With so many lay-offs in sectors like housing, construction,
upper management and even some service industries, there’s one area that looks
to be holding steady if not improving despite the poor economy. Customer
service representatives like those that work in an inbound call
center, an outbound call center and a telephone
answering service are always in demand, and apparently that doesn’t appear
to be about to change.
In fact, the job of customer service representative ranks at
#3 in the governmental Bureau of Labor Statistics’ list of the top 10 jobs that
are expected to grow the most in the next 10 years. Insiders expect that the
growth will amount to an increase of about 20% by 2018. And there were already
2.3 million CSR jobs available in 2008, so that increase means almost 3 million
jobs just in customer service in the next 8 years that will need skilled
workers. Places like a telephone answering service and other inbound call
center set-ups within companies and outsourced companies will need those
workers, and people with some sort of training or experience will be more
likely to be hired than those without experience.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ numbers don’t just include
people who work in an inbound call center. Customer service also means email,
chat and website customer service, as more people use these methods of
interacting with businesses than ever before. The trend is biggest among those
35 years of age and younger, who make phone calls to businesses 12% less than
they did 3 years ago and opt for things like web interaction and emails
instead.
And because the Internet is as instant as a phone call in
many situations, with online CSRs available, businesses realize just how
important good customer service can be to their bottom line. More CSRs hired
means more employment, whether at a telephone answering service or one of the
other options, and that’s good for the economy. It also has the potential to
increase consumer spending on products when they get good customer service and
decide to put their faith in a particular company.
With the huge rise in popularity of social media, companies
should continue to hire customer service representatives as well as spend time
training them well. If a customer had a complaint several years ago, he could
make that known through word of mouth, but probably didn’t have the capacity to
really cause a problem or affect change. Today, an unhappy customer can make a
post on a blog or Twitter about a bad experience, and that information could go
viral quite quickly.
Someone who does call an inbound call center for customer
service is just as capable of posting online about the experience as someone
who used webchat or email to talk to company representatives. The potential
damage in this type of social media is clear, but it can also boost a company
that gives good customer service and has highly trained inbound call center
workers handling customer inquiries. Those are just some of the reasons that
customer service jobs are expected to boom over the next several years.
