Business and Career Counseling
An old saying goes: “a team is only as good as its weakest link.” In business terms, if the weakest link is your customer service team, you have problems.
Your customer service team is one of the first lines of defense you have when it comes to keeping your customers happy and coming back.
A happy and motivated customer service team provides good customer service to your customers on a daily basis, which in turn means they come back to you and keep your business going.
Caching in the business world has become more popular in the last few decades, and this is because it has been proved time and time again to be an effective method of motivation for teams at all levels.
Coaching can be transformative on a personal level as well as on a professional level, and the art of team coaching is something that professional coaches can specialize in and something that your customer service team should be able to access in order to improve their output.
Here are six ways you can implement a coaching mindset to help your customer service team to be the best that they can be.
Giving your teams the tools to do their jobs properly is going to make a big difference to motivation and enjoyment at work.
A tool such as a desktop support chat app to monitor customer queries coming in on different channels is a great option for customer service teams and allows for teams to be more flexible when it comes to their work.
Giving teams the tools that they need means they will be more effective when doing the job at hand, and you will receive fewer complaints from your customer service team because of poor tools or equipment.
Teams that are able to work better do work better.
Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an important aspect of all high-performance teams, and customer service teams are no different.
What is absolutely critical with customer service teams in particular, though, is creating performance indicators that are actually achievable and based on real benchmarks.
This can be difficult for new businesses with no benchmarks to go on, but even within a short amount of time, you can see what goals are achievable and change them accordingly.
For example, asking your team to answer every query within 15-minutes when your team is only small, and you have thousands of queries may be completely unachievable, but if you can get a benchmark of how quickly queries are usually answered, there is more of a chance that you can improve on this answer time, giving your team a more realistic goal to work to.
Goal setting is vital for all teams and helps high-performance teams to have focus.
There is strong evidence to suggest that continued professional development helps workers in practically every industry to stay motivated at work and work towards success.
This may be difficult for you to implement for your customer service team, who are usually very busy day-to-day doing their job, but ensuring that each team member has a clear path towards learning and development will inevitably mean that your team’s motivation is higher.
There is a bonus here for businesses too. Giving employees the opportunity to improve their skills means they are more likely to do a better job for you, thus improving your bottom line when it comes to profitability.
Something that doesn’t get pushed very often is the idea of an open culture, especially when it comes to people having creative ideas and trying new things.
It’s far too easy to say to somebody that you have tried that option before years ago or that their idea is a stupid one and much more difficult to discuss an idea through and see if the practicalities are implementable or not.
Of course, not every idea is going to be the best idea in the world, but if your working culture allows for a safe space to explore ideas, there is more chance that the good ideas will eventually flow and that your employees will feel valued.
Checking in with your customer service team is incredibly important.
Customer service is at its heart a difficult job to do. Your team will spend a lot of their time answering queries, questions, and complaints from customers who may not be very happy with your service or product.
This can be really difficult on the mental health of your customer service team, especially during times where they are facing a heavy load and unable to match their targets as best as they would normally do.
Checking in with your team to see how they are doing mentally is even more important now that a lot of teams are working remotely too. Your customer service agents may be feeling isolated and lost, as well as dealing with the very serious personal issues of health going on.
Be sure to check in with your team regularly; even if it is just a regular social video catch-up, even the smallest check-in can make a difference to somebody’s life.
Competition is healthy, it’s how the human race has survived, and most people enjoy competition as it gives them something to work towards.
This is especially true for customer service teams who sometimes get the raw end of the deal if they are always dealing with customers who have complaints or difficult queries.
You can incentivize your team to do well by providing all kinds of competitions and perks as prizes.
How you measure success is up to you as a company, many companies use things such as feedback reports after each customer service session so that customers can rate their agent that they were speaking with.