tracking system (ATS), a computer program that is designed to rank resumes based on a list of keywords from the job ad.

Since an ATS acts as the first line of screening in the hiring process, the goal of using one is to help employers eliminate the resumes of unqualified applicants. If their document contains the keyword the ATS was programmed to identify, applicants will move on to the next stage. However, those jobseekers whose resumes don’t contain the proper keywords usually never have their resumes seen by a human recruiter.

For this reason, learning how to write a resume that is packed with the proper keywords and ATS-friendly is critical to success. The best way to accomplish this as follow:

• Carefully study the job ad. Make a list of the critical skills and experience it lists.
• Customize each resume to the job ad. When writing your resume, make sure that these requirements are listed prominently. This will require personalizing your resume slightly each time you apply but taking that time to do so will greatly improve your chances of landing an interview.
• Echo the language used in the job ad exactly. If the job ad asks for a candidate with “strong written and verbal communications skills,” use that language exactly on your resume. Remember, an ATS is a computer program so it can’t interpret nuance, so if you write that you have “stellar communication skills,” it may not recognize it as the same skill and you could be knocked out of the running.