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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Inquiry Specialist

💰 $40,000 - $65,000

Customer ServiceOperationsSupportContact Center

🎯 Role Definition

The Inquiry Specialist serves as the primary point of contact for customer, partner, and internal operational inquiries. This role triages and resolves issues, documents interactions in CRM/ticketing systems, escalates complex cases appropriately, and analyzes inquiry trends to recommend process improvements that reduce repeat inquiries and improve customer experience. The specialist balances empathy with efficiency, meets defined service level agreements (SLAs), and works closely with product, billing, fraud, and technical teams to close the loop on outstanding issues.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Customer Service Representative with 1–2 years of inquiry-handling experience
  • Contact Center Agent with demonstrated quality and KPI performance
  • Administrative or Operations Associate who managed customer-facing requests

Advancement To:

  • Senior Inquiry Specialist / Subject Matter Expert
  • Customer Experience (CX) Analyst or Quality Assurance Specialist
  • Team Lead, Inquiry Operations, or Supervisor of Contact Center

Lateral Moves:

  • Account Services Specialist
  • Escalations Coordinator
  • Billing or Claims Analyst

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Respond to a high volume of inbound and outbound customer inquiries via phone, email, chat and ticketing systems, providing clear, accurate and professional information while meeting established SLA and quality targets.
  • Triage and prioritize incoming cases by severity and impact, ensuring time-sensitive or high-risk issues are escalated to the appropriate specialist, manager, or technical team within documented response windows.
  • Investigate and resolve complex account inquiries by reviewing account history, transaction records, and system logs; coordinate with billing, fraud, or technical teams to provide a complete resolution and follow-up.
  • Create, update and close CRM/ticket records in Salesforce, Zendesk, Freshdesk or equivalent systems with detailed notes, resolution steps and next-action items to maintain auditability and continuity of service.
  • Execute root cause analysis on recurring inquiry types, prepare trend reports for stakeholders, and recommend process or product changes that measurably reduce repeat contacts and improve first-contact resolution rates.
  • Maintain and contribute to internal knowledge base and standard operating procedures (SOPs), ensuring guidance is accurate, searchable and aligned with current policies and system capabilities.
  • Manage customer expectations proactively by communicating realistic timelines, interim workarounds and escalation status updates until resolution is achieved and validated by the customer.
  • Monitor and meet individual and team KPIs, including first contact resolution (FCR), average handle time (AHT), customer satisfaction (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS) touchpoints, and SLA compliance.
  • Conduct sensitive account actions (e.g., refunds, credits, account adjustments) in accordance with company policy, documenting approvals and audit trails to ensure regulatory and internal compliance.
  • Validate and verify customer identity and authorization using established authentication protocols to protect customer data and prevent fraud or unauthorized access.
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, legal, operations and marketing teams to reproduce issues, provide user-facing context, and test fixes or enhancements prior to release.
  • Escalate unresolved or system-level issues using structured escalation matrices and ensure follow-through by tracking progress, updating stakeholders and closing loop communications to affected customers.
  • Participate in continuous improvement initiatives, including process mapping, workflow automation projects and implementation of self-service options that reduce volume and improve resolution speed.
  • Deliver coaching and feedback to peers by participating in quality assurance reviews, call monitoring and knowledge-sharing sessions that raise team performance and consistency.
  • Support regulatory, compliance, or audit requests by providing accurate case histories, documentation and test evidence as required by internal or external auditors.
  • Assist in onboarding and training new Inquiry Specialists by developing training materials, running shadow sessions and validating readiness through competency checks.
  • Handle complex or escalated complaints by applying negotiation and conflict-resolution techniques, offering appropriate remedies and escalating to leadership when required to protect brand reputation.
  • Facilitate proactive outreach campaigns to impacted customer segments during incidents, outages or product changes to minimize inbound volume and provide transparent communications.
  • Track and reconcile data discrepancies between internal systems and customer records, initiating fixes or data cleansing activities and reporting systemic data integrity issues to data owners.
  • Support ad‑hoc reporting requests and provide analytical insights on ticket volumes, resolution times and recurring themes to help leadership prioritize product and operational improvements.
  • Ensure strict confidentiality and secure handling of personally identifiable information (PII) and financial data in adherence with GDPR, CCPA and internal privacy policies.
  • Contribute to capacity planning and workforce management inputs by forecasting inquiry volumes, identifying peak periods and recommending staffing adjustments or automation to maintain service levels.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist in pilot programs for new support channels (e.g., social media, WhatsApp) and provide feedback on operational readiness.
  • Help test and validate new platform releases or product updates that affect customer interactions and service workflows.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Proficiency with CRM and ticketing systems such as Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, Freshdesk or ServiceNow for case management, logging and reporting.
  • Strong knowledge of Microsoft Office suite (Excel pivot tables, VLOOKUP, filtering) and Google Workspace for reporting and data manipulation.
  • Familiarity with contact center telephony systems, ACD routing, and softphone tools for efficient call handling.
  • Experience with basic SQL queries or data-extraction tools to pull ticket volumes, construct trend reports and validate data integrity.
  • Ability to use knowledge base platforms and content management systems to maintain and publish help articles and SOPs.
  • Understanding of compliance and privacy frameworks (GDPR, CCPA) and secure handling of PII and payment information.
  • Experience with quality assurance tools and methodologies, including call recording review, scorecards and continuous improvement frameworks.
  • Competence with chat and messaging platforms (Intercom, LiveChat, Drift) and familiarity with omnichannel support best practices.
  • Exposure to incident management and ticket escalation tools like Jira, PagerDuty or internal issue trackers.
  • Basic troubleshooting skills for replicating customer issues in web, mobile and backend systems; comfortable documenting reproduction steps for engineering teams.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent written and verbal communication with the ability to explain technical issues in plain language to non-technical customers and stakeholders.
  • Strong problem-solving and analytical mindset with attention to detail and a bias for root-cause resolution rather than quick fixes.
  • Empathetic customer service orientation that balances customer advocacy with business policy and risk management.
  • Time management, prioritization and multi-tasking skills to handle competing requests and deliver consistent outcomes under pressure.
  • Conflict resolution and de-escalation skills when managing frustrated or high-stakes customer situations.
  • Team collaboration and cross-functional influence to align stakeholders and drive timely resolutions.
  • Adaptability and resilience in a fast-changing product and operational environment.
  • Continuous learning mindset with openness to feedback, coaching and process improvement.
  • Strong organizational skills and documentation discipline to maintain audit-ready records.
  • Data-driven decision-making with the ability to translate metrics into operational improvements.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • High school diploma or equivalent; relevant customer service certification is a plus.

Preferred Education:

  • Associate or Bachelor’s degree in Business Administration, Communications, Information Systems, or related field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Business Administration
  • Communications
  • Information Systems / Computer Science
  • Customer Experience (CX) or Service Management
  • Operations Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 1–4 years in customer service, contact center, or inquiry handling roles; volume and complexity may vary by industry.

Preferred:

  • 2–4 years of experience using CRM/ticketing systems, handling escalations, and collaborating with technical/product teams; experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare, telecom) is a strong plus.
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