Community conversations in Customer Support is crucial in everything we do, whether it’s social media, marketing, PR, or making something happen for your business. With that in mind, it’s very important that your customer support team is effective and consistently produces quality responses to your clients’ complaints and issues.
Keeping your support staff as efficient as possible, and increasing their productivity can be incredibly difficult for a small business, especially since they work without a lot of time to spare. Not only does this often mean that you’ll have to manage around a certain amount of time on each support task, but also spending a lot of it on an average can lead to a pretty significant time crunch in the future. Therefore, finding the right ways to stay vigilant on the job, and ensure your customers receive the swift and efficient customer service they deserve requires a little extra thought on your part.
7 Ways to Boost Your Customer Support Team’s Productivity
Working with a client to provide support can be extremely fulfilling at times. Perhaps your client has had a problem for months, and you take on the responsibility of resolving it. Perhaps you only have limited time to handle the problem however, and if you want your client to feel comfortable with you, you have to commit a lot of your time to addressing the issue. Regardless of what kind of situation you’re in, there are a few ways that you can ensure that your team is as productive as possible, and ensure that you’re giving your customers the best possible service out there.
1. Hold Community Town Halls and Work Party Sessions
Always improving the quality of your customer support can be hard work when you’re dealing with people with so many different jobs on their team. In some cases, if you think your team is actually doing an outstanding job on a particular project, it’s time to bring them together to have a community conversations event. You can choose from a few different options when it comes to bringing your team together for this, and the reason for doing this is really quite simple:
- Building teamwork, putting everyone to work on a project
- Training for the next job
- Building communication to your customer and encourage social
Since your team members don’t always always have time to sit down and talk about how their customers are feeling, it’s a good idea to use a town hall meeting. Bring people together on the project itself, like emails or social media, but make sure you prepare a lot of ground. Allow people to share how they’re feeling, or how they feel about the process or project you’re working on. To make the most of these kinds of community sessions, make sure that you invest in a set of tasks. Having a set of points that everyone is striving to achieve creates engagement and can lead to increased productivity for your team and your clients.
2. Share Performance Reports
Once you gather all of the information that your team has produced during these community symposiums and work parties, it’s time to share their performance with the rest of the team. These reports are essentially individual, but people’s feedback can really help improve the team’s overall productivity.
For example, a survey can be a great way of gathering information about the feedback of a particular product or service. You’re able to collect all the feedback your team members have been able to gather over time, and if any of the members of your team deserve credit, it’s all the better. But it doesn’t end there. You’re also able to organize those reports into one place, making it easier for everyone to access. You can start by putting your report in the middle of your weekly meeting, or create a new report specifically for those people who may not be able to attend the larger meetings. Of course, in the future, you can take your review as far as you want. Take full advantage of the fact that it’s always easier to look back at past numbers when it’s easier to see them.
Give your team access to performance reports in a way that they can identify and fine-tune specific improvements they’d like to see, as well as motivating them to strive to become even better at their job. To generate these reports, look up stats for the following categories:
- Productivity Statistics for your Customer Service Team
- Performance Statistics for Your Productivity Team
3. Offer Flexible Working Hours
Flexible working hours play a crucial role in ensuring that your team is as efficient as possible. The most important part of this is providing flexibility in your employees’ start times, so that they can start their day earlier. This is more of a challenge to community conversations because it’s difficult to determine the exact start time for any given employee. Fortunately, you can work around this by having an open office policy, which means your team can set their own hours while still being “available” to be accessible to you.
But there are some things you can do to help your team get the best out of their early risers. While it’s not always possible for your team to work longer hours, these office policies can help. Offer your team attractive rewards, encouraging them to work harder, and ensure they have ample break time.
4. Make Sure Your Employees Feel Quickly Involved in the Meeting
Once your team begins talking with each other, it can be important to make sure that each other is involved in the meeting. While it’s certainly up to the individual team members to decide whether or not to participate in the meeting, including a clear agenda allows your team to participate more effectively. If you do take a more structured meeting, make sure there are clear direction points on how the meeting will move forward. Additionally, be prepared for your team to start talking early in the meeting, since it’s generally ideal to start with some small group activities, like a game or group meditation for community conversations.
5. Offer Real-Time Feedback on Individual Employees
One of the best ways to get feedback from your employees is by allowing them to get feedback on a real-time basis. Whether you use a Google hangout, Skype, or regular emails, your employees will have the opportunity to have a more direct and immediate dialog with the company, as well as have the knowledge that their actions can have an impact on the overall company results. Supportbench allows you to have a clear overview of how your Support Team is performing to help with this.
Another great benefit of real-time feedback is that it goes one step further, offering valuable information that should go a long way towards fostering great relationships between employees and the company. At the end of the day, to keep your employees happy and motivated, it’s important to honor those employee feedback surveys.
6. Verbalizing the Value of Great Customer Service Strategies
Another important aspect of becoming a great customer service organization is communicating the value of great customer service. Your staff will want to communicate this value to their customers in a manner that motivates them, but doing so can be challenging if you don’t have a system in place.
After all, just because your customers are happy, that doesn’t mean that your employees are either, so investing time in a great and efficient process will ensure that they are happy as well. Regardless of the size of your organization, it’s possible for all departments to take the step to build a great experience for customers that cannot be subpar, and not only will it be a great outcome, but it’ll also attract more qualified candidates to the company.
7. Schedule Regular Workplace Events
There are some workplace activities that your team can start at the start of every workday, or even put in place at the end of the day. For example, have lunch with your team, or hold a casual impromptu social gathering. It’s important to balance your team’s social life with your everyday business tasks, so keep these activities enjoyable.
Regardless of what activities you incorporate, it’s important to set aside time for your employees, so that they can be free to spend time with each other. There’s no need to overwork your team members, but it does pay to give them an opportunity to connect with each other.
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