Guest Blog: Creating a Great Remote Customer Service Team

This week we feature an article by Wayne Turmel who writes about how to be successful with a remote customer service team. This is a new challenge that many employers are facing. – Shep Hyken

When you’re trying to serve your customers, your reps must be self-starting, relatively autonomous, and focused on their jobs. You probably also want them to help each other out, answer questions for one another, and share what works so that everyone can improve. That’s hard enough to do in a call center or office. But how do leaders create great customer service teams when everyone is working from home, or at least from somewhere you’re not?

A great many companies have found that there are advantages to having their customer service agents working from home. There are significant savings in real estate and hard costs, it’s easy to get coverage 24/7, and workers view not having to deal with a commute as a major benefit. The downsides include not knowing when folks are actually working, what they’re working on, and people not interacting and sharing information as well as you’d like. How do leaders maximize the benefits of remote work while minimizing or eliminating the problems that can result in a less-than-stellar customer experience?

Maximizing the Good Stuff
Many managers worry that people won’t work as hard or efficiently from home as they do in the call center or when the boss is watching. Our research for The Long-Distance Leader shows that as people become more used to working this way, the worries about this diminish. In fact, less than 28% of first-line supervisors and managers worry that “when the cat’s away, the mice will play.” This is usually more a concern of senior leaders who are less used to working remotely and tend to come from a generation that isn’t as used to using technology to instantly solve problems and be proactive. The research, from Harvard Business Review and others, shows that if people are properly set up for success, they will often surprise you with their productivity. Some of the things that need to be in place are:

• Clear, mutually understood goals and expectations. This is not only obvious things like tickets-per-day or calls but response time to others.
• Monitoring, listening in and assessments should be agreed to in advance. The difference between “checking up” and “checking in” can mean the difference between a motivated workforce and one that feels like it’s being spied upon and mistrusted.
• If you have both in-center reps and home-based people, make sure that they are treated equally. If it feels like one group is getting preferential treatment, it can build resentment that results in loss of engagement and turnover.

Minimize the Downside
This is not to say that if you set people up for success they’ll succeed, it’s just a starting point. If you’re going to create a highly effective team, there are some important things good Long-Distance Leaders do to help address the obvious challenges of not being altogether:

• Check in more often than you might otherwise. Working remotely means that people generally prefer short, frequent communication. In a call center, you might not speak to someone for a while, but you can see them coming in and out, see how well they work and if there’s a problem, you can respond right away. That’s not the case when you can’t see each other.
• Create opportunities for the team to share ideas, best practices and wins. Even if your team is made up of individual contributors, you want them to encourage and learn from each other. Use both synchronous tools like web meetings, team calls and your messaging tools, and asynchronous methods like email, message boards and pre-recorded videos to help people feel like a team.
• Share wins with the team, not just with individuals. We know we should encourage and give plenty of feedback to our workers. When we’re in the office, everyone knows when someone gets an “attagirl,” or is singled out for a good job. When you work remotely though, you may not know when someone comes up with a great idea, or solves exactly the problem you’re working on. A good leader helps everyone learn from each other and feel like they aren’t alone in the world.
• Help the team get to know each other. Webcams, photographs, playing games and drawing attention to people on meetings are proven ways of helping build the kind of human relationships many people need to feel like they are part of a real team, not just a lonely drone.

Companies all over the world are showing that remote-working models can succeed. The biggest trick is to remember what good leaders have always done, then find ways to mimic those behaviors in this crazy new world where the people you work with could be almost anywhere.

Wayne Turmel is the co-author, along with Kevin Eikenberry, of The Long-Distance Leader, Rules for Remarkable Remote Leadership. He’s a co-founder of the Remote Leadership Institute and for 20 years has been obsessed with helping people communicate more effectively to lead people, projects and teams.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes Articles: Uber Your Business Before It Gets Kodak-ed