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The twenty-ninth episode of Support Heroes by Kaizo featured Brianne Adams, Melissa Hughes and Bob Miley- customer support representatives from Fetch Package.
In this episode, these three frontline support heroes explore how Fetch Package (Fetch) has created a supportive and productive customer service culture. Here are 4 unique tips from Fetch that you can use to build an equally effective customer service culture for your team.
1. Encourage knowledge sharing amongst all support staff
“People have to be allowed to ask things or else they’re not going to be able to put [information] both to practice and memory.” – Bob Miley, Customer Support Associate at Fetch Package
- This starts with solid onboarding. At Fetch, the team does 1 on 1 onboarding with new recruits to ensure that agents start off on the right foot. Having a person always available to a new agent enables them to ask any questions in a comfortable space.
- Another effective strategy to make onboarding more effective and enjoyable for new agents is putting new hires into small groups. Keeping the onboarding groups small is very important for building personal and professional connections. These connections make agents feel comfortable and more open to sharing knowledge with one another. At Fetch, Slack channels are opened for each new cohort to further encourage knowledge sharing and co-learning. This is yet another comfortable space for agents to ask mentors questions.
- Answering an employee’s question when they are unsure of something also ensures that tickets get prompt and positive results. If questions don’t get asked, mistakes are more likely to be made and customer satisfaction will suffer.
“There was never a situation where I felt like there was a silly question to have asked. Everyone gave their input in a very respectful way” – Melissa Hughes, Customer Support Associate at Fetch Package
- How do you encourage people to ask questions and for assistance? Make sure that there’s no judgment in asking. It doesn’t matter if the answer is obvious. It doesn’t matter if it was in the meeting yesterday. A question is simply a request for immediately unavailable information. More than anything, it’s an opportunity to help your colleague and make their day easier.
2. If employees ask for assistance, make sure they get an answer
- First and foremost, if a person expects their question will be answered and will be answered quickly, that person is far more likely to ask for help.
“With being remote, everybody is very aware of the necessity for a response time to be quick [to internal questions on Slack] ” – Melissa Hughes, Customer Support Associate at Fetch Package
- At Fetch Package, the support team is committed to answering each other’s questions in a given Slack channel. Team leads and other agents always jump in right away to help one another. Having a fast response time to internal questions also means having a faster response time to customer queries as a department.
- Having questions answered is even more important for new recruits. So on every shift, new recruits at Fetch Package have designated senior agents to answer their questions. This is highly encouraging for new employees, making their onboarding experience easier and less stressful.
- Being able to trust and rely on one another is crucial in building a strong customer service culture. These practices prevent mistakes, accelerate improvement and ensure that support staff doesn’t feel under pressure to know everything all the time. Increasing the longevity of employees and the performance of the department overall.
“I want to work here forever” – Brianne Adams, Resident Support Lead at Fetch Package
3. Build an effective customer service knowledge base
- To improve the efficiency of your internal knowledge sharing, it’s important to have answers to key questions available digitally. An easily accessible knowledge base ensures the smooth and speedy transfer of knowledge and increases correctness of solutions.
- For actionable tips to help you build an effective, up-to-date knowledge base, check out Episode 17 of Support Heroes: “Knowledge is Power”.
4. Integrate the team’s ideas into company strategy & culture
- Good ideas can come from people in any position. However, for junior staff, it can be intimidating to speak up and offer their perspective. As such, it’s important to encourage everyone to share their ideas and encourage senior staff to include junior staff in the decision-making process.
“I definitely feel confident in what I’m saying in support because I know once I give feedback [to the team], that it’ll actually be taken seriously” – Melissa Hughes, Customer Support Associate at Fetch Package
- For an employee, suggesting a change and seeing that change implemented is very gratifying and motivating. On a department level, having this occur regularly creates a culture of critically reviewing the department’s practices and constantly improving.
- Rui Chaves– Director of Customer Experience at Deel formally of Facebook and Uber gave a good example of why pulling insights from junior staff is useful and effective…
“You need to spend the time with the agents, team leads and operations managers because they will tell you how bad your tools are. They will tell you if your processes make no sense.” – Rui Chaves- Director of Customer Experience at Deel