The second hard truth is that it’s impossible for supervisors to manually evaluate a sufficient sample size of interactions to objectively measure agent performance. A small sample size of interactions will almost always be skewed, and that’s not even mentioning the bias that creeps in when humans evaluate interactions.

There are effective methods of improving and evaluating soft skills. But first, consider the evidence.

The hard truth of soft skills and happy customers

It’s truly incredible the strong connection between agent soft skills and customer satisfaction. In fact, our recent State of CX research report lays out this connection clearly. We analyzed over a billion CX interactions to tease out critical CX insights every CX leader should know. And this is one of them—the better your agents can bring a human touch and empathy to interactions, the happier your customers will be.

We broke it down even further—the more types of positive soft skills your agents demonstrate, the happier customers are. This includes behaviors such as building rapport, acknowledging loyalty, being empathetic, and demonstrating ownership. If this isn’t a strong validation of the power of agent soft skills, then nothing else is. Or as I like to say, “the proof is in the pudding.”

Companies can achieve this uptick in customer satisfaction by emphasizing soft skill behaviors over mere process and technical training. Delivering company policy in a monotone voice, with no empathy towards the customer’s plight, doesn’t make anybody feel better. That’s true even if the agent’s chosen words are otherwise correct and prompt. The human touch really matters. In other words, it’s much more than simply saying a canned type sounding response such as “I understand” or “I can see how that would make you feel”.

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