Three Ways to Quantify Your Customer Service Resume

On a resume, numbers stand out to employers in a sea of text, providing solid, memorable facts to hold onto. As a customer service professional, who deals largely with human-centered problems, it can be difficult for you to put numbers on your experience. By taking a cue from common service metrics, you can quantify your accomplishments and use them to increase the impact of your professional resume.

Customer Satisfaction

Many companies measure customer satisfaction through quarterly or yearly surveys. When customer satisfaction rises, it means that your efforts as a customer service professional are paying off. If you held a top service position at a company, you can use this data as proof of your effectiveness.

To quantify your impact on customer satisfaction, measure the dates of your past service initiatives against the survey data. If an initiative or program corresponds with a spike in satisfaction, it often means that your efforts paid off. On your professional resume, you can quantify the experience with a sentence that reads, "Developed a service script that increased customer satisfaction by 35 percent over 10 months." These solid numbers give an employer a specific idea of your performance, as opposed to a more general resume item such as, "Used new service script to increase customer satisfaction."

Time to Resolution

If you don't hold a supervisory customer service position, it can be difficult to measure your impact on the company as a whole. Instead, use metrics that measure your individual performance. One of the most effective is the time to resolution, which starts from the first response and goes until the case is closed. In general, customers do not want to spend a great deal of time in communication with customer service agents; a low time to resolution indicates that you are efficient and effective.

A quantified time to resolution is useless in isolation. Instead, compare your number with the company or industry average with a sentence like, "Achieved a time to resolution of 10 minutes, which is 50 percent lower than the company average." The comparison shows potential employers that you are a high performer, even when they have no prior knowledge of the company or industry.

Number of Cases

For employers, it is important to hire customer service professionals who will not waste time or avoid customer interactions. To increase the impact of the other quantified accomplishments on your resume, add the number of cases you handled in a specific period. A high number lets employers know that you work consistently, without long lag times between calls. Again, use a comparison to highlight your performance. This measurement is particularly effective when combined with your time to resolution because it demonstrates that you are both efficient and productive.

Quantifying your customer service accomplishments is a powerful way to improve your resume and increase interview requests. When an employer sees solid, measurable proof of your effectiveness on the job, you immediately get a competitive advantage over candidates with more general resumes.

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