Customer Service Certifications: a Beginner’s Guide

You work in customer service, but you want to up your skills. Professional organizations offer customer service certifications programs. Upon completion, you earn an official certification that can boost your job outlook. These courses teach best practices and provide real-life scenarios for individuals who are new to a service industry or focused on becoming a more marketable job candidate.

Certain courses also provide specific training for job progression within customer service. Certifications may be designed for growth in management, technical support, telecommunications, customer care, and help desk positions.

In this article, we’ll look at the basics of customer service certifications, including types of certifications, benefits, examples, and FAQs.

Purpose of professional certifications

While collegiate and graduate programs provide a foundation for long-term career goals, many certification courses focus on job-specific training. Among many benefits, earning a certification is a way to:

• Gain leadership training
• Learn communication skills
• Practice working with popular industry software
• Discuss strategies for handling difficult customer service situations

With many certifications available, these courses range from a general field introduction to programs for developing a specific skillset or pursuing a management role.

Types of customer service certifications

Many certification programs focus on job-specific roles. These include:

• Call Coordinators
• Service Dispatchers
• Help Desk Personnel
• Tech Support
• Customer Care
• Senior Support Professionals
• Support Analysts

Courses may be unique to an industry, such as those focused on retail, food service, or hospitality programs. One example of a certification course recommended by HubSpot “covers topics like handling inquiries and complaints from customers as well as reading stressful situations to determine the best outcome. The skills and fundamentals obtained from this training program are essential for delivering consistent customer satisfaction.” This short course provided by Alison focuses specifically on Customer Service Training.

Business News Daily provides information on the vast number of help desk functions and technical support roles that customer service certifications assist with. Ed Tittel and Mary Kyle’s review of top help desk certifications reports that “A greater number of credentials that style themselves as verifying technical support skills are also available, where many such credentials focus on specific sets of vendor platforms and products.”

Each of these focused courses may provide hands-on training and develop core competencies related to the software and technologies used in specific industries.