Enhancing Customer Support Teams

Your customer support teams are one of your most valued assets. They’re the main point of contact in enhancing CX. – Josh O’Farrell

Train Your Support Teams

Building an effective customer support strategy requires people with the appropriate attitude. The maxim should be “hire for attitude, train for skills.” A structured training program in both work skills and people skills must be maintained once in place.

If the market gets tough, this is not an area where you can cut corners. Consider requiring all employees to complete formal customer service training.

Don’t just throw the issue at your HR department, identify job specifications and make it clear what you want. This will help to ensure that your new people fit your culture.

Listen to What Your Customers and Staff Are Saying to You

Listen to and analyze client calls regularly. Set up focus groups for feedback and recommendation systems. Look at speech analytics. Test what your clients are up against with your own systems. Pay attention to what your customers and employees are saying to you.

Don’t send out a customer satisfaction survey just because it is the standard thing to do and carry things on as they are. We want an actionable customer and employee feedback strategy.

This strategy may include calculating metric results, employing focus groups, or various types of surveys. Whatever you do, the results must be actionable, accessible, and auditable.

Here are a few more ways to listen to customers and staff, once you have set your purpose:

Have a Communications Plan Implemented

It can be difficult to keep your agents up to date when things are changing so rapidly. Because some agents receive hundreds of emails each day, an essential email update that they need to be aware of, whether it’s a campaign or a change in process, might be missed.

That’s why it’s so important to make sure that every quarter, or at least once a year, you are investing in and checking you have the right communication channels to communicate with agents.

It’s critical to have a communications plan in place so agents know exactly where to look for their high-priority updates that must be reviewed right away.

Collaborative technologies like Slack are also helpful for assisting cross-functional teams in better working together by allowing them to communicate more efficiently rather than exchanging emails.

Bridging that gap between support teams and product marketing can be really improved by using these kinds of collaborative tools and communication channels.

The Need for Staff Retention

Staff retention is crucial to improving your organization’s customer service. Staff members who are satisfied and appreciate the organization for which they work are more likely to stay.

Recognition and development programs to assess potential, as well as a well-thought-out career plan framework, should be prioritized.

Many people consider good customer service and support to be the most essential differentiation between you and your competitors, and it may help you establish a great reputation in the industry.

Furthermore, being renowned for providing excellent customer service will encourage employees to work with you and remain with you, as well as contribute to client loyalty and advocacy.

Ensure Your Support Teams Are More Empathetic

Every customer wants to be treated as important by call centre agents whenever they call customer care, and it is the duty of the agent to make every customer feel special with timely service, first call issue resolution, and cordial conduct. You must ensure you train your agents properly to be more empathetic with your customers. They are the point of contact for the customer and want to feel safe and reassured that their problem is their number one priority. Being empathetic with the customer can help keep the frustration towards an agent to a minimum, helping resolve the problem faster.

Be Proactive With Excellent Audio Quality

Despite the emergence and stabilization of other valuable channels, the phone remains the most used (48%) and preferred (80%) method for reaching support agents, according to Aircall.

Because the phone is such an important tool, it is vital you make the most of it. Customers have high expectations for the voice channel, especially the quality of the call.

If the audio quality on the calls coming in is poor, then an agent’s job is always going to be harder than it needs to be, they are always going to be prone to errors and they are always going to be exhausted by the effort involved.

No agent wants to come to work to be blamed by their customers for having poor-quality calls.

If you’re concerned about your agents’ experience (and are watching your advisor satisfaction/employee net promoter score), then one of the fundamental things you can do to improve this is to ensure that your lines have good audio quality.

If an agent is reporting to management that all of their calls are failing or even some lines may be down, you need to ensure this problem is resolved immediately. Or better yet, before it becomes an issue.

This can easily be solved by proactively monitoring and testing numbers for call quality, thus ensuring your agents remain motivated and unfrustrated.

By proactively monitoring your numbers, you will be alerted and given the time to fix any issues your agents could be facing. Customers will trust a business that they know has excellent audio quality.

Not only will it help speed up resolving the issue but it becomes less hassle for your agents, while also being extremely cost-effective.

Do:

• Have a long-term strategic plan
• Be committed at the top
• Involve and trust your people
• Be customer-centric
• Listen to your staff and customers
• Measure the right things
• Proactively monitor and test your call quality

Don’t:

• Ignore your existing customer base
• Stop training in the tough times
• Pretend you’re good if you’re not yet
• Only listen to the good news
• Invest in technology too early
• Quit when it gets tough

Nobody said dealing with customers was going to be easy, but there are ways to ensure both sides have a smoother, hassle-free experience. Be sure to implement these tried, tested, and successful steps to provide your customers with the best possible experience when calling your support teams.