All in all, you\u2019ll be held responsible for every single thing happening with your team. And that\u2019s okay, but you should feel prepared for everything that\u2019s coming your way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To help you there, here are 10 customer service management tips that will help you make both your team and clients happy (and do I need to highlight that customer loyalty will skyrocket as well?):<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Hire your people (like, YOUR people)<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Effective customer service management starts with hiring people for a business. To hire customer service representatives<\/a> who will elevate your customer service, you’ll need people with related education or experience. And what’s important – soft skills play a crucial role in this endeavor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sure, there are things like the speed of typing for live chat agents or experience with coding. And other things being equal, such hard technical skills can be a huge advantage. But what will you do with an experienced developer with no empathy and communication skills whatsoever?<\/p>\n\n\n\n That\u2019s why you should be looking for some very specific set of soft skills<\/a> in your future customer service representative:<\/p>\n\n\n\n But how do you even test something like this? <\/p>\n\n\n\n A good old job interview with the right questions is probably one of the most failure-proof ways to measure candidates\u2019 soft skills. However, there are additional tests you can run to make sure that a person\u2019s got what it takes. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For instance, you can offer a role-play scenario<\/a> requiring a specific solution to customer inquiries and see how job candidates handle it. Or even go play ping pong with them. Such unexpected circumstances might be perfect for testing soft skills in a more friendly setting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We at HelpCrunch have these bar-raising meetings as a \u201cfinal trial\u201d. At these meetings, our whole team comes to speak with candidates who have passed their test assignments and job interviews successfully. We do this to make sure that everybody will get along well. But for customer service representatives, it\u2019s even more important to make a good impression on everybody as it will literally be their job.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Now, depending on the size of a business, customer service can include anything from answering email requests to proactive onboarding to even upselling and cross-selling. That\u2019s why it is a customer service management job to define all the tasks that your team will be responsible for early on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Obviously, it will include handling all customer requests and questions coming from live chat, email, social media, and phone. This should be your team\u2019s top priority at any moment. But what else can they do once they reach inbox zero?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Customer service is usually responsible for the following additional tasks (which often intersect with the sales and marketing agenda):<\/p>\n\n\n\n Sure, it might seem that some of these tasks belong to sales or marketing departments, but that\u2019s the thing about a five-star customer service management strategy. It\u2019s your job to establish continuous communication not only with customers but with other departments, too. Clients shouldn\u2019t even feel there\u2019s anything other than good customer service from your side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Usually, customer service training comes hand in hand with hiring staff. A manager finds a person for the job, onboards them, and then calls it a day. However, new trends and technologies emerge every day, and it\u2019s your job to keep up with them yourself and to train your team as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Malte Scholz, CEO and Co-Founder of Airfocus<\/a>, thinks that any customer service training should start at other departments. That\u2019s why they make customer support agents spend some time in the sales and marketing teams before starting with their main role:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our onboarding process takes two weeks, and before they start working in customer support, each new hire has to spend a week in sales and one week in marketing. The goal is to understand the processes in each team so that they can better transfer messages to the customers. For example, marketing has a certain messaging, and the customer support team needs to be aware of that because the customers will react to your landing pages or social media ads. At the same time, customer support can learn the art of persuasion from the sales team.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n You can also organize quarterly or yearly in-house customer service training<\/a>. One form of it might be role-playing scenarios<\/a> with some questionable or crises, where your team needs to find the perfect solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are also numerous customer service conferences happening all over the world every year. As part of customer service management, you\u2019ll probably be going to lots of those not just to be well-informed about the industry but to network, too. So, it might be a good idea to help your team visit such business conferences as well. People exchange a lot of experience and inspiration at such events to get insights into modern customer expectations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While there are some problems that can be solved by a professional customer service team and a good detailed knowledge base, it\u2019s not always the case. Sometimes, support requires help from developers or needs to transfer a customer issue to sales.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Samantha Odo, COO at Precondo.ca, thinks that a good customer service manager will make every executive\/department involved in customer service:<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best thing you could do is to make every department involved in the customer service department. No, I am not saying that it takes its final responsibility in a lot of hands. But involve every executive in it. CEO, accounts department, sales department, and every other major department\u2019s executives must have a link with customer service. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Its benefit would be that you could come up with more good policies. For example, a sales team can help you in dealing with customers, and the budgeting team will allocate a proper budget to this department. By doing so, you would combine all departments to achieve one goal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, how do you achieve this synergy? Well, you need tools. You need the best and most efficient tools you can find for keeping all the issues in order, communicating with the team, and, of course, providing stellar customer support.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Customer service operations can\u2019t happen without the right tools and their proper implementation. Kat Kalmykov, Head of Customer Success at Thankful.ai, says that there is always a lot of pressure from above for customer service managers to implement tech in their processes. However, it\u2019s critical to evaluate whether (and which) tech is the right solution for your brand. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Tech can enable some brands to deliver an incredible customer service experience, but for other brands, it can actually lead to a less-than-stellar outcome because the tech isn\u2019t able to do what you thought or hoped it would. Make sure you know your strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities before deciding on implementing any new processes, tech or non-tech.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Choosing the right tools can only come from your own experience and expertise. Here are some tools that will help you manage your customer service team more efficiently:<\/p>\n\n\n\n These tools are just a bare minimum that every customer service team should have. Also, you can actively utilize not a technology but a kind of trick \u2013 a \u201cthank you for your order\u201d template<\/a> and similar that will significantly speed up the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There are also things like chatbots that are gaining their momentum right now. However, opinions differ on this technology. Some say<\/a> that it\u2019s the best way to help customers 24\/7 and ease your team\u2019s workload, while others think that this technology isn\u2019t developed enough to be any helpful at this point.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dmytro Okunyev, Founder of Chanty<\/a>, says that chatbots are only good if you have a range of 4-5 questions that your customers keep asking:<\/p>\n\n\n\n We get a range of different questions about our pricing plans, how we stack up against our competitors, what features we have, what is in our product roadmap, etc. Moreover, we have customers ranging from small teams of 5 to enterprise businesses with 500 seats. In other words, the target audience is just too diverse to cover with a single chatbot. This is why we ditched the chatbot and started hiring customer support agents to have coverage for at least 12 hours per day. The cost is greater but so is the ROI.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Once you\u2019ve hired the right people, outlined their responsibilities, and given them the most powerful tools, your main responsibility is to track their performance. That\u2019s why setting realistic yet precise customer service KPIs<\/a> (key performance indicators) is a must.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In my personal experience, KPIs usually sound rather intimidating to employees. That is why it\u2019s important to base such requirements on your own experience to make them achievable. Also, a good customer service manager remembers that KPIs exist to reward and motivate frontrunners, too. Don\u2019t forget to endorse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, here are some of the most common customer service KPIs that you might want to track at your company:<\/p>\n\n\n\n Most of these metrics are easily tracked in any customer service software. For instance, HelpCrunch counts the number of conversations, first response time, and time to close. You can also check your customer satisfaction rate based on chat ratings that customers leave after you resolve their issues.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Define customer service responsibilities<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
3. Organize training programs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/helpcrunch.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/customer-service-scenario-flowchart.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\n4. Establish continuous communication with other departments<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
5. Choose the right technology stack<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
![\"helpcrunch-shared-inbox\"](\"https:\/\/helpcrunch.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/11\/helpcrunch-shared-inbox.png\")
<\/figure><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n\n
6. Set realistic customer service KPIs<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
\n
![\"helpcrunch](\"https:\/\/helpcrunch.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/helpcrunch-satisfaction-report.png\")
<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n7. Create a customer service philosophy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/helpcrunch.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/02\/giphy.gif\")
<\/figure><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"