Improve Your Social Skills as a Tech

As Techs, sometimes we lose focus on the customers and clients and focus on the systems we work on, and our social skills can suffer as a result. Perhaps we never had much social skill to begin with, and we were never a social individual to start with. Why do you need to have good social skills as a Tech, and how can you improve them?

Why You Need Good Social Skills

As a Technician in the service industry, we don’t just deal with machines, we deal with their owners. As business owners and contractors, or even employees, we have direct contact with people on a daily basis, and lack of social skills can hurt our business and our livelihood, whereas improving our social skills will improve our business. Our social skills need to make people feel secure about working with us. Ask yourself, ‘Are people happier when they leave my place of business than when they arrived? Did they feel special or did they feel like they were just another number on our list? Did they feel like they were taken care of as a valued customer?’

Why is it so crucial to our business to improve our social skills? If you were the client with the machine full of memories, personal and business data, and years of work in the form of collected software and utilities, would you hand that over to just anyone to work on? I know I wouldn’t. I would want someone I could trust, someone who was personable, who demonstrated interest in me and in what I was handing over to them to work on, someone civil, reasonable, and courteous as a matter of being professional. What we need to ask ourselves is ‘Is that what my customers see in me?’

An important truth was demonstrated to me a long time ago, that ‘people don’t care what you know until they know that you care’, and that is a primary concern in the service industries. Clients and customers thrive on excellent customer service, and they’ll often go out of their way to refer businesses who have treated them very well, leading to much more business for you. Improving your social skills is the direct step to improving your customer service and the social side of your business.

How To Improve

Start by greeting the customer courteously when they call you or walk in your door. Remember to always smile, even if you’re worn out and just not in the mood. It’s contagious, and they’ll brighten up if you wear a smile. If it’s common in your area, exchange pleasantries, and then ask them how you can help them. If you’re currently busy with another customer and no one else is available to help them, inform them immediately that you’ll be with them in a moment. Sometimes all a customer needs to know in a brick and mortar shop is where to find a particular range of products so they can pick and choose, and sometimes it only takes a second or two to point the aisle or area out to them and go back to your present customer, without making the current customer feel like they’re being put on the back burner.

When dealing with the customer, listen patiently while they discuss the problem they’re having, and acknowledge what they’re saying without taking over. When they’re done, ask any qualifying questions you need to narrow down what might need to be done, and then get down to business with them, depending on your repair policy, as far as giving estimates or taking a look at the system before calling them with an estimate.

When you go to a place of business to deal with a client or customer, be polite and professional. You might have to deal with receptionists and secretaries before you get in touch with the owner or director of the department, so strike up a conversation and be pleasant, and you might find they need help with a machine at their house, and they’ll be more likely to call you if they know you already and you’ve made a good impression on them. When dealing with your client, be respectful. They might not know the difference between a phone jack and an ethernet port, so come down to their level and don’t look down your nose at them or give sarcastic replies. If you’re respectful and treat them well, as with the secretaries and other workers, they might call you to work on machines at their house as well, or give you more business.

If you go to a residence to work on a system or troubleshoot issues, greet the customer, and if appropriate, exchange pleasantries and then get down to business. Depending on the neighborhood or the household, they may have some really nice flooring and have a ‘socks only’ policy, and I respect that as a guest to their home, but it’s a very rare occurrence where they ask you to take care with their floors, in my experience.

Be conversational, inquire about what they do for work, and make small talk. Make sure you answer all their questions, and be a very good listener. Give them eye contact when they’re talking to you, but don’t stare them down. Don’t focus so much on the work and on the system you’re working on that you lose focus on the customer and either don’t reply to their questions or acknowledge what they’re saying. If they think you’re ignoring them, you’ll come across as rude and impolite.

Make sure you take care of everything they asked you to work on. If your memory is like mine, you might want to take a little notepad and write things down as they mention them so you don’t forget. If they notice you doing that, it will impress on them that you take what they say seriously, and it really shows personal interest. Make them feel like they’re your best client, and the most important customer. If you do, they’re much more likely to call you back even for a small issue, because you have a positive effect on them when you’re there.

If you’re still finding trouble working on your ‘people skills’, grab a friend, practice a job scenario with them, and ask them how you did, and what you can improve on. Pick a friend that has good social skills and someone who can give you constructive criticism that will help you improve your social skills. When they give you advice, write it down, and on each job, work at those main points and you’re sure to improve your customer service with your customers.

If you have any tips on improving your social skills on the job, drop a tip below! We’d love to hear it.