Collaboration and support team communication will help your customer support team function like a well-oiled machine. The nature of a customer support rep is not meant to be siloed; it’s not a job where you sit down and do your work individually. A healthy support team shares their collective knowledge and helps each other out with cases. This results in faster resolution times, reduced agent frustration, and happier customers.
So better collaboration and collaboration is a must for an efficient support team, but how do you go about improving it?
Tip #1: Share knowledge
Your agents are an endless mine of information. Leverage the collective wisdom of your agents to build a comprehensive knowledge base. A well-documented and detailed knowledge base will help your agents resolve tickets much more quickly, as well as help train new agents. By tapping into the whole team’s experiences, it helps takes the onus off individual agents to know everything under the sun.
This is especially important for complex and difficult cases. If the agent that resolved that complex ticket shares their knowledge of how they did that, it saves the next agent that comes across the same issue a ton of time.
Many support software allows you to create multiple knowledge bases, so you can have an internal one for your agents and an external for customers who prefer self-service help. Both help in reducing tickets and speeding up resolution times.
Tip #2: Document detailed case notes
Encourage your agents to note down every detail of their interactions with customers, regardless of how small. From the customer’s preferred method of communication to crucial details about their business, minor notes that may seem inconsequential can help the next agent who interacts with that customer.
Documenting detailed notes can help improve the customer’s experience because every time they interact with your company, the agent will have the most up-to-date information to help them – it also helps add a human touch to your support service.
Tip #3: Talk to other departments
Collaboration and communication are not just essential within your support teams, it’s also crucial to connect with other departments in the company as well.
If you use a CRM tool like Salesforce, make sure it can integrate with your support system so that your sales and support teams can communicate and share information with each other easily. This ensures that your support agents always have all the necessary information they need to assist customers. There may have been an important detail during their application process that your support agents need to know in order to resolve the issue the customer is calling about.
If your social media is handled by another department like marketing, it’s crucial for that team to connect with your support agents because customers often reach out over multiple channels. This helps create a more cohesive and seamless experience for the customer.
Communication and collaboration between departments are also important because support requests often require input from multiple teams for resolution. It might be a technical issue which means your support team has to collaborate with the product team to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. A billing inquiry might involve the finance team, or a refund may need the operations team’s involvement.
But it’s often a challenge to get a fast response from other departments as they have their own priorities to deal with. This is where collaboration and communication come into play to ensure that the issue is resolved as smoothly as possible. Create a system or workflow where there is a clear line of sight of the progress of the ticket as it moves from department to department.
Tip #4: Encourage feedback on your support team communication
Since your agents are the ones on the frontlines everyday, they are best able to identify potential gaps within workflows. If they constantly use workarounds to overcome obstacles or frequently come across the same issues, encourage them to voice them, suggest ideas, and work together to come up with solutions on how to improve processes.
This is also a prime example of how to increase agent productivity and empower them with the autonomy to get more involved and contribute to the company.
At the end of the day, creating a culture of communication and collaboration will allow your team to work as efficiently and smoothly as possible and deliver an excellent experience to your customers.
Do you have other tips to facilitate collaboration and communication with your customer support team? Get in touch with us and Let us know what you think.
