Customer Service Skills Resume

In today’s terrible job market more and more people are out there looking for jobs that require customer service skills and it becomes important to know what employers are looking for in the customer service industry.

This article will hopefully shed some light on how you can improve your resume specifically for customer service positions in your area. Tailor your resume so that it looks fantastic to those hiring managers that are in the position to give you a great job as a waiter, front desk agent, sales associate, receptionist, or any other kind of job that involves having good customer service skills.

Let me first start by telling you a little story that explains just how tough the market is out there these days. I work at a hotel in Boston and my food and beverages manager was looking to fill a part time bar tender position to fill up some gaps in the banquet schedules. He made the mistake of openly posting the job up on Craigslist.

He posted it around eight o’clock in the morning and by two in the afternoon he had received over one hundred job applications from applicants all over the Boston metro area. They came into the hotel in person, they filled up his voice mail with phone messages, and they emailed him resume after resume. He was so overwhelmed by the response that he will never use craigslist again to do his hiring. He was forced to pick about twenty resumes and then choose the best one out of those.

See how difficult it is just to get your foot in the door these days? The economy is bad and everyone seems to be on a hiring freeze. You don’t want to get your resume tossed out because it isn’t properly written. You might have a ton of customer service experience but because you aren’t showing it off properly, no one is going to notice.

Here are some tips on formatting your resume specifically to showcase your customer service skills.

1. Put all of your most recent customer service jobs up at the top of your resume. The hiring manager has to read countless amounts of resumes in a day and he doesn’t have time to read them all completed. A proper resume should be no more than one page and the most relevant experience should be displayed up at the top. That way he can easily skim your resume and find the skills most important to him.

2. Use bullet points. Don’t go on and on in lengthy paragraphs. No one has time to read that. Use quick and simple bulleted examples of your customer service skills. Make sure that you don’t just say you have customer service skills, try to tell a short story with your bullets. Instead of saying "so and so has great phone skills" imply that you have great phone skills by describing a specific responsibility you had involving the phone.

3. Use action verbs. No one likes to be bored to death and that is especially true with resumes. These things are boring by nature so it is up to you to spruce them up a little bit with exciting and informative word choices. Keep it simple and keep it snappy and you’ll be well on your way.

I hope these few little tips can help you improve your customer service skills resume and land you that waitress job you’ve been looking for. Just be persistent and do the work, if you put enough resumes out there someone is bound to bite.

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