Guest Post: How To Support And Inspire Your Customer Experience Team?

This week we feature an article by Anjan Pathak, Co-founder and CTO at Vantage Circle, an Employee Engagement Platform. He shares how rewarding your customer experience team is critical to building an inspired, high-performing team.

Your brand’s name will eventually suffer if you don’t have a strong core team handling customer inquiries, keeping them pleased. Also, research says that brands with a great customer experience get them 5.7 times more revenue than their contenders. Thus, your customer experience team is the driving factor behind loyalty and returns in the long run.

As a leader, you must know how rewarding your customer experience team is critical to building an inspired, high-performing team. In doing so, it is important to understand how much and how often you must motivate your team, which will directly impact their performance.

Five Best Ways To Support And Inspire Your Customer Experience Team

Help them avoid burnout: Keep your team fresh and bright-eyed throughout the day.

When things go tough, your customer service representatives need better management, not more money. It is the basic which every boss should be able to afford, at least in today’s working environment.

It’s important to provide them with top-down information and solicit their feedback, utilizing pulse surveys and suggestions for company-wide projects. Find out what your employees aspire to have or do, and see what you can do to help them achieve their goals. Using outside expertise to train your employees can help them succeed. It will ensure that there is ongoing progress and that customers are satisfied. At the same time, the staff will be energized and inspired by the fact that management is investing in them.

Flextime can work for your customer experience team too. Try it!

Most bosses are apprehensive about allowing for flexible working hours. But, regardless of where we work, one thing remains unavoidable: the demand for flexibility. And, it is here to stay, in some form or another. However, when it comes to giving flexibility, the customer experience team is left out – possibly intentionally. It’s a common misperception that they can’t use flexible working tactics like hybrid schedules, hot desking, or remote collaboration. They indeed can.  But how do you help with that? The next point summarizes everything.

Make their task easier with tech-enabled resources for customer services.

To reduce the stress on their customer support teams, most leading organizations rely on and upgrade their technology. Let’s take a look at the omnichannel approach to customer support. It serves as an umbrella center for customer data across all channels, allowing you to instantly access the necessary customer data in a single dashboard view. As a result, the customer experience becomes completely seamless and consistent, as they don’t have to repeat their problems. It automatically shares the customer’s previous interactions with the support team across channels, making their job considerably easier.

Chatbots, which are self-service services, provide another approach to help with incoming issues and answer simple questions without requiring personal responses from staff. With such smart-tech-enabled resources, you might want to adopt flextime, which allows your customer service personnel to work outside of the traditional 9 to 5 hours.

Let them enjoy their holidays and plan for their absence.

The festive season does not discriminate. Just as it starts with your consumers, it starts with your customer service people. And, honestly, it is your responsibility, as a leader, to consider it for them. While doing so, is it necessary for your company to hire additional employees to meet the holiday demand? Do you need to train your employees on new channels available to customers during one specific season? Or, is it necessary to notify your customers in advance of extended holiday hours? If you answered yes to all of these questions, it’s high time that you start planning now so that when the holidays arrive, your team is ready to manage any client encounter!

Here are three tips that might help you plan it!

1. Your customers may be inundated with questions over the holiday season, especially if you own a leisure/ recreational business. It’s probably because of all the jingles you play on the radio and the huge discounts you give. If possible, your firm can look into recruiting seasonal support employees to help your team keep up with the demand in this situation.
2. Take a peek at the most popular questions from previous holiday seasons. Do they have to do with pricing, delivery, inventory, or returns? Look further into the ticket data to see what questions consumers typically ask. Make sure that all the relevant help articles are updated and made easily accessible via your FAQ page.
3. Examine and determine which support channels your consumers use throughout the holiday season. If you find that they prefer to pick up the phone and call customer service, you can turn off the least desired help channel. It will help to focus your personnel and training on the most preferred support channel, limiting the number of people placed on irrelevant tasks.

Recognize their accomplishments, both major and minor.

It would be best if you often recognize your customer experience team for big and small achievements. It can be as simple as saying something appreciative when you notice good work. Or you can send a Thank You email, pat someone on the back, or applaud someone in a meeting.

Employees their employers recognize will recognize the customers, which is a natural consideration. So, energize and encourage them by emphasizing the importance of their contributions to the company’s and customers’ success. Consider having a variety of innovative ways to express your gratitude and keep your employees motivated. Gift cards, team lunch outs, company happy hours, for example, can ensure a lively atmosphere and motivate your customer service crew. Consider holding wellness contests and challenges with different customizable employee rewards that they would enjoy.

Final words

Customers use a brand name to describe great customer service experiences. Thus, any company that understands the skill of having a strong customer service culture will undoubtedly become a market leader. We hope that this post has been informative in helping you form an incredible customer experience team.

Anjan Pathak is a Co-founder and CTO at Vantage Circle – an Employee  Engagement Platform. He is an HR technology enthusiast, very passionate about employee wellness and actively participates in the growth of the corporate culture. 

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

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Ten Principles To Create A Customer-Centric Company