10 Tips to Motivate Your Customer Service Team

Best customer service consists of a motivated and enthusiastic team who gives priority to the customers and tries hard to solve their problems. If you are to win customers’ hearts by proactive and positive customer care services, you will have to go out of the box to keep your customer service team motivated.

Nourishing customer gratification can nurture confidence and belief, enhance brand loyalty, and increase customer engagement, conclusively boosting a company’s business. Vice versa, poor customer service certainly damages the business.

We will explore the best ways to keep your team motivated and high-spirited, which will ultimately cherish your customers.

1. Try to Know the Cause of Motivation

Psychologists say there are five under-the-hood needs upon which the whole psyche of any person develops: physiological needs, safety, love and belonging, self-actualization, and esteem. Some team members may be motivated by belongings, and some are by self-actualization.

Figure out the natural source of motivation for every customer service team member to feel engaged and motivated. For example, if someone feels happy solving problems, give them a problem-solving working atmosphere. Have sessions with your team agents casually and ask open-ended questions to know more about them.

2. Empower Your Customer Service Team

If you trust your team and empower them, this will cause real motivation. If agents go to their senior management for approval of every move, this will demoralize them. Without freedom of decision, they will feel hindrance in accomplishing their tasks.

If you are to unearth good results, then make your representatives empowered. The worker can make their own decisions at meeting with customers. They are not to verify their every business meeting, for example, discount offerings or pricing from senior management.

Ask your Customer Service team what makes them so confident? Listen to their opinions and recommendations on any consistent issue. Give resources and authority to agents to take proactive action without the approval of the higher people. If they are performing well, appreciate their accomplishments.

3. Equip Them With Advanced Tools

Most customers leave due to unsatisfactory responses to their questions. Therefore, customer service always requires specific tools. However, agent will feel limited without advanced tools and will be unable to deliver quality services.

It’s a prerequisite to equipping your team with tools, for example, live chat tools, video chat tools, chatbots, and co-browsing. If they are equipped with the right tools, agents will feel motivated. These tools are:

• Live chat: This enables agents to engage with customers on a website or smartphone.
• Co-browsing: This technology helps agents to watch the screen of customers in real-time and guide them in complex processes.
• Video chat: This technology assists agents in connecting with customers in real-time to solve their queries.
• Chatbot: Chatbots are AI tools that answer customers’ frequently asked questions.
• Feedback system: Upgrade your customer service team with a feedback system to evaluate customers’ mindsets.

4. Train Your Customer Service Team About Products

Customer service is the fundamental pillar of any business and it faces customers’ complaints and suggestions daily. They are to convert customer interaction into a permanent client by solving their problems.

You need to have an experienced worker who can add value by addressing the customer’s pain points. Therefore, agents must have complete knowledge of products or services to resolve their problems.

These are the best practices to train your customer service team members:

• Keep Your Team Updated: it’s compulsory to update your team with advanced product knowledge so that they can satisfy the needs of customers.
• Hold Meetings: Hold occasional meetings with your team, where you ask questions about your product or services to gauge their understanding.
• Provide Product Demos: Give them a product demo to understand the complete history of the products.
• Provide Documentation: make documents regarding all business activities to make your business optimized.

5. Have a Standard Customer Service Process

A good customer service team needs a standard process for customer service communication to respond to the customer effectively. Improper principles and unproven strategies lead to unwanted results. In addition, there must be a flow in your customer service process to successfully interact between customers and agents.

These are some guidelines to make customer service process:

• Customer’s journey map: Make a map to trace the condition of the customer at different stages to inform your interaction
• Align your service with KPIs: Align your services with KPIs to make your cycle well optimized.
• SLA (Agreement): This is a documented agreement between you and your customers. It helps the team work according to the desired standard.
• Escalation Process: When any problem occurs and involvement of higher management is inevitable, then the process must be there to resolve an issue.

6. Set Realistic Goals for Customer Care Agents

The company with no goal reaches nowhere, always decentred and demotivated. If business goals are not set, then businesses fail to meet success. So, your customer service team needs clear understanding of tasks to accomplish them accordingly. So always keep the focus on the company’s goals to attain its objectives.

Some tips for goal setting

These are some tips for setting a clear goal for your customer service:

• Set Small Targets: Targets that are bound and small are easily accessible.
• Relevant Goals: You must set goals that are attainable and realistic. Otherwise, you will be bogged by unrealistic conditions.
• Regulation: You must regulate all the tasks so that there must be no pressure on the workforce and they achieve their targets successfully.

7. Incentivize Feedback Responses

Put measures in place to trace the customer service team’s efficiency from call receipt to solving queries. The real-time victory in customer service is customer feedback on the spot. Give incentives for good feedback results.

When a team member satisfies an demanding customer with grace, you must share their story as a case study with other members. Present them as the face of success due to good teamwork. Inspire others to handle such problems successfully in the future.

8. Establish Team-Building Activities

Customer service is a hot seat job. Your team members have to face rude customers, but they have to keep calm. Only a customer service member can understand the importance of customer service. That’s why it’s good to set a cordial working atmosphere.

Team-building activities do not mean that you are lecturing them all the time. Instead, it means holding a healthy discussion in your spare time.

If the team is not physically present, try to hold meetings through digital platforms, for example, Zoom. Discuss the recurring issue and listen to all members to draw solutions to this problem to make your customer service better.

9. Training Sessions

On-board training sessions assist customer service team members to polish skills that will be better for your company; This is another way of empowering the customer service team to feel attached and loved.

For example, you ask an agent what they want to do and which skill they want to learn. They answer that they want to lead a team, and that’s why they desire to learn leadership management. You should manage these skills for agents.

The agent will feel honoured and valued. Some companies transfer agents from one department to another department to make their skills complete. This expertise through cross-department training enables agents to be more innovative, more active, and more informed.

10. Set Performance Metrics

Setting proper performance metrics to evaluate your customer service team’s achievements can also stir motivation. Different ways to trace customer service’s efficiency will keep them engaged. Apply all subjective and objective approaches to make an evaluation strategy.

Discuss with your team what factors would evaluate performance? First, persuade all team members to brainstorm to foster a dynamic team. So you can apply qualitative and quantitative approaches at the same point.

For example, you can inspect the number of cases solved per day under a quantitative approach. For example, an adept person can solve many queries in a day. In the case of a new member, they will take more time per case as they are learning. So you will evaluate them using a qualitative approach.

To conclude, the customer service department is the critical department of any business. They interact with the customer. So this interaction sets the tone of your business toward the customer. To make all interactions successful, all customer service agents must be motivated.

To make them motivated, follow the steps mentioned above. For example, find the key factors that motivate your agents.

Empower them with decision-making power, equip them with advanced tools, make standard processes, train your customers, set realistic goals to meet, incentivize customer feedback, training sessions, and team-building activities, and set success measuring metrics. Follow all these steps to grow your business limit.

This blog post has been re-published by kind permission of Scorebuddy – View the Original Article

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Author: Scorebuddy