Enhancing your Customer Support Teams

Here are a number of useful tips you can implement to your business, ensuring your customer support teams provide the best possible experience for your customers. They are the main point of contact after all!  

Train your support teams

Building an effective customer support strategy requires people with the right attitude. The maxim should be, “hire for attitude, train for skills.” Once in place, your business must maintain a structured training program in both work skills and people skills.

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 systems. Pay attention to what your customers and employees are saying to you. Don’t send out a customer satisfaction survey because it is common 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’s challenging 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 proper 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 they must review 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.
It would be best if you prioritized recognition and development programs to assess potential and a well-thought-out career plan framework.

Many people consider good customer service and support to be an essential differentiation between you and your competitors, and it may help you establish an excellent reputation in the industry. Being renowned for providing excellent customer service will encourage employees to work with you, remain with you, and contribute to client loyalty and advocacy.  

Ensure your support teams are more empathetic

Every customer wants to be treated as important by call center agents whenever they call customer care. The agent must make every customer feel unique 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 priority. Being compassionate 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, you must make the most of it. Customers have high expectations for the voice channel, especially the quality of the call.

When the audio quality on the calls coming in is insufficient, an agent’s job will always be more challenging than it needs to be. They are always going to be prone to errors, and they will always be exhausted by the effort involved. No agent wants to come to work to be blamed by their customers for having poor-quality calls.

Suppose you’re concerned about your agents’ experience and watching your advisor satisfaction/employee net promoter score. In that case, one of the fundamental things you can do to improve this is to ensure that your lines have excellent audio quality. If an agent reports 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.

Proactively monitoring and testing numbers can easily solve this 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 problem, but it becomes less hassle for your agents while also being extremely cost-effective.  

Nobody said managing your customer support teams would be easy, but there are ways to ensure both the teams and customers 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.  

Find out more about Spearline

If you are new to Spearline and would like to find out more about how you can benefit from the platform, we would love to speak with you. Please send us a brief message, and we will be in contact with you shortly. Spearline’s platform proactively tests inbound telecommunications services, as well as dial-out.
Connectivity and audio quality are monitored on fixed-line, SIP, or mobile networks, globally. Spearline enables organizations to provide uninterrupted services to customers around the world. For further information, or if you have any further questions .