A Guide to Connecting Your Remote Customer Support Teams
The future of commerce has prompted a dramatic change in the way customers engage with brands and businesses. From the exponential growth of online commerce to the continued presence of new customer service technologies, even smaller organizations can connect with and serve customers around the world.
The ability for customers to communicate with companies, regardless of their location, means that customer support teams are no longer restrained to traditional work arrangements.
From 2019 to 2021, the number of customer support teams working from home is projected to grow from 34% to 56%. Cubicles, conference rooms, and even offices themselves are becoming relics of a previous way of working as businesses explore the potential of fully-remote customer service teams.
Whether your company is looking to develop a sustainable remote work infrastructure for your support representatives or has quickly migrated to off-site working in observance of social distancing, follow these crucial steps to ensure that your employees are properly equipped and trained to succeed outside of the brick-and-mortar office.
#1. Enhance Team Training
An effective onboarding and training program is foundational to both the short- and long-term successes of employees who interact with your customers. More often than not, comprehensive training is the differentiator between high- and low-performing teams, with 88% of high-performing customer service leadership investing heavily in training programs.
The challenge of developing a great learning experience is only further complicated without the opportunity to train new hires or recertify more experienced team members in the office.
- How can you ensure that individual trainees are receiving the same information that is required to perform well at their job?
- How do you keep training seminars engaging and actionable without the physical presence of a teacher?
- And how do you plan to track the success of each of your courses for future improvements?
One solution is to learn about learning management systems, or tools for remote-native workforces. A learning management system, or LMS, provides a centralized online hub for all of your courses, certifications, training documents, tutorial videos, and the status of training completion for each employee.
This helps promote a standardized approach to your training methods while simultaneously making your training program fully accessible to remote new hires. As opposed to reading through a training manual, many LMS providers offer opportunities to create interactive videos, questionnaires, and guides, which makes the information more digestible and engaging.
#2. Expand Communications
Perhaps no single obstacle is more difficult to overcome than the issue of communication for customer support teams that are distributed across a broad geographic area.
Effective communication, without chances for face-to-face conversations, proves to be a significant barricade for remote work in general; in a study on the impacts of a fully digital workspace, 57% of remote workers stated that a lack of communication leads to them missing out on vital information.
Beyond the challenges that come with communicating as a team without ever speaking face-to-face, virtualized communication also forces customer service teams to reconsider the technology they use every day.
It’s no longer pragmatic to equip your agents with a hardwired phone set while fielding incoming customer inquiries, especially when many remote workers opt to put in their 8 hours during business travel, at the local library, or between multiple locations in their home.
In a position where communication with both customers and fellow support team members is so crucial to success, you can bridge the digital gap by exploring Voice over IP communications.
As a replacement to office phones that are hardwired into your building, Voice over IP takes advantage of current internet speeds to create a “digitized” phone experience, which means that its users can carry a phone conversation with customers through their laptops, tablets, phones, and more.
Adding a new phone line is as simple as upping your subscription and downloading software onto your new agent’s computer. This helps businesses create a customer service toolbox that is as portable as their service reps need it to be.
#3. Find New Ways to Measure Success
Excluding any preliminary hiccups, while your team adjusts to their personal office spaces, long-term remote work arrangements should not hinder your support team’s productivity.
(In actuality, off-site employees often prove to be more productive, compared to those in office, and reportedly work an additional three weeks every year.) What may change, however, is how you measure productivity as you manage your team from afar.
It’s easy to check up on each person’s progress when everyone is housed in the same office space. But how can you maintain this same level of team visibility within a more flexible work arrangement?
Without any kind of supervision, your employees may feel like you are not supporting them when questions or concerns come their way. On the other hand, customer service leaders who check in too frequently may disrupt their team’s workday and make them feel micro-managed.
To find a place in between these two polarities, look into goal-setting through your CRM. Support agents more traditionally use CRM platforms to organize and track their engagements with customers, but remote employees can also use them as a touchpoint within a larger team setting.
By their very nature, CRMs convert the human relationship between a customer and your company into metrics—everything from the total length of time it takes your customers to convert to how many times on average they engage with customer service before making a second or third purchase.
By leveraging the numbers around your support strategy, you can help your remote team create measurable goals that will give them direction when you aren’t there to provide it for them in-person.
Using Goal-setting to improve your team’s average time to respond, reduce the number of messages before resolution, and boost the number of tickets handled daily will provide you with the blueprint you need for full-time remote success.
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