Customer Service Representative Resume [In-Depth Guide and Examples]

Resumes

Jul 15

Customer Service professionals have had it rough the past few years as more and more of their jobs have been shipped overseas to “Zoom Towns.” But there are still customer service jobs based here in the US, especially those that require more skill, for example, jobs in loyalty departments and those that involve high ticket items such as home sales or aerospace manufacturing.

With offshoring comes higher competition for the customer service roles that are still here in the US. That means you’ll need a really good resume, better than you needed a few years ago.

The problem of course with most of the customer service resume advice on the internet is that it ignores how diverse this field is. Customer service jobs can be vastly different from one another. Some customer service representatives process warranty claims, some communicate with high-ticket accounts like Boeing on big-ticket items, and some offer consumer support for services such as Hulu and AT&T.

While all of these customer service representative jobs share some similar responsibilities and require similar qualifications, they are far from the same. Writing a resume for all of them simply will not work anymore - unless you like rejection that is.

Today I want to take a nuanced approach to a few different types of customer service jobs and the resumes that they require from job seekers.

Customer Service Skills For Resume

I’ve recruited hundreds of customer service openings throughout my career. In this section, I'm going to break down the top things that most customer service managers and directors ask for when searching for their next customer service representative.

As you read these, don’t simply list these out in a skills section, but rather brainstorm different ways you can show that you are good at each of the following. You can then write about that in your resume summary and work experiences. I’ll show examples of these later, but for now, make note of these relevant skills and start thinking about your own talking points.

Answering Customer Inquiries

This is the most basic function of any customer service support role. If you’re working in a B2B company this will most likely take place in person, over the phone, or through email. If you work for a direct-to-consumer company, this may mostly take place via phone and chat. Those differences are important and require different traits and transferable skills.

Make note of how you’ve fielded customer inquiries in the past and also the volume of those calls, emails, and chat conversations. There’s a big difference between the person who answers 10 calls a day and the person who answers 100 calls per day.

If you don’t have any previous customer service experience, brainstorm how you’ve answered customer inquiries in other jobs. Many jobs require similar activities including retail and administration.

One final point about customer inquiries is that it’s important to clearly state in your resume the type of customer inquiries you are handling. Are you mostly fielding inquiries about pricing and delivery schedules? Are you fielding inquiries related to technical support, billing, or account management? This is important information most recruiters and hiring managers will want to know.

Cross-Organizational Communications

In almost every customer service role you’ll need to team up with other departments to resolve escalations, expedite customer requests, create recovery plans for delinquent orders, or troubleshoot complex technical concerns.

This may play out differently depending on the type of organization you’re working for. For example, if you’re working at an aerospace manufacturer, you may have to work with the shop floor or program managers to expedite the fulfillment of a delinquent order. If you work for a SaaS company, you may have to partner with a software engineer to fix a customer’s problem.

Make note of how you work with other departments and who those department contacts are. This information will be critical to making your resume unique and stand out.

Resolve Customer Issues

Most people only contact customer support when they have a problem. Your resume should discuss how you go about resolving customer concerns.

You may talk about when and how you determine to escalate something to another person vs. handling it on your own. How do you research and solve customer complaints in a timely manner? You may discuss how many inquiries you can resolve on your own due to your own expertise. You could even talk about how quickly you resolve customer concerns. All of these could be examples that would show that you are effective and good at this job.

Another important point to make here is how you strike a balance with customers in resolving situations that are in the best interest of both the company and the customer. In other words, you probably don’t want to talk about how you give everyone what they want all the time regardless of the impact on the company.

You can also discuss how you employ empathy when dealing with customer issues and how you’ve improved customer satisfaction.

Process Orders and Returns

Many customer service agents process orders. Depending on the organization you want to work for this may be more or less complex.

If you want to work for a company that makes and sells big ticket items such as airplane parts, this may involve reviewing contracts, submitting POs (purchase orders), following up on outstanding quotes, providing customers with pricing and delivery information to fulfill RFQs, and even updating forecasting modules to load demand for assigned accounts.

If you work for a company that sells thousands of widgets each day, it will look much different. You may instead find yourself processing orders via the phone, processing customer credit card payments, or assisting customers with navigating online ordering. If you work for a company like Amazon, you may also process returns and exchanges for customers.

If you work for a company such as Hulu or AT&T you may also assist customers with billing requests and aid them in canceling subscriptions - although you’ll probably want to do everything you can to save the account first.

Depending on the type of company you are applying to, you’ll want to make note of these nuances and be sure your resume talks about this key responsibility appropriately.

Provide Product Information and Sell Products

Some customer service roles are more involved in selling than others. If you find yourself wanting to work in a high-volume call center for a direct-to-consumer sales company, there’s a good chance that you will field phone calls and chats from potential customers seeking more product information. You may also be required to make recommendations about what each customer should purchase based on the limited information they are sharing.

In many manufacturing environments, this will play out much differently. Someone else most likely will send quotes, but you may be responsible for following up on those and converting orders. In other words, this is more of a proactive, outreach function, than a reactive approach fielding inbound calls. That’s an important piece of information to make note of because it will drastically change how you write your resume.

Create and Maintain Customer Records

No matter where you work, almost every customer service representative I’ve ever recruited has to maintain customer records. This involves creating new accounts, updating those accounts, and documenting all customer interactions.

The size of the records and accounts you manage could be relevant for your resume as well as the system that you track it all within. Many companies use a CRM (customer relationship management) software. You may also make use of an ERP system such as JD Edwards or Oracle or even a ticketing system like Jira. Make note of these for your resume.

Support On-Site Customer Visits

If you work in a customer service department at a company that sells high-dollar items, there’s a good chance that you’ll also be responsible for coordinating cross-organizational resources for any on-site visits.

For example, in many manufacturing companies, there are tiers of suppliers. A Tier 2 supplier provides subassemblies to Tier 1 suppliers, who then supply parts to OEMs (original equipment manufacturers). If you worked at a Tier 2 supplier, your customer is the Tier 1 supplier. That Tier 1 supplier may wish to visit your facility and many times the customer support representative is involved in planning that visit.

Other Customer Support Representative Skills and Duties

Depending on the exact type of organization you wish to work at next, there could be all kinds of nuanced skills you may wish to highlight in your resume. Some other items I’ve seen, but are more rare include:

Performing PO backlog audits and reconciliations
Maintaining customer portals
Evaluating customer demand inquiries and mitigating risks for both the customer and the company
Assisting shared services or accounting with collection efforts
Building long-term relationships with existing customers

If you’re unsure if your resume has all the right elements, it’s always best to consult with a qualified resume writer. While I try to make this article as inclusive as I can, it’s impossible to cover the entirety of such a diverse field as customer service in one article.

Customer Service Soft Skills and Characteristics

Here are some commonly seen characteristics or soft skills in a customer service representative that managers ask for.

Displaying empathy for customer concerns
Maintaining professional image
Multi-tasking and time management
Ownership of customer accounts
Verbal and written communication skills
Balancing team and individual responsibilities
Identifying problems, solving them, and resolving them quickly
Conflict resolution

Customer Service Resume Format

Some of you may be thinking about writing a functional resume or hybrid resume, especially if you don’t have a lot of previous customer service experience. You may have even been told this by an “expert.” I’m going to be extremely frank here. I’ve never met a hiring manager or recruiter (and I’ve worked with many over the past decade alone) who likes these resume formats.

Instead, write in reverse chronological order. This often involves a resume summary followed by your work experience, starting with your most recent employer and working backward. You can include additional sections if you need to for internships or projects if you feel that those will help your cause. The examples laid out in this article follow this resume format.

Other Formatting Tips

Use plenty of white space. If you hit someone with a wall of text, there’s a good chance they’ll stop reading it because it requires too many brain calories to process the information. Make it easy to read.
Use font pairing or stick with one font. You can find all about font pairing in my Definitive Guide to Resume Writing.
Keep your margins to one inch to maintain white space, never any smaller than .5 inches.
You can also pair font sizes. I like to use a 10pt font for body text and a 12pt font for headings.

Customer Service Resume Summary

Most customer service resume summaries are poorly written and AI hasn’t helped that much (yet). This shouldn’t be a section loaded with feel-good statements and generic words that don’t mean anything.

Instead, ask yourself what you want to be known for. What kind of customer service representative are you? Are you the high-volume superstar that quickly resolves thousands of issues each week? Are you the customer service rep who sustains relationships with large accounts? Are you the person who maintains a professional image at all times or the person who lets loose a little to connect with your customer?

Naturally, you’ll want to be everything. Don’t do that. Figure out the one thing you want to absolutely be known for and that one thing that hiring teams really want. That’s what you should lead with.

Here’s a simple formula for writing a customer service representative resume summary. Include the following elements.

The Problem You Solve (AKA - What You Want to Be Known For) + The Type of Organization You Solve That Problem For + Two to Three Ways You Solve That Problem

If you can write about those three things, I promise you your customer service resume will immediately be better than 90% of the others out there.

Resume Summary Examples for Customer Service

Here are two examples of what an effective customer service resume summary could look like.

Resume Summary Example 1

Over 4 years of creating memorable customer experiences that lead to more subscription sales because of great service. Professional multi-tasker capable of handling over 100 daily communications with an average response time of under 60 seconds and an accuracy neat freak that saves companies over $150,000 each year in unnecessary errors.

Resume Summary Example 2

Over 2 years of call center customer service experience reducing customer wait times by 50% by juggling both chat and phone support simultaneously and not making customers wait online or on the phone when additional research is needed to resolve their concerns - all while maintaining a 90%+ customer satisfaction rating on all communications.

Customer Service Experience Resume

Writing about your work history can be challenging. There are so many different ways you can do it, so today I want to focus on one way that works. In this section, I’m going to teach you how to communicate your past experience and show that you would be good at your next customer service job - all in a logical way that others can digest easily.

I like to start with a job summary for each job. This is 2-3 lines of text that provide clarity around the relevant parts of your job and begins to tell your story. To write a job summary, you’ll start with these elements.

How you got the job. (Recruited, Hired, Rehired, Referred, Promoted)
What you were hired to do. (Your Central Mandate)
What type of organization you were hired to do that for. (Based on Volume of Inquiries, Industry, Environment, etc)
Your key responsibilities required to complete your mandate. (Three to Five Core, Relevant Responsibilities)

That’s it! Easy to say, but much harder to put into practice. But if you get those 4 things, everyone will have clarity about the relevance of your previous job experiences.

After you’ve written a concise job summary, you can then use bullet points to highlight your key accomplishments or contributions. These should backup your job summary, elaborate on it, and most importantly, show the reader that you were really good at the responsibilities you listed in your summary.

Let’s put that all together visually so you can see what it looks like.

Customer Service Experience Resume Sample

Here is an example of what a non-traditional customer service resume job experience could look like on your resume. This example is based on someone who is a service advisor wishing to pivot into a customer service role at a telecommunications company. This is an excellent example of an entry level customer service resume.

You can see multiple examples of the customer service skills discussed earlier in this job experience, despite it not being a traditional customer service job. If you struggle with translating your non-customer service work experience into something relevant, I highly suggest working with a resume writer or trying the Huntr Resume AI to help you get ideas.

Customer Service Resume Action Verbs

You may have noticed that I started every bullet point with an action verb. Here is a list of some appropriate action verbs for a customer service representative resume. Use what makes sense for your situation.

Analyzed
Collaborated
Communicated
Coordinated
De-escalated
Documented
Educated
Empathized

Escalated
Followed Up

Investigated
Listened
Prioritized
Researched
Resolved
Sold

Other Customer Service Resume Sections

Your resume summary and work experience section will undoubtedly be the most challenging parts to write; however, there are other sections you will want to include as well. Let’s briefly cover them.

Technology

If you’ve used any type of ticketing system, CRM, or ERP you should list that on your resume in a technology section. I would also advise including Microsoft Office if you’re proficient with it. The rule of thumb is that if you can quickly navigate around a software and are familiar with it, list it.

Often overlooked, but relevant are hardware and other software systems. If there are types of phone systems or chat systems you are familiar with, list those.

Education

You may not want to hear this, but it is becoming more common for companies to hire customer service representatives with a bachelor's or associate's degree. It’s kind of become the modern-day high school diploma. If you have a degree, you should certainly list it.

You can also list any relevant customer service certifications you may hold. If you are currently in the process of completing a certification program or degree, list it on your resume with parentheses afterward indicating your expected completion date.

Assessments

There are many assessments available to both job seekers and companies these days. If you’ve taken a typing test of any kind and scored well, things like this can give your resume a boost. Be sure to include your scores.

Projects

This is probably the least likely additional section for most people reading this article, but if you’ve worked on projects that involve customer service skills you may wish to list them on your resume in a separate section. I would typically advise this if you are a career changer or a recent graduate with minimal experience.

Customer Service Representative Resume Examples

Here is an example of a customer service representative resume based on a resume I wrote this year for someone. This resume ended up securing multiple interviews at subscription-based companies and opening the door for this individual to their new job at AT&T. Notice how specific and detailed it is. This is what you should aim for in your resume as well.

Resume Template for Customer Service Representative

You can access the exact same resume template I used to create the example resume earlier. With this template you can edit everything and anything - and you won’t have to worry about formatting because it’s done for you.

Should You Tailor Your Customer Service Representative Resume

That depends on your job search strategy. In competitive markets, many employers will highly prefer to hire customer service representatives with similar industry experiences. In other words, if you’ve worked customer service in a call center environment, target other call centers. If you’ve worked customer service in food distribution, target those types of companies. The more overlap you have in industry expertise, the better.

If you’re employing a targeting strategy like the one I just described, the answer is no. You don’t need to tailor your resume to every job. That is a waste of time. If you’re applying to all kinds of customer service jobs, then I highly suggest you tailor it.

Here are some helpful articles about this.

Segmenting Your Resume Instead of Tailoring It, A Segmented Master Resume Guide

Targeting Strategies, How to Find Jobs You Are Qualified For

How Long Should a Customer Service Representative Resume Be

Most effective resumes have between 300 and 500 words. I know that’s a large deviation. But here’s why.

In my resume example, you’ll note that I only included two jobs. The word count on that resume is 378. But imagine if that person had 4 jobs instead of 2 in the past 7 years (which wouldn’t be that unheard of). That word count would increase by several hundred words. In fact, one job section in my resume is around 120 words. I’ll let you do the math.

I typically use the job description as a roadmap to determine how much job experience to write (because that is usually what increases the length of a resume). If the job asks for 5 years of experience, I will write about the past 5-7 years of experience and possibly end the resume there in some instances. This helps reduce the length of the resume and gives the reader exactly what they were looking for.

But if you’ve had more jobs than the average person, your resume length may be longer. I wouldn’t fret over this too much. A good goal for your resume is one to two pages and 300 to 700 words.

Alternative Customer Service Job Titles

One final thing that isn’t resume writing related, but will impact your job search is customer service job titles. As you begin to use your finished resume and search for jobs, here is a list of alternative job titles that you may wish to use when searching for job listings.

Customer Support Representative

Customer Support Specialist

Call Center Representative

Contact Center Representative

Customer Specialist

Customer Care Specialist

Customer Experience Associate

Customer Service Representative Resume Recommended Reading

Ideal Resume Word Count

Resume Writing: The Definitive Guide

Soft Skills for Your Resume [This Year’s In-Demand Skills by Job]

How to List Temp Jobs on Resume

Cole Sperry has been a recruiter and resume writer since 2015, working with tens of thousands of job seekers, and hundreds of employers. Today Cole runs a boutique advisory firm consulting with dozens of recruiting firms and is the Managing Editor at OptimCareers.com.