Critical thinking should be a prerequisite for hiring new customer service personnel. Customer service today is no longer just about being able to smile and help customers when requested, but also about reaching out to them in the most creative, meaningful, and impactful way possible. Of course, these flexible actions provided your staff can apply critical thinking in their daily work. Creative thinking that results in a better customer experience should be encouraged provided they adhere to the established operating framework and authority established by the Organization.

Gone are all those days when organizations simply viewed their customer service as mere customer transaction satisfaction and nothing more. They are not trained to be personal and creative in their approach. In the past, Customer Service staff just needed to learn how to smile, transact, and know how to scale an unpredictable situation to the next level to handle. As a result, Customer Service positions are often filled by low-skilled personnel with adequate speaking skills.

Today’s customers no longer just act purely objective and rational as they become more demanding. To influence these customers to stay with you or to buy more from you, you need to train your staff in critical thinking. They need to be trained to put themselves in the customer’s shoes. Customers are no longer just looking for bargains, but also inner satisfaction when buying from you.

So what is critical thinking really? Critical thinking includes a complex combination of skills and may include the following: –

(1) Rational thinking

Ability to trust reason rather than emotion, require evidence, ignore unknown evidence and follow evidence where it leads, and is more concerned with finding the best explanation than being right when analyzing apparent confusion and asking questions. Only the right level of critical thinking can help your staff better understand and anticipate needs.

(2) Self-awareness

Ability to weigh the influences of motives and prejudices, and to recognize our own assumptions, biases, prejudices or points of view. Once again, creative thinking is key to developing such self-awareness to better handle customer demands.

(3) Sincerity and honesty

Ability to recognize emotional impulses, selfish motives, nefarious purposes or other forms of self-deception. there will always be insincere and dishonest people around. Creative thinking can help your staff better apply their judgment when dealing with such clients and not simply follow the procedures established by the Company.

(4) Open mind

Ability to evaluate all reasonable inferences consider a variety of possible points of view or perspectives, remain open to alternative interpretations accept a new explanation, model or paradigm because it better explains the evidence, is simpler or has fewer inconsistencies or covers more data accepts new priorities in response to a reassessment of the evidence or a reassessment of our real interests, and let us not reject unpopular views outright.

(5) Discipline

Ability to be accurate, meticulous, comprehensive and thorough, resist manipulation and irrational appeals, and avoid harsh judgments.

(6) Without prejudice

Ability to recognize the relevance and / or merit of alternative assumptions and perspectives and the weight of evidence.

Take your customer service staff through a critical thinking assessment test to improve the critical thinking aspects of their jobs. Regular evaluations will go a long way towards improving your staff’s reasoning skills when faced with different situations at work. There are many samples that you can try for free to assess the type of critical thinking assessment test that will be most appropriate for your organization.

In conclusion, critical thinkers are skeptical by nature and do not accept things as they are. They approach texts, images or videos with the same skepticism and suspect that they approach spoken comments. Critical thinkers are active, not passive, and are constantly looking for the variables that will make a difference in their goals. They constantly ask questions and analyze. They consciously apply tactics and strategies to discover meaning or ensure understanding. Critical thinkers do not adopt a selfish view of the world, but go dancing with their objects. They are open to new ideas and perspectives. They are willing to challenge their beliefs whenever there is conflicting evidence. Critical thinking enables us to recognize a wide range of subjective analyzes of otherwise objective data and to assess how well each analysis could meet our needs. Facts can be facts, but the way we interpret them can vary.