Contact centers have evolved significantly over the past few years, requiring contact center agents to refine their customer service skills. To keep up with new forms of communication, hiring managers must ensure contact center agents have more than verbal communication and people skills.
For example, writing and reading comprehension skills for email, chat and social media are growing in importance. Body language and visual observation skills are also important for video chat. Additionally, as many contact centers support hybrid and remote work models, agents must be comfortable collaborating digitally with supervisors and teammates.
Agents must also understand and appreciate the benefits and limitations of new contact center software, including knowledge management systems and CRM platforms. Increasingly, modern contact centers rely on digital communication channels, automation tools and AI-driven agent assist technologies. Agents must combine strong interpersonal skills with the ability to work effectively alongside these tools.
The importance of soft skills
When contact center agents interact with customers -- regardless of the channel of communication, where they work, or the contact center software and systems they use -- soft skills are of critical importance.
An agent must resolve the issue and communicate in a manner that's understandable to the customer and shows care, understanding and confidence. It's important that agents don't sound robotic, and display empathy and caring when listening to a customer's issue and communicating the resolution.
These contact agent soft skills are the "icing on the cake" in driving an outstanding customer experience.
Most common contact center agent skills
Many basic contact center agent skills haven't changed during the past few years, but there are additional skills that contact center agents must have to successfully perform their job.
Here are 10 key contact center agent skills that managers should look for when hiring.
1. Interpersonal skills
Contact center managers must look for agents with exceptional people skills who thrive on working with people to understand their issues -- whether the agent can relate to them or not -- and solve them.
2. Communication skills across channels
Contact center agents interact with customers across a variety of communication channels, including inbound and outbound calls, email, web chat, text messaging, video, messaging platforms and social media customer service channels. Many of these channels require different types of communication skills from a listening and speaking perspective. While an individual agent doesn't need to excel at communicating in all these channels, they must exhibit the skills necessary for any channels they will support.
3. Professional and courteous demeanor
Customers reaching out to a contact center might be frustrated and emotional, depending on the issue they're trying to resolve. Contact center agents should be sensitive to a customer's feelings, always have a courteous demeanor, and display empathy and patience when providing customer service, regardless of the channel of communication.
4. Excellent problem-solving skills
Customers often reach out to a contact center with complex issues that are difficult to explain. Agents must be able listen to the customer, identify the core issue, work independently and provide a resolution that serves both the customer and the organization. Contact center agents must have training in active listening so they can ask questions, clarify points and summarize what the customer said to ensure they have all necessary information to assist the customer. If they can't resolve a customer inquiry immediately, the agent should know how to find the solution. Customer satisfaction increases if contact center agents are creative and go above and beyond to find answers for their customers.
5. Ability to learn, retain and apply large amounts of information
Agents must learn and retain a tremendous amount of information regarding products, services, policies and procedures. In cases in which they don't have an answer, agents must understand how to navigate across several systems -- such as AI-powered knowledge search tools or a knowledge management and CRM system -- to find the answer to the customer's inquiry.
6. Ability to accept and meet quantitative goals
The contact center environment is extremely metric-driven, so monitoring metrics and KPIs is important for the performance management process. Agents often have quantitative goals such as quality monitoring results, average handle time, attendance and occupancy that managers measure and reward them for. Agents must be willing to work in an environment where their managers monitor, track and report most of their activities.
7. Work in a highly structured environment
Contact center agents must adhere to strict schedules, deal with a large volume of transactions, have exceptional time management skills, and follow detailed attendance and punctuality policies. Agents should be monitored to ensure they're comfortable working in this type of structured environment.
8. Flexibility
Organizations constantly change by rolling out new products, services and features to attract new customers and retain current ones. In most cases, agents receive notification of these changes in a timely manner, but there are many times when the customer knows about a change before an agent does. Agents must be flexible to deal with these instances and cannot be overwhelmed when surprises occur.
9. Comfortable working remotely
It's important to realize that at times it can be lonely and remote workers might not have the same personal connections as on-site workers. Additionally, not having the ability to have in-person meetings and coaching sessions requires the use of other communication techniques to support learning and engagement. New hires must be comfortable working remotely and have the skills and demeanor to succeed in this type of environment.
10. Good judgment and common sense
As contact centers use more advanced technology, agents must use tools in new ways and determine when something does or does not make sense.
For example, agent assist technology offers automated recommendations to a contact center agent following analysis of a customer inquiry. While these recommendations are often accurate, agents must evaluate them carefully to ensure they apply the best solution. Contact center agents must have strong judgement skills and common sense to ensure technology is used properly.
Agents who combine empathy, problem-solving ability and adaptability are best positioned to deliver strong customer experiences.
Editor's note: This article was updated in April 2026 to reflect the changing nature of contact center agent skills.
Scott Sachs is president and founder of SJS Solutions, a consultancy that specializes in contact center strategy assessments and technology selection.
