Customer Support Rep Job Description: Template and Examples

Customer Support Rep Job Description: Template and Examples
Illustration by Sonny Ross

Customer support representative is one of the most common jobs on the market for individuals looking to work in technology, so the job description you write for your open role needs to be exceptional in order to attract applications from exceptional candidates.

It's important for your job description to clearly reflect your company's needs and the requirements of the role. If you downplay key expectations, you may end up with applications that don't meet your requirements, and if you sugarcoat other aspects, you may end up with dissatisfied employees.

Honesty is just one crucial aspect of the perfect customer support representative job description — use the template and examples below to get every aspect right.

Section 1: About the job

Start with information about your business and how it operates. You can include information like company size, when it was founded, and the type of product you offer. From there, move into describing the role itself.

For example:

Help Scout is a remote first company, with 110 employees working from 80+ cities all over the world. Our mission is to support small businesses with tools that make customer support more helpful and human. Today we’re supporting more than 12,000 of them — we’re passionate about this stuff! We’re also a Certified B Corporation.

Our customers are at the heart of what drives us as a company. As a customer service representative, you’ll work directly with our customers over email, chat, and phone. Our customer service team is small and intimate and focuses on helping our customers directly with issues they are experiencing with our product or its functionality.

Our ideal hire is motivated by what we’re doing as a company, believes in the importance of quality support, and is eager to contribute to the success of our customers.

Section 2: Key responsibilities

Outline the core work that the successful candidate will perform, especially covering any specific tasks that may be different from what candidates expect — e.g., a language requirement, working outside of normal business hours, or more technical knowledge than a basic customer support role requires.

For example:

You will be supporting our customer base both directly through conversations and indirectly through creating and maintaining documentation. Here is what a typical day on our team looks like:

  • Answering customer questions as they come through email, chat, or phone.

  • Reviewing social media and either answering inquiries or routing them to the appropriate internal team.

  • Spending time out of the queue to create new ways to excite and engage our customers, for instance: branching documentation, interactive email signatures, or proactive email campaigns.

  • Creating documentation to help customers resolve their issues.

  • Assisting with billing issues.

  • Staying late (or coming in early) to support high-priority customers in different time zones.

Section 3: Skills and qualifications

This section should help people self-identify as a good fit for your role. Alternate titles for this section include “You’d Be Great If...” and “Our Ideal Candidate….” Whatever heading you use, be clear whether the items listed are nice-to-haves or definitely role requirements.

Here is a way you could present customer service skills and qualifications:

  • You are willing to commit to working a minimum of two years on our support team, upgrading processes, helping our customers, and implementing new functionality to help our customers work even better.

  • You enjoy empowering users with the knowledge to do things for themselves in the future, not just fixing things for them.

  • You’re an A+ listener and communicator with the ability to synthesize feedback and be the customer's voice to help your teammates become better marketers, designers, builders, and more.

  • You are eager to spend your days speaking with customers on the phone, via email, and through chat.

  • You are reading this, and you’ll include a "Hi, I love marshmallows!" in your cover letter so we can know you've read it.

  • You're comfortable being uncomfortable and figuring things out on the fly. Our team is small and new, but we'll give you the autonomy to help build processes from scratch.

  • You're driven and goal-oriented. It can be challenging to stay focused with so much freedom and autonomy, but you're great at striving toward the prize.

Note that this is all descriptive enough to be easy for someone to read and get excited about. Also, note the optional message about including a specific phrase in a cover letter. That is a method that some companies use to weed out applicants who apply to multiple roles without really reading descriptions.

Other things to consider including

Help your customer service job description stand out by including additional information that might be relevant to your best potential candidates. For example:

  • Benefits that you can offer.

  • Perks of working for the company.

  • Information about the company's fiscal stability — for instance, did you just get a round of funding?

  • What the interview process will look like.

  • Where candidates can find you on social media or contact you with other questions.

Include pictures that depict your culture, show brands currently using your product, and mention any partners with whom your customer support team works closely.

Other compelling data points to include are testimonials from employees or customers, Glassdoor links, or even blog posts about your company culture or values.

Lastly, always double-check anything you post for biased, alienating, or discriminating aspects. For instance, if someone doesn't need a bachelor's in computer science to succeed in the role, don't include it in your customer support representative job description.

The language you use here will determine what type of candidates you attract, so consider every word carefully.

Recommended Reading

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5 great examples of real customer support representative job descriptions

Here are a few additional customer support representative job description examples that show how differently similar roles can be presented while still being effective.

1. Hopin

Hopin does a great job of making the job expectations very clear. Not only does the company include the requirements for the role, but they also name the nice-to-haves. They do an excellent job of painting a picture of the brand, what they find important, and how they help their customers:

hopin customer support representative job description
View the full job description

2. OpenPhone

OpenPhone keeps it short and sweet but ticks all of the required boxes. This job description lists what an ideal candidate will look like, what the company looks like, and the role's key responsibilities.

Beyond that, they also include the specific shifts they are hiring for, which makes this an even more helpful job description for potential applicants.

openphone customer support representative job description
View the full job description

3. Qwilr

Qwilr ensures that their job description will help individuals self-select. It's incredibly evident, too, that they care about being accessible for everyone. One of the best, most innovative things that they include in their post is the note at the bottom of the description:

Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other folks in minority groups tend to only apply when they check every box. So if you think you have what it takes, but don't necessarily meet every single point above, please still get in touch. We'd love to have a chat and see if you could be a great fit.
View the full job description

4. 15Five

15Five takes a different approach to their customer support representative job description. They are hyper-transparent that it isn't just customer support they will require for this role, and they include headers for role responsibilities like writing documentation and peer coaching.

15five customer support representative job description
View the full job description

5. 1Password

Along with a description of the job and the company itself, 1Password gives a picture of what kind of role the candidate can expect and gives touchpoints for one month, three months, and six months. This is an innovative and clear way to help candidates understand if the job is a good fit for them or not.

Make it your own

Your goal is to get the right people excited at the prospect of working with you — and your job description is the first step. Whatever you choose to include in your customer support representative job description, make sure that it wholeheartedly reflects your company and your team.

Your values and the team you are cultivating will make your job most attractive to potential candidates, so be sure to let them shine.

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Mercer Smith
Mercer Smith

Mercer is the VP of CX Insights & Community at PartnerHero, a yoga fanatic, and strives to make the world a little bit happier one customer at a time. You can find her at mercenator.com and on Twitter.