How To Build And Maintain A Successful Customer Support Team?
by Abdul Aziz Mondal Customer Service Published on: 27 July 2022 Last Updated on: 23 May 2023
Every entrepreneur follows a big idea when creating their company, and a successful team is a key pillar to winning results.
An effective customer support team structure must follow practical strategies and tips to gather the fitting agents. Hire the most suitable candidates or collaborate with outsourced technical support from the beginning. It will be easier to manage a customer support team of similar core values and philosophies.
We want to share tips on hiring the best-fitting candidates, ensuring their work engagements, and supporting mental health for superb results.
Top Tips To Support Your Customer Support Team
The remarkable team doesn’t appear on its own. It relies on some concepts proven over time. Thus, the productivity and success of the team depend on agents’ involvement in the work process and their mental health, and great caller ID reputation service (give it a try!).
We want to share advice on how to organize the first and maintain/support the second to build the customer service of your dream.
1. Appreciation
The number one reason you might lose top talents is that they didn’t feel appreciated (despite the salary you pay). Moreover, it includes simple ‘please/thank you and big gestures like a gift certificate for ‘the customer support representative of the week’. Let people know that their work, ingenuity, innovation, and overall contributions are noticed and recognized.
2. Belonging
The major driving force of the greatest corporations is a unique sense of belonging where every person feels they belong to a particular community.
You can organize a specific team culture despite the business size. Thus, people come to work, live by established cultural values, and make human connections with people they like.
3. Develop talent
The involvement requires challenges or extra tasks to develop people with new mind processes and inspirational feedback. Good team managers cannot be too busy to coach their people. If they take people to where they’ve never dreamt of being, it forms a team of loyal agents.
4. Maintain mental health
Working with clients who can scream at you or offend you affects mental health and emotional well-being. There are many initiatives like a psychologist on-demand, face-to-face conversation with a manager, room for anger, and other events where people can reveal their emotions.
How to Create a Successful Support Team: Step-by-Step Guide
Every company wants a successful team of people that accomplish grand purposes. If you’re going to find suitable individuals despite the type of organization, here’s part of the challenge in finding a successful customer service team. We’ve got a checklist for you to hire and develop the most fitting candidates and put together a good team.
1. Check History
It’s not a bad idea to check applicants’ history or qualifications to do the job. Despite their motivation, they might not be able to perform your customer support’s specific tasks.
If they worked in departments far from customer service, it might be challenging for them to get used to quickly unless you’re ready to train staff thoroughly. If you possess little time and many duties, focus on candidates with complementary skills and experience.
2. Check Interest
If somebody is interested, they’re probably a good prospect. However, many people fake their interests easily. There are different reasons for it, like a financial question or an angry wife, but your task is to detect a lie. For example, a face-to-face conversation with each candidate will reveal a true or fake interest and prevent hiring the wrong people.
3. Check Response
A person’s response tells you about someone’s integrity and character. Is the break only 10 minutes? Two evenings a week? Saturdays? It gives you the necessary clues, so don’t go past them. Such responses quickly illustrate their philosophy.
It doesn’t mean anything bad of a man, but he just doesn’t fit your “successful team” concept. The person might seem appropriate for a while, but the response will come from their true philosophy, which you can’t change or adjust.
4. Check Results
If the candidate fits all the previous points, and you hire them, they will start performing soon and show how they play this game. Thus, the results are the final judge. And they must match the quality metrics of the support team.
a. Firstly, check activity results.
Every customer support representative has to make, e.g., 10 cold calls every day. So the math is pretty simple on Friday, isn’t it? If the activity results are poor, those have to be signals and red flags.
b. Secondly, check productivity results.
The ultimate test of a quality team is productivity, which is measurable progress in a reasonable time. The team leader has to be upfront in team-building with what they expect. They shouldn’t let the surprise come later and put it upfront.
Afterwords
The most remarkable team managers leverage their team’s talents around them to multiply and accelerate common results. They know how to gather together people of shared philosophy and organize their work effectively. They support agents’ mental health and maintain emotional well-being.
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