Category: supportbench.com

6 Tips for Improving Customer Service Experience

Posted on by Supportbench

Do you want to learn how to improve your service?

We often refer to the one of our quotes for the process: “We will not tolerate you making excuses. Our customers expect a quick and prompt answer – and then they’ll give you their money. ” You can make sure customers feel valued with these tips and tricks that will serve your customers!

These tips will help you start improving the speed of service you provide to your customers.

1. Understand the Customer’s Problem-to-Solution Process

Most customer service teams use email to handle customer inquiries, before focusing their efforts on the real customer service problem-to-resolution process. This practice is common for calls and online order status. While such email-based processes are efficient, they can easily be interrupted with customer-service requests or a new number. Email is suitable for email addresses only, and any other email address will interrupt your workflow.

When it comes to receiving an email regarding a customer experience that has not yet been resolved, your customers’ status will not be a priority for your team. “Too often, our team chooses to skip a follow-up email, ignoring the point of contact, as if that resolves their issue. If we missed the email, we’d catch up the next time we get it,” says Pam York, CMO at SoFi. “Our customer service team members feel that it can be best to brush up on the issues first and jump into the e-mail conversation if necessary. ”

2. Keep It Accountable

Customer service emails can quickly pile up as your team starts out with a list of possible email clients. So, it’s important to choose an email service provider that delivers good support and accountability.

Customer-service emails cannot be relegated to the non-essential section of your inbox, which means they need to be reviewed and approved every week or every month. At Intercom, we’ve found a number of ways to improve your existing email management. For example, we’ve added a customer-service email central record management system. This helps teams keep their email in check and assign e-mails specific priorities, to help them speed up the e-solution process.

3. Train Your Team

The one thing you can’t do at this point is answer every query in an email. Training your team to identify the real problem-to-resolution process is crucial to keeping your customers happy. These staff members are tasked with handling more complicated queries and often complete them quickly. This is because your time is limited, and as a team, you have to prioritize your requests and communicate concerns during your calls. “We also use recorded answers to answer frequently asked questions that contain a detailed, bullet-point list of the basic steps,” says Dan Ryan, CMO at DentalMate. “This helps our staff get the answers they need faster. ”

To help your team with their responsibilities, we have several options to help connect your staff with customers. However, you’ll need to choose a mix of service providers and you must decide the type of service you want to provide. But, if you do this well, it won’t impact your overall sales numbers! You can learn more about the help your team provides on the Supportbench website.

4. Use Reporting to Monitor Performance

Using reports for customer service gives you the ability to monitor a customer’s buying journey – and make predictions about their patterns in both company and industry news.

We try to visualize our customer data and summarize it, by the very act of opening the email. For example, we’ll use the an indicator report to estimate the length of time it’ll take to sell a particular product. This will be measured at 5 to 10 days after the invoice’s receipt.

By using a number of tools, you can see how your target buyers interact with your work with reports. You can have a report that runs “all emails sent,” or report the number of receipts processed. You also have the option to track customer activity on your website, to see how people interact with the brand through e-commerce, and how they’re discussing your business on other social networks. You can use any tool to help you understand your customers better.

With this data available, you can then look for opportunities to push your brand forward – for example, by offering a special promotion or service, or by reworking the content of the email to reach your target group more effectively.

5. Use Advanced Targeting To Reach Prospects

If you have the ability to tag people who are buying your product, you can send them a targeted email with new information, that would help them make a purchase, or even recommend a sales channel and pricing. A couple years ago, we were testing a pre-purchase email alerting customers to the best time to make a purchase. It was a groundbreaking experience – customers saw all their recent purchases in the inbox, and then have a choice to schedule an appointment with the salesperson, or just check out online.

Since that sale, we’ve used other advanced targeting tactics to develop the best targeted customer experiences. If you’re sending a sales email to a customer who has seen the most sales emails in the past 6 months, you could make the personal experience feel more like you know them. That’s why we always recommend you work with an A/B testing agency, so you have the opportunity to run many variants of sales emails across different channels, targeting multiple people at the same time. 

6. Using Data for Email Marketing

Although email is the most effective channel for converting customers, there are some challenges with the ROI. It’s important to use analytics to find out what works, and what doesn’t. Email gives you the ability to combine your data from within your email service provider (ESP), to produce personalized marketing emails that are relevant to your customers.

Part of delivering customized marketing emails means you must have the processes and knowledge to use relevant, third-party data, to capture data from through your ESP. Once you identify your top goals for customer experience, you can go through your data to find the most relevant goals. 

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

The Benefits of Community Conversations

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Customer Support is crucial in everything we do, whether it’s social media, marketing, PR, or making something happen for your business. With that in mind, it’s very important that your customer support team is effective and consistently produces quality responses to your clients’ complaints and issues.

Keeping your support staff as efficient as possible, and increasing their productivity can be incredibly difficult for a small business, especially since they work without a lot of time to spare. Not only does this often mean that you’ll have to manage around a certain amount of time on each support task, but also spending a lot of it on an average can lead to a pretty significant time crunch in the future. Therefore, finding the right ways to stay vigilant on the job, and ensure your customers receive the swift and efficient customer service they deserve requires a little extra thought on your part.

7 Ways to Boost Your Customer Support Team’s Productivity

Working with a client to provide support can be extremely fulfilling at times. Perhaps your client has had a problem for months, and you take on the responsibility of resolving it. Perhaps you only have limited time to handle the problem however, and if you want your client to feel comfortable with you, you have to commit a lot of your time to addressing the issue. Regardless of what kind of situation you’re in, there are a few ways that you can ensure that your team is as productive as possible, and ensure that you’re giving your customers the best possible service out there.

1. Hold Community Town Halls and Work Party Sessions

Always improving the quality of your customer support can be hard work when you’re dealing with people with so many different jobs on their team. In some cases, if you think your team is actually doing an outstanding job on a particular project, it’s time to bring them together to have a community event. You can choose from a few different options when it comes to bringing your team together for this, and the reason for doing this is really quite simple:

Since your team members don’t always always have time to sit down and talk about how their customers are feeling, it’s a good idea to use a town hall meeting. Bring people together on the project itself, like emails or social media, but make sure you prepare a lot of ground. Allow people to share how they’re feeling, or how they feel about the process or project you’re working on. To make the most of these kinds of community sessions, make sure that you invest in a set of tasks. Having a set of points that everyone is striving to achieve creates engagement and can lead to increased productivity for your team and your clients.

2. Share Performance Reports

Once you gather all of the information that your team has produced during these community symposiums and work parties, it’s time to share their performance with the rest of the team. These reports are essentially individual, but people’s feedback can really help improve the team’s overall productivity.

For example, a survey can be a great way of gathering information about the feedback of a particular product or service. You’re able to collect all the feedback your team members have been able to gather over time, and if any of the members of your team deserve credit, it’s all the better. But it doesn’t end there. You’re also able to organize those reports into one place, making it easier for everyone to access.You can start by putting your report in the middle of your weekly meeting, or create a new report specifically for those people who may not be able to attend the larger meetings. Of course, in the future, you can take your review as far as you want. Take full advantage of the fact that it’s always easier to look back at past numbers when it’s easier to see them.

Give your team access to performance reports in a way that they can identify and fine-tune specific improvements they’d like to see, as well as motivating them to strive to become even better at their job. To generate these reports, look up stats for the following categories:

3. Offer Flexible Working Hours

Flexible working hours play a crucial role in ensuring that your team is as efficient as possible. The most important part of this is providing flexibility in your employees’ start times, so that they can start their day earlier. This is more of a challenge, because it’s difficult to determine the exact start time for any given employee. Fortunately, you can work around this by having an open office policy, which means your team can set their own hours while still being “available” to be accessible to you.

But there are some things you can do to help your team get the best out of their early-risers. While it’s not always possible for your team to work longer hours, these office policies can help. Offer your team attractive rewards, encouraging them to work harder, and ensure they have ample break time.

4. Make Sure Your Employees Feel Quickly Involved in the Meeting

Once your team begins talking with each other, it can be important to make sure that each other is involved in the meeting. While it’s certainly up to the individual team members to decide whether or not to participate in the meeting, including a clear agenda allows your team to participate more effectively. If you do take a more structured meeting, make sure there are clear direction points on how the meeting will move forward. Additionally, be prepared for your team to start talking early in the meeting, since it’s generally ideal to start with some small group activities, like a game or group meditation.

5. Offer Real-Time Feedback on Individual Employees

One of the best ways to get feedback from your employees is by allowing them to get feedback on a real-time basis. Whether you use a Google hangout, Skype, or regular emails, your employees will have the opportunity to have a more direct and immediate dialog with the company, as well as have the knowledge that their actions can have an impact on the overall company results. Supportbench allows you to have a clear overview of how your Support Team is performing to help with this.

Another great benefit of real-time feedback is that it goes one step further, offering valuable information that should go a long way towards fostering great relationships between employees and the company. At the end of the day, to keep your employees happy and motivated, it’s important to honor those employee feedback surveys.

6. Verbalizing the Value of Great Customer Service Strategies

Another important aspect of becoming a great customer service organization is communicating the value of great customer service. Your staff will want to communicate this value to their customers in a manner that motivates them, but doing so can be challenging if you don’t have a system in place.

After all, just because your customers are happy, that doesn’t mean that your employees are either, so investing time in a great and efficient process will ensure that they are happy as well. Regardless of the size of your organization, it’s possible for all departments to take the step to build a great experience for customers that cannot be subpar, and not only will it be a great outcome, but it’ll also attract more qualified candidates to the company.

7. Schedule Regular Workplace Events

There are some workplace activities that your team can start at the start of every workday, or even put in place at the end of the day. For example, have lunch with your team, or hold a casual impromptu social gathering. It’s important to balance your team’s social life with your everyday business tasks, so keep these activities enjoyable.

Regardless of what activities you incorporate, it’s important to set aside time for your employees, so that they can be free to spend time with each other. There’s no need to overwork your team members, but it does pay to give them an opportunity to connect with each other.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Operating Real-Time Customer Service

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Saving money and time, giving the customer the best possible experience, and building loyalty. These are just a few of the important reasons why providing real-time customer support is so critical for successful businesses.

Establish a Clear Understanding of Your Customers

Customer care is a diverse and ever-changing industry. The good news is that the easier it is to communicate with your customers, the more likely they are to open the door for your next sale. Good customer support means knowing your customers in the first place and what they need from you. This will help you provide a personalized experience with remarkable results. According to Matt Price, CEO of Optimizely, “Real-time support is a key contributor to creating sustained results, in the form of better sales, better conversion, and increased market share. ”

The First-Mover Advantage

A key first step in providing real-time customer support is being first to respond to customer concerns. Customers expect to receive a response within 24 hours. Properly prepared business processes are vital to realizing this level of responsiveness.

By anticipating their needs, you allow yourself time to whip a system up. The urgent nature of live chat is prompting an increasing number of ecommerce companies to partner with companies that monitor customer interaction and respond in real time. Because responses that take days are extremely frustrating for customers and the business, it makes sense to connect with a company that knows how to respond in this type of situation. This gives your customers more time to process their issues while allowing your business time to complete the support process.

Making Better Use of Support Centralization

Many ecommerce businesses are now connecting to cloud-based platforms like Supportbench to centralize their ecommerce support processes and provide better service to their customers, and help their service agents be more efficient. In the past, a live customer care rep might respond to a customer who has just bought a product through an online store. This customer interaction would take place, likely taking hours or even days.

By implementing a few core real-time support processes, an ecommerce company can quickly get back to actual customers while gaining the costs and time savings associated with a server automation solution. In fact, job site CareerBuilder conducted a study that revealed companies employing a live customer care person are able to handle real-time inquiries within 24 hours. Furthermore, employers have more than double the return engagement rates as those that do not.

Chatbots and Facebook Messenger are the Best Options for Omni Channel Support

Across all industries, more and more companies are looking for automation solutions to simplify their customer experience. Helpdesk automation is the next step on the journey to improving customer experience and making your business more efficient and efficient.

If you’re a business needing to offer a specific support service, using a Facebook Messenger-ready chatbot to listen and respond to customer messages can be a cost-effective and effective way to ensure a response to customer questions, concerns, or requests. It takes less than a minute to type out a question.Once the correct information is populated, the response can be initiated and documented. This type of service helps speed up response times and adds more important data to your CRM system. Chatbots can help you become more efficient with customer service and create a better experience with your customer and the customer experience can ultimately be improved as a result.

Make Customer Self-Service a Requirement

If you’re one of the many businesses offering web and mobile self-service capabilities, a customer service and support system that supports this demand will come in extremely handy. In addition to making customer self-service possible, maintaining this infrastructure and system is much more efficient and less expensive than a full-time support employee. But not everybody wants to make the effort to setup and maintain their own service system. In fact, supporting remote helpdesk chatbots, or bots that help manage and monitor social media channels, is becoming increasingly popular.

As more businesses integrate self-service capabilities with customer support, this type of customer support offers a more personalized and engaging experience that customers want to give their attention to. It also saves business time and money, which is always important, and increases your effectiveness.

It’s not enough to offer online self-service. Customers will expect your customer support systems to support customers 24/7, which means businesses must have the resources and help desks that support customer support chatbots to fulfill this demand. Additionally, it’s vital to offer the highest quality customer support you can. No matter what you choose to do with support, there are three key trends in support services:

  • A focus on customer care
  • Refining the support experience
  • Guided self-service

Making customer care a priority not only helps business owners save time and money, but also makes a meaningful impact on their customers’ experiences. A focus on customer care always creates a better customer experience for customers, resulting in them leaving a more positive and satisfied impression of your business.

Refining the customer support experience comes naturally, since it is integral to having the right tools in place. Whether your business is focused on advertising, financial services, retail, outsourcing, manufacturing, food services, hospitality, real estate, retail, or other types of industries, these businesses are using real-time customer service to drive customer value. For example, as part of a customer service and support initiative with a finance company that offers real-time customer support, staff members are on the phone for two hours a day, every day. The staff listens to the customer’s needs and suggestions, then connects them to someone knowledgeable who can assist them in solving their problem quickly and easily. This process creates measurable improvements in customer satisfaction and loyalty that results in an immediate return on investment.

Guided self-service is the hottest trend in customer support solutions. If used correctly, guided self-service empowers your employees to answer customer questions and concerns, while providing the proper level of expertise. This can be done by using a smart chatbot or other self-service system, also known as automated chat for customers. Using guided self-service that’s easy for customers to navigate will also create a more personalized experience and better overall business results. A customer service and support team can help organizations connect with customers with real-time, conversational skills via on-the-go automated self-service solutions.

Great customer service is still a must-have, and automated self-service is the best way to give customers the best experience possible. We’re seeing more automated chatbots deployed today, and organizations of all sizes and industries are turning to this technology to manage and grow their support operations faster and better. The evolution of the marketing and customer experience is driving a trend that benefits not only our customers, but our business as well.

Supportbench makes automated self-service an integral part of its platform for marketers, editors, developers, developers, project managers, and attorneys. Consumers are realizing that they are ready to ask questions or start a project on a mobile device and businesses are taking notice. Chatbots help customers shop for products more efficiently and confirm when a purchase is a good fit and what kind of product best fits their style, needs, and budget. In addition, self-service solutions are often more customer-friendly and easier for businesses to manage than full-time support staff. By automating customer service, you can minimize the impact on your staff and reduce costs.

Customers want a positive experience. A cloud-based customer experience platform enables business owners to be more agile by leveraging data to understand and quickly move data. Whether you’re a solution provider, sales rep, call center, social media manager, or customer service rep, join the customer service revolution by getting the right tools.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How to improve Service Recovery

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

As service professionals, we should be proactive and proactive in helping customers. Realistically, we can’t change everything that went wrong. But we can ensure that our tools and techniques are up to date. With a little planning and training, we can better satisfy the needs of our customers.

Here’s the ultimate guide to service recovery for customer service. From a company perspective, when a service is wrong, it undermines the quality of our work. Customers don’t like to deal with a company that can’t solve a problem fast. With that in mind, we wanted to provide some basic pointers about how to assess your service and help resolve a problem quickly.

How it works

Once you find that a problem exists, start by researching the details. Once you’ve got everything that you need, go to the problem on your computer or mobile device and explore the problem process.

Review the documentation on how to deal with an issue, such as the process of connecting a phone, changing an account, or a download for an app or service. In the section below, you’ll discover some tips on how to find some of the crucial information.

Time constraints

Service recovery is not impossible, and it can be achieved using a very simple method. Contact the (contact any) customer service, or find a solution, with a note attached.

Describe the problem to the representative, with what information you have at hand, and how long it will take to solve the problem. Before they act, ask the representative your exact timeframe, to see if they can solve the problem immediately. If the company doesn’t make an effort to listen to your situation, you might want to contact the customer service department of the business and ask them for a solution. If you are patient and you remember your notes, you might even get a referral point in the future.

Training

If you are going to train yourself and your team, understand that the real task of improving your service is a continual work. You don’t need to create your own training system from scratch, but you will need to ensure you do not meet the same challenges every single time.

Before the training, create a checklist.

You should ask yourself the following questions:

  • How much time do I need to complete the training?
  • How much time will this take?
  • What is the purpose of the training?
  • Does my work environment make it difficult for me to receive training?

If your answers to these questions are still blank, you might want to find a way to incorporate it into your daily work. For example, make a tool to help with training, or create a spreadsheet for all the posts that need to be completed in order to get started.

Use your knowledge to serve

While you’re on the phone, consult the documentation on how to approach a customer service desk to see if you can find an issue related to your own work. When you get to your job, understand your process.

If you have worked in this industry before, but only ever through outsourcing, you will appreciate the benefits of working from home. By discussing customer service issues with your HR department, you can also gain valuable time by solving the problem.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How B2B Companies Are Attracting and Engaging Customers

Posted on by Supportbench

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

It’s no secret that customer support is a massive gap in today’s B2B sales world. More and more organizations are discovering that a lack of customer support can ruin the B2B sales cycle.

However, customer support is also a cost it can’t afford to ignore. A common challenge for organizations who want to sell software is simply maintaining existing clients who’ve experienced buyer’s remorse.

The best way to do this is to provide the best, most up-to-date information. The good news is that B2B brands are finally starting to realize that they’re missing a major opportunity if they don’t provide great, engaging customer support. With just a bit of creativity, companies can outdo their rivals by addressing their customers’ most pressing needs.

The evolution of customer support

Over the past several years, the evolution of customer support has been toward a more personalized and personalized experience for B2B sales teams.

Continue on to learn some of the ways customer support has changed over the past several years and how new technologies are making the role of support even more relevant and fun.

Customer care teams and their leaders are surrounded by technologies that provide greater access to customer support and more customization and personalization. We have often discussed in other posts in how some brands are already improving the customer experience for existing customers, while others are expanding the breadth of their support for new customers.

Supporting the customer’s journey from buyer to customer

Customer experience and experience design for the customer are on the rise. The customer journey from buyer to customer isn’t a linear one; there are so many modes of customer journeys.

For example, some customers have journey phases that aren’t linear:

  • Recycling to appreciate an older product
  • Bringing your company back to life
  • Making a purchase
  • Long-term relationships

To meet the needs of customers on all these journeys, companies need to think about the customer’s experience across the customer lifecycle.

Extending the customer journey

Companies can stay a step ahead of customers by thinking about the customer journey from buyer to advocate.

Leaders and teams should regularly put themselves into customers’ situations, aiming to understand their motivations and desires more deeply. The next step is to extend the customer journey beyond the customers who have developed a direct, one-on-one connection with a service offering. In some cases, companies should work with third-party vendors and a partner to extend a user’s experience, into different operating systems and devices, even offering an add-on service, such as remote support. Yet with too many options, customers could buy a product that already addresses their needs, increasing the impact of data loss and increased expenses.

A world of continuous, personalized support

Personalized customer support is becoming more critical for B2B sales teams, as they’re increasingly receiving unsolicited emails, mentions, mentions, and mentions. Getting these mentions to lead to a conversion on top of bringing customers in the door is near impossible. To support better marketing tactics, brands need to get their brand advocates online and start to earn more points for each mention and email mention they receive. Organizations are realizing that “impressing leads with a single reference is more effective than convincing leads to become customers.”

Greater accessibility from outside the organization is key

Brands shouldn’t underestimate the ability to interact with their customers directly outside of the organization because of the way they interact with customers now.

To build a truly engaged customer base and to increase the engagement of their existing customers, organizations need to be able to answer any customer questions at any given time in an instant, anywhere at any given time. Companies have now made such a push towards accessibility that consumers should contact the tech support from a @tweet. B2B customers have also benefited from such situations where brands can get their products or services in front of hundreds of thousands of global customers for the most competitive price possible. ”

In fact, studies have found that 80% of customers request help from more than one place, and 70% say they would expect their company to provide a centralized technical support channel.

Learn how Supportbench empowers brands to centralize technical support through our unified platform.

But it’s not all about the technical solution

Some companies are going even further with the way they interact with customers, with some even making it a requirement to have a remote support system for product services.

It’s still very important to embrace technology and that requires being able to enable a service that can be in several places. This should be where customers often demand for support. And that’s a vast improvement from the traditional approach for companies, often getting the lead to do the research themselves or call a hotline where they have to wait for an inspector to come by or have to decide whether to stay on hold or whether they’ll stop by once in a while.

The “human experience”

If a business doesn’t consistently deliver support that’s tailored to the needs of its customers it will begin to lose its commitment and loyalty. After all, what are you going to talk about at your next promotion party?

Smaller companies will more than likely not want to have the hassle of having to repeat the sales pitch because their customers have already told them. Instead, a business should see the purchasing decision in the product and service itself, add a personalized element to that by using a matter-of-fact chat session with an agent to answer any questions on the spot, and then provide a consistent delivery of that customer’s experience.

Voice and video

Voice is an important piece of any support strategy and overall is a good way to increase customer engagement. This makes the prospect feel more important, which is sure to get them to do business with you.

Customers want to reach customer support in their own time, and in their preferred medium. If that means having agents have the ability to speak to customers by phone, chat, and/or video, then it’s a wise move.

But brands should be more than just content with conversational support. Businesses can improve the customer experience further by being more proactive and proactive in moving each customer along the sales funnel.

Today’s brands can’t talk the same language as your competitors, when speaking with prospects. Brands have to provide consistency in their customer communications that they can replicate.

Let’s face it: some things are better off to the side, behind the scenes than out there in the open and easily accessible. Yes, there are software solutions that can provide better customer support, and there are software companies who can compete with your investment in that front-line technology.

However, the way in which people interact with each other is evolving at a rapid rate that’s resulting in a place where a customer interacting with a brand today will have just as great a chance of winning the sale as their favorite human sales rep.

Supportbench’s platform empowers human agents to deliver quality customer service and unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Customer Service Automation: Why It’s the Future of Enterprise Service Automation

Posted on by Supportbench

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Delivering continuous quality customer service is always an ambitious task, but if up to the challenge, you can thrive, with some automation. Our team of professionals at Supportbench, experienced in helping organizations and teams deliver high quality customer support through the Supportbench platform, can help you with your journey ahead.

From defining service terms to dealing with the sales process, even just up front, big changes happen as soon as a service agent is onboarded and starts working. Data management, document sharing, processing transaction information, and coding processes come into focus, contributing to an enhanced level of performance and efficiency. These changes often help simplify the customer experience and drive increased sales of your products and services.

To assist you as you turn customer experience into profit, we’ve put together a list of benefits and features that help your customer service operations go from bad to best. Check it out below.

One of Supportbench’s core market benefits is the power of unification. Using our extensive experience, our dedicated service team designs and builds customer service applications to suit our clients’ unique needs. These solutions can and often do take a few months to complete, but you’ll be able to turn on the tools to perform routine tasks and scale up your expertise as needed.

Attention to Content Retention

The value of the ability to gather your customers’ content right away during an interaction creates a tremendous leverage point with a potential new client. They’ll start a project with minimal knowledge about your offering, but it will develop over time, eventually leading to a long-term relationship where they understand how your business operates and how to use it in order to meet their needs.

Simplified Workflows & Processes

Being a team of realists, we’re tempted to think that customers aren’t going to grasp how tedious and time-consuming it is to do customer service. By implementing workflows and strategically thinking through the onboarding process, you can help drive adoption, retention, as well as the added bonus of decreased influx of new customer inquiries on how to use specific features.

Timeline Automation

Timeline automation makes operations easier at all times. It saves time and helps with analytics, both in terms of identifying risks and gaining insights as you head into a new conversation. One key grievance that customers will often express when dealing with customer service is how they feel like they’re being tossed around and dealing with so many different people or repeating the same information over and over.

By taking advantage of Supportbench’s synchronized and unified Customer Support platform, any agent who is working with a new customer inquiry, or even an existing one, can easily get insights immediately into the case history and how to pick things up where they were left off.

However, it’s important to note that the process of training customer support agents to be diligent about reviewing previous information prior to engagement is up to the policies and guidelines set by your company. Make sure that your agents take advantage of the tools available to them.

An automation-driven customer experience increases productivity and consistency, which brings increased likelihood of winning new customers. This is true regardless of whether your solution is fully automated or you use onboarding activation.

Whether you’re providing an on-premise software like DocuSign or providing a hosted solution like Sendler, you can improve the customer experience by strategically building out processes that are supported by automation.

This allows you to bypass expensive personnel by using proactive tools to help the agents get into the mindset of their customers. It’s also scalable, helping you with low or remote locations while not compromising the quality of the experience.

DocuSign Case Study: Optimized Onboarding

When we launched a product, we wanted it to be incredibly easy to use, and to be easy to use. Once we were able to achieve this through automation, we saw a real lift in customer satisfaction. “We used DocuSign to sign our SaaS, and it was so much easier than other ways. We’re now going to use the system more,” shared Georgia, an early adopter.

What’s more, DocuSign has solid compliance policies in place that clients are able to implement to complement them. There are simple things that we like to d on for GDPR compliance, such as credit reporting and certifications. While some of this can be done manually, there’s value in automation so you can carry out these tasks entirely online or even at an offline location, like a service center.

Notifications and tracking

Checking the status of your new customer is critical to the customer service process, but it’s also a challenge, since it can vary greatly across a variety of companies. In addition to hardware, everything from good and bad CRM integration to documentation must be considered. Our consulting team performs custom deep dives to see how well a firm’s platform-based offering compares with other providers, but we also run a competitive analysis and download data from multiple vendors and proprietary tools, such as Hubspot, to help with training and scheduling and the ability to notifies your customers. We also work with companies on how they can manage the assets that customers have digitally and automate this process.

Right at the start of the journey we develop a comprehensive call center workflow plan, such as a Sales Stage Plan, an onboarding stage plan, a service recovery plan and an activation stage plan, which lets us start configuring a strategy that enables our first responders to carry out the audit promptly.

Software-as-a-Service

The beauty of web-based CRM is that it’s easy to get the engine to run. In addition to the onboarding stage, we use the sales platform or platform to sign new customers. By doing so we can come up with a more personalized onboarding process, such as adding the customer’s relationship on their social channels, justing their identity on the platform and tracking their assets and contacts. It’s also a great way to introduce the customer to your tech stack.

Overnight response times and expertise

With DocuSign, we get to measure improvements very quickly in terms of the time between activation and the first calls to our site, including:

  • Time between the activation and the first call to the call center
  • Time to the first call to the first rep
  • Response time
  • Simplification

Service teams are busy and while there are sometimes difficulties, we see a clear lift in customer satisfaction when they’re able to serve our customers all night long with data, documents and signage—just in the time it would take them to craft it with pen and paper.

Industry best practices

A little-known fact is that DocuSign’s goal is to drive all of the various service worksite processes on line, while simultaneously making it easier to focus on re-training and repairs. New employees benefit, as well, as it helps them understand the what, why and how, for making any system-based services better. These systems include comprehensive onboarding, which is much easier to run than manual processes.

Delivering an exceptional customer experience

Ultimately, delivering an exemplary customer experience means providing exceptional service to your customers—as a human should. The customer service team is the emotional catalyst of an organization, but without what we call the “customer experience continuum,” it cannot deliver an exceptional service. Meaning, if the experience from the very beginning is a cultural and non-verbal power trip, then your great customer service team is likely falling short. If a customer service rep is universally ignored when they ask for a technician, then you’re serving your customer poorly and the relationship is likely to suffer. Doing a good job of training, mentoring and improving in numbers can certainly give your customer service team the ability to improve the customer experience, but doing it right requires the right tools, too.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

7 Steps to Drive Real Customer Support Improvement

Posted on by Supportbench

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Many businesses have the same goals: to restore and improve customers’ trust and improve their bottom line. However, restoring trust, as well as increasing the revenue stream, for some businesses seems impossible.

In such cases, customer service can be the solution. Without customer service, consumers will search online, calling, emailing, (after all these tools are very expensive) or even post on social media. A simple Google search for customer service help or case studies can lead you to hundreds of examples.

We have examined thousands of case studies and hundreds of case studies that both gave an overall assessment of customer service initiatives as well as how to verify and audit the actual data, as well as how to differentiate it. The key takeaways for managers are:

1. Customer service takes years to build trust with customers

A company provides outstanding service but two out of three customers never know about it. This may be the reason why only 37% of US businesses are serving their customers as they should. As you can imagine, this can have a very significant impact on your bottom line as 70% of customers form their opinions about you based on customer service.

In fact, 90% of consumers will simply stop buying from you if you don’t fix your service issues. The customer journey begins with a business statement describing what your organization does. This is vital because, in the post-internet age, your competitors have so much more control over customer perception and opinions.

2. It’s not a minor issue

Your customers need your help to validate their opinions because trust is a priceless asset. Without this, your real value proposition becomes blurred as to who are really accountable for your customers’ experience and therefore how much they’re going to take your word for it.

In the absence of security for your data, your competitors become better at collecting information than you. This gives them a competitive vantage over you and can present the most severe problem to the rest of the field as well.

3. Customer service dominates the top five business top trends for 2020

Over 80% of businesses which have successful customer service overall will increase their market share.

Today’s automation plays a major role in customer service and this makes up for most of the mistakes, as well as in the inability to build an excellent customer service culture.

Despite it, there are certain lessons companies can take away by looking at both case studies and performance metrics in finance, healthcare, insurance, government, etc. They can easily check if their strategies are working out in practice and simply using additional variables like agents’ response time, how they’re training them, the amount of advertising dollars they’re spending on customer service (both online and offline) etc. can also provide valuable insights into the real performance of customer service.

4. Conduct an audit of the customer data

Let’s say you own a software company. Your next step is to visit the website of your top competitors and see what they can tell you about your customers. Additionally, using sites like G2.com that provide aggregated reviews from customers of rival products can show what customers are finding to be valuable and where there may be potential missteps. Using this data, you can get access to valuable customer data points of competitors that you may use to improve your customer support, positioning, and also for better understanding of market dynamics.

Furthermore, if you’re already a leer in customer service, we recommend making sure you make a point of having several performance audits and reviews along the way. Having multiple auditing sessions along the line might have a huge impact on your bottom line and this certainly helps you save yourself time, energy and money on the process.

5. Know how to answer every question

Back to customer support solutions, the most important aspect of a successful customer-service process is being able to answer every question. In order to avoid questions, the rest of your communication should be about what you can do to fix it and how you’re going to do it.

In many cases, your customers prefer email and you try to answer some questions manually, like who can they call, how, what kind of questions or how they should respond to some specific questions.

By knowing and working through the questions and answers, you can then start compiling and building an internal knowledge base to help support your team. Furthermore, you can even use this to build a public facing self-service knowledge base that allows your customers to find the answers before contacting you, offloading common questions from your customer support team.

The key is to make sure that you also have a customer support solution such as Supportbench that will allow you to respond instantly and actually even facilitate some better answers.

6. Identify the key factors on customer satisfaction

The ability to enhance your customers’ health score is what’s defined as your company’s ability to live up to your customers’ expectation for what your company is best known to do. There are many different issues, like tracking your customers after getting an order, direct communication and change, resolving issues, or providing more coverage in the event of a claim. That’s why it’s important to look at a customer’s journey from the beginning and measure how you can help your customers. As part of doing so, it’s crucial to understand their pain points and understand what you can do to identify problems, tackle questions, and adjust your service.

Additionally, it is vital to view potential customer service challenges in perspective of your company and get your KPIs on a weekly basis. And before you can start looking at customer satisfaction, you have to see these issues as a business opportunity. So the first step of identifying problems is taking an eye-opening look at your customer satisfaction overall.

Business logic is at the root of every problem, and that’s how you first get to know your customers. It’s important to know what their feedback is and how you could be improving the way you engage with them. Without taking those first steps, you might fail to see the big picture and miss a great idea of how to take action.

Most industries today would be shocked by the fact that attention to customer retention is incredibly poor. According to the Customer Service World, more than 55% of Americans were unsatisfied with their customer experience in 2017.

And the fact that US customers use 27 customer service agencies because they aren’t getting the help they need has also skyrocketed. That’s why it’s vital to prioritize fixing those issues. What started as a mistake can really negatively impact the entire customer experience. It’s important to develop systems that match each and every employee’s needs so that you are doing everything possible to strengthen the relationship between you and your customers.

7. Get real on leading change

When it comes to effective customer service, leadership skills are a powerful part of it. Every time there is an issue with your business, it’s the responsibility of the business leadership to lead. You need to help shape the organization and help redefine the way customers interact with your company. Without change, you will continue to miss opportunities to build on your customer’s experience.

Customer satisfaction is the core of every relationship and for many consumers, that’s the number one touch point with your company. And in fact, even though those are two words that most companies don’t use in their daily messaging, people do use them.

Influencers are great to engage with your audience and you want to make sure they see value in your company. You must be there when customers want you to be there. And if you aren’t there, well that doesn’t translate to customer retention. It also means that you aren’t helping your customers get the service they need. They may be experiencing problems, but without knowing what you are doing, your next steps in communication may not lead anywhere good.

Once you know that 80% of all social media users dislike passive interaction and 85% of them are looking for engagement, you should be doing everything you can to satisfy that need. That is why being active with social media is crucial to customer satisfaction in 2020.

In some ways, a basic and simple guide to getting on social media that could improve your business. If you want to be there when people want you to be there, then you need to be there by listening to your customers and acting accordingly.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How to build a customer-service culture in your company

Posted on by Supportbench

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Hiring a customer-service manager is the first step in bringing customer-service practices in your organization up to snuff.

But you don’t have to go through the trouble of hiring a consultant to make it happen; you can institute successful customer-service practices in your company by investing in everything from cultural training to customer service development. And to make sure you’re focused on developing the team, take the following steps to ensure you have a strong customer-service culture in your organization:

1. Work with an Experienced Customer-Service Trainer

Having an internal member of your team sit down and teach people at their pace is like watching paint dry: it takes time to get everyone on the same page. That’s why it makes sense to find a customer-service expert who can help companies across the country teach and train employees.

If your company doesn’t have one available, go to the experts at Glassdoor Workforce Solutions for the full list of best customer-service consultants.

2. Audit The Employees

If you want to build a winning customer-service culture in your company, you need to uncover where they’re finding themselves stumbling down the road and how can you help them realize success.

If you can’t find a way to upgrade their learning, look into how you can improve their job role or employee compensation package. This will give you a better idea of how to get them where they want to go.

If you have a company that’s growing and needs more new hires, find a way to attract and engage this new talent to your company. This can either mean investing more in their package or investing in training them on their chosen paths so that they can succeed.

3. Deliver on your Company Values

While it’s encouraging to see a company working on the right values, it’s even more important that a company follow through on them. This means having policies in place that ensure that the team understands and upholds the company’s values.

At the end of the day, your employees aren’t interested in joining your company just because you have policies that say so. They’re looking for a company that believes in them. For example, a company that won’t charge its employees fees for programs and training that would make the employee more productive and the company more money is more than likely going to keep them happy.

4. Stay Alert And Proactive

Regardless of what you’re doing, or how you’re doing it, if you’re not doing what you need to do, you can’t expect your team to fall in line. Instead, you’re going to need to be constantly active in your company.

For example, look into how you can train your employees and how your company can attract new talent to get better at what it does. Then, stay on top of it, stay aware, and always be proactive.

If you were able to outline all of the steps mentioned above in this guide, you’ll have a strong foundation in place to meet all of your company’s needs.

4. Delivering On Service To The Benefits Of A Great Brand

Your best customers are a reflection of the brand that you’re representing. If your organization isn’t known for communicating with its customers, and if you’re not known for its exceptional customer service, then your business will die. Because today, quality Customer Service is an expectation, not a nice to have.

Fortunately, there are things you can do to build a great brand. Namely, you can work on building a strong reputation of customer service.

If you’re already known for outstanding customer service, then this will make you a well-respected leader in your field. Then, with a solid reputation, you’ll be able to maintain it. Therefore, as they say, the more customers you have, the more profitable you’ll be.

But that’s not the only thing you can do to build a great brand. In fact, it’s more important than that. If you have a strong brand, you should be able to implement it in every aspect of your business.

5. Expand The Road Map For Your Brand

Another way that you can build a great brand is to look at where your brand is and where it could be going.

For example, a great brand is recognized, people will remember it, and what brand owners want their business to be known for is easily identifiable. However, if you haven’t been the best customer service leader in your organization, your competitors will be—and this will lead to lost business and losses of money.

Therefore, your best bet is to make all of your social media, press, and advertising platforms more visible to everyone. This will expose your brand to the widest audience possible, and when people know about your brand, they’ll be more likely to share it.

This will also allow you to create a strategy that will allow your brand to become a well-known brand: Maybe they’ll want to know the competition is coming after them. Or maybe they’ll notice that you’re a customer centric brand instead of a brand that doesn’t care about their customers.

The goal of this exercise is to give you an overview of where your brand is, as well as where it could be going.

No matter how you look at it, people judge companies by how well they treat their customers. If you don’t make an effort to go out of your way to do that, then your business will fail. Everyone will not only know that you don’t care about your customers, but that you consider it beneath you to even exist there.

But it’s not always about treating your customers well. The other key to building a winning customer service culture is a culture of integrity. This kind of attitude will set your brand apart from the rest of the crowd.

But isn’t it also all about keeping the fans happy? Sure, but loyalty doesn’t just happen. You need to keep them happy so that they come back time and time again to do business with you. And this is where an active, competitive customer service culture comes in. If you don’t really care about people, then you’ll lose customers – and you’ll lose money.

If you’re serious about establishing a winning customer service culture, you need to make sure that every department is following that example.

Internal

Your HR department will build its employees’ skills and habits and train them on how to handle every issue. It’s up to you to make sure that your customer service is the one under your control, and if that’s not the case, then you need to reinforce it with the people you’re using it for.

Your employees are the future leaders of your company, and since customers will be under their influence, they should set up an environment that makes them feel valued and respected. Just being friendly to your customers will start to rub off on employees, and a good customer service culture will then draw them in further.

There’s one position within your company that should be given maximum priority. This is your customer service director. That’s the person responsible for ensuring that every customer is met with the most positive experience possible. They need to make sure that all the guys behind the scenes have the skills they need to carry out that job effectively. It may sound like an easy task to make sure your employees are well-trained in responding to every customer request, but it’s actually really hard.

Over all, it’s important to make sure that your employees are treated as equals, and that there’s a well-informed and supportive culture. As part of that, the culture of every team must play an important role. Everyone will be expected to come up with solutions, and in doing so, they need to train one another to do the same.

That kind of high-quality culture can attract customers and improve retention, all while ensuring that your employees feel like they’re their partner in success.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How do we get more out of our customer support team?

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.Because of the ease of reaching out through the internet and social media, there is continually an enormous number of customers looking for assistance.

If you want effective customer support for your business it is helpful to have dedicated staff and officers who are always ready and willing to help. If you operate a manufacturing business, you may have someone on staff to help service suppliers, if your company is a consumer business like grocery and clothing stores, you need employees who can take care of questions from their customers.

Getting employees properly trained and equipped to assist their customers and how to use the right information to deliver the best answer to their questions is key to success. As the manager of a customer support company, you should also be knowledgeable about customer service matters and think of ways to strengthen your support team. Provide your employees with training and access to best practices that they can follow so they can develop positive traits of customer service that you want to instill in them.

Set Limits and Expectations

As with any aspect of business, it is important to create limitations and expectations for your customer support team. You need to give your staff some parameters in which they are to operate and you have to maintain clear lines of communication with your employees to ensure that the topics that you want discussed are handled properly.

Miscommunication is a major reason why a customer support team fails. Mistakes such as the failure to send an invoice or not following through on a refund, can cause you loss of revenue and unsatisfied customers.

Delegate tasks properly and let them know that you expect them to fulfill all the tasks that you or the team manager assigns to them. Keeping the team up to speed on their duties would help your company avoid mistakes caused by miscommunication.

Apologize and Move On

At one time or another, mistakes will happen but at the end of the day your customer support team will perform better if they feel supported.

Do not dwell on their mistakes and put them in a position where they are embarrassed or put on the spot for their error. Encourage them to acknowledge their error, apologize, and that should be the end of the conversation.

Equip them with proper training to avoid committing the same mistake. Supporting your customer service team’s growth will allow you gain their trust.

Train More Get More

It is good if your team feels comfortable enough to approach you and ask for help, however, you may not always have the time to answer their questions and give them support. As the customer service team that supposedly has the answers to customers’ concerns, shouldn’t they be more educated?

You might have to spend for training and education, but that would be a wise investment. A customer service team could not be unfamiliar with customer concern solutions. They need to be trustworthy and reliable and that would only happen if they are properly trained and armed with an updated knowledge base that would act as an encyclopedia of answers.

Equipped with all the necessary skills and information, your customer service team will help you retain your customers and keep them happy resulting in good feedback, referrals, and increased business.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Building a Customer Support Engagement

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Bad customer support can mean bad customer satisfaction. When a company can’t keep customers coming back and keep them satisfied, it can damage its long-term business.

Manpower shortages or lack of employee engagement are often what causes bad customer support.

One solution to this is to challenge all your employees to become more resourceful. That’s easy enough to say but learning how to do it is definitely harder. As the leader of a customer service team you need to learn how to steer your employees so that they can get more done.

Understanding at which level of responsibility staff members should be held is important. From the manager, to employees working directly with customers, you need to know their roles, responsibilities, and how they should be performing them to produce desired results. That way, you can really drive toward results and fix problems efficiently.

Realizing that a strong business support service requires the cooperation of the whole team, involve all staff members in setting up your team rules and structure. They should not only be part of a committee, but should also be directly part of the business and responsibilities.

Being a part of a customer service team, it is your role to hear and address the concerns of your customers however it’s not enough to just be their advocate. You should foster an environment where they feel heard, understood, but also provide with the capacity to handle their issues by themselves.

That’s a big start. To get started with this, you will need to establish a little platform for customers to share their issues with you, have such conversations regularly – not just with customers, but also with your employees, vendors, clients, new partners, customers, and even other members of your staff (even the ones not connected to customer service).

This is how you can gather data to begin compiling an encyclopedia of answers and solutions to whatever questions and problems your customers may have regarding your products or your service.

We know that businesses, who are just starting, out may find that building an engagement system may be overwhelming at first but there are customer service software like CRMs that would make it easier to communicate with your customers. Some of them would allow your staff to communicate with multiple customers at the same time and even have the capability to capture the customer’s email and reference number making further conversations easier, uncomplicating the process of registering and reminding your staff of what their issue is.

Customer service systems make it easy to establish a relationship with every customer and keep them pleased. If you’re building out an innovative new system, then that new system needs to facilitate an ongoing dialog with the customers. It is important to have a conversation that’s completely functional, yet something that can foster a relationship with customers.

Customer service communication technology has evolved tremendously making it more convenient for your organization to respond to the feedback of the customers. Your ability to do so will define how successful you will be.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

Your Customer’s Areas of Difficulty

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

A simple test to discover how well your support team is performing is by identifying their areas of greatest difficulty.

“Let’s do it! is a universal mantra. It may sound encouraging but this piece of motivational prodding may urge many sales people to make superficial changes to their products without grasping the real root cause of problems. This could be effective at first but might cause the

Every business that has something to sell should be able to identify these four areas of difficulty:

Problem 1 – Why are you selling what you’re selling? Problem 2 – How do your customers make their decisions? Problems 3 – What are their expectations? 4 – Where do they need help?

All of these areas have a significant impact on business, so the first thing salespeople and support professionals need to do is determine the root cause of customer struggles and design or package a solution.

Determining the issue

Solution 1

It’s no secret that customers are always seeking better products and services. To answer this, businesses try to offer an ever-improving quality of service and maintain a competitive position within the market.

Knowing the specific reason for our customers’ issues can go a long way in determining how to design a different message that will help customers solve their dilemma. Before a salesperson or support professional should try to address issues with a new product or service, it’s important to first eliminate the root cause of those problems. In other words, before you dive in, determine the “why” of your product or service and design a product to address that issue.

Solution 2

To determine how your customers come to a decision to take action or make a purchase, take a look at their problems and observe how they impact their business.

There are different factors why our customers decide to make changes or consider a purchase. A customer experiencing change at work, for example, will find that making new changes to his job will have a negative impact on his performance. Knowing all the factors for decision making will allow you and your team to formulate a solution around that type of impact.

Problem 3

Some customers expect you to have all the answers to their problems, others want to solve their issues on their own and merely ask for support or instructions. For this to be clear, do not hesitate to ask your customers what level of service and kind of assistance that they expect from your customer service team. Knowing this will help you and the customer to be on the same page and come to a solution the easiest way possible.

Solution 4

Perhaps your company doesn’t know what’s bugging customers? How about trying to find out? Of course, it doesn’t hurt to talk to customers about their problems in depth to get a better handle on it and which programs you can use to help fix them. These conversations are useful to your sales and support team to help them recognize the real issues and find the solutions that customers really need.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

How Can You Build A Customer Service Culture?

Posted on by rpsstudios

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform.

Customer service is arguably one of the most underrated areas of leadership and management. It is an area of sales and service that is often overlooked when starting a company. But building a customer service culture within your organization will ultimately increase profits by improving customer service and enhancing a brand.

But how do you create a customer service culture? And are there specific things to do to build a successful one?

Collaborate with the rest of the organization

Being part of an organization can help build your customer service culture. People may think that management is where the best customer service ideas emerge. But one area where it can feel like an outsider is the place where you place your own initiatives. But at some point in every company, the likes of staff and the rest of the team must show interest in doing better customer service. People must see that they have the power to make their employer and colleagues more responsive to them. Where senior personnel are happy, it means that the rest of the team feels comfortable making recommendations. These recommendations are built on a strong culture of collaboration, transparency, and a pro-active approach to resolving problems that may arise.

Building a customer service culture is one thing, but getting everyone on board is another thing entirely. Of course, training and development should be a priority of every department of a company but the culture at your workplace must also be a part of this. It’s not enough for your employees to learn to provide customer service. You must demonstrate how you intend to put the training into effect. For example, do you go into them asking them to help with their daily tasks? Or, do you send a message to them that your department team members want to work alongside them? This will send a message that your company is serious about its customer service program. It demonstrates that if you invest in people that you care them. And employees won’t fully cooperate if they don’t feel cared for and appreciated.

Instead of assuming that employees are skilled at customer service, you should provide them with training and coaching. Give them the knowledge and ability to handle situations them give them a chance to handle those situations. Whether it’s taking order for a team on sales or as a customer service representative, employees in every department need to get hands on experience as best they can. You can arm them with proper training but good customer service is better learned through actual practice.

Establish a strong direction for your organization

You need to establish a strong direction if your organization wants your employees to have a winning customer service culture. Staking out a stand of strength and support for your employees should be your mission statement. That’s the first thing you can do to help your team ensure success.

Be clear in what your objective is. And having that clarity allows you to create your work environment in a way that enables that focus. If you have a clear goal for your role in the company, that makes it easy for your employees to fit around it. And it also allows you to have collaboration, as you create your success and you get to higher levels of your company.

Train your employees

Second, you need to find the resources to train your employees, including on-site courses or virtual training opportunities. You need to empower your employees with online learning capabilities – tools such as online training portals and a solid knowledge base. Don’t forget that training doesn’t have to come from a textbook – online lectures and interactive flashboards allow you to do this. It will make your job easier if these employees are constantly on the move learning new things and uncovering new techniques and know-how.

Give them the opportunity to grow

And third, you need to make sure your employees have the opportunities to learn and grow. They need the opportunity to practice their skills and the “chance” to improve the skills they are already proficient in.

When disseminating information to your employees, choose an easy, non-intrusive way to get the message out to them. Allow them to talk, ask questions, and provide feedback. This way, they can learn and grow.

Don’t expect them to be experts right away, don’t forget that your employees are just starting to learn. Encourage them to read articles that are relevant to your industry, to learn lots of new things. This lets them grow and advance their skills without the pressure of being judged on something they have not done before. And this is an active process, not a passive one where you only start training when you think they do.

When your employees get used to the process, they should initiate their improvement themselves. And once they demonstrate their ability for self-development, you should further encourage them and provide the coaching they need to expand further into the field. The goal is not to show the development, but to prepare an experience where you believe your customer will find useful. Your goal isn’t to create a wonder worker, but to empower them in a way that allows them to discover their gifts and use them to make your customers’ lives easier.

Wouldn’t you want your employees to be a part of the building of a great place where your customers thrive and grow? Does that appeal to you, too? Don’t leave the learning for your employees. Start your own learning collaboration. Help your employees get better. Connect with them, be a partner, and contribute to what they do. Connect with them and their opportunities, and join in on the learning together.

They will engage and grow as much as you and when that happens, there will be a lot to share with their customers. I think these are the three key things that you can do to unleash their potential.

Smart workers must have a purpose. Some companies create no purpose, and they leave an empty boardroom with no people.

Build a company culture. Anything outside of that purpose isn’t going to be going to make a difference to the company’s performance. People who are not bringing their vision and their purpose into the realm of life inside of the company, and uniting around that aspect, will be working up against that wall and not getting the growth or the success. Not all of the ideas have to create a big splash, but maybe they help a few customers, then they’re still ideas that can be considered for implementation. Your culture must have that purpose.

Let’s say you have a restaurant. Do you or your staff have a set of skills and talents that help you create that magic? Do you have any retail skills, or any type of front office experience that can help you make dining in your restaurant easier for your customers? Or do you have marketing skills and sales skills? Do you have anything else you can bring to the table? And would customers enjoy it and benefit from them? Are customers complaining, or are they saying there’s no reason to come to your restaurant? If your establishment does not have a customer service culture, you’re only going to get poor reviews and poor sentiment, and in the end, a failed business.

Supportbench unifies customer support, success, experience, knowledge management, and account management into one simple platform. Do more, with less, to maximize your retention.

Ready to provide excellent customer support? Contact us today!

upport? Contact us today!