Let’s introduce Peter: he manages a team of customer support agents by day and is planning a backpacking trip for his 28th birthday by night. The company he works for recently raised a series A funding round (#winning) and Peter’s life changed overnight. The success brought with it new challenges ― a growing number of users (and their demands). For Peter’s team of agents, this meant more tickets to solve in the same amount of work hours, onboarding new team members and dealing with remote teams in other countries. While doing things faster. And keeping the quality high. And the CSAT stable. Did we mention doing things faster? Well, this is how Peter looked like in 3 months, in case you’re wondering:
If you work in customer support, you’ve probably heard of similar stories. Or maybe you are even walking in Peter’s shoes as you read this.
Improving performance in a customer support team doesn’t come in a time of crisis. It is a result of great work (Kudos!) and a successful growing business.
Here are some ideas to help you stay great when your business is scaling:
1. Information gives you power
Start by finding challenges you can solve. All that data at your fingertips can help you monitor your team’s daily performance to stay on track. Make sure you understand this data and use it regularly. We at Kaizo believe in meaningful data, that teams can really use to make decisions. With Kaizo, we take massive amounts of raw data and turn it into a meaningful and contextualized but simple story. Customer support managers and agents can spend time on making their customers happy, expanding the team, or making helpful decisions rather than collecting and interpreting big data sets.
2. Provide feedback to your team
Once you have all your data you can provide feedback to your team and help them improve their skills through coaching.
It’s been proven that regular constructive feedback keeps team members more engaged at work, removes feelings of uncertainty, and helps them stay more focused on career and company goals.
Including positive feedback as well as areas of improvement boosts their feeling of accomplishment and general motivation and engagement. This Gallup survey found that 67% of team members whose managers focused on their strengths were fully engaged at work, as compared to only 31% of people whose managers focused on their weaknesses.
3. Keep an eye on quality
In a fast-growing business, maintaining a high-level quality of service is crucial. Make sure that the quality you provide is still perfect, or at least ALMOST perfect, by establishing a simple ticket rating process. We believe ticket review should not only be done by managers, but also by the agents: peer review in the team and self-reflection on their own tickets. It builds a culture of transparency and trust, helping you improve or maintain your (almost perfect) output quality.
4. Use easy-to-integrate tools
You are already spread thin across customer requests, service quality, team feedback, data-based decisions — not to mention the new hiring and onboarding needs (and celebrating your series A). Whichever tool you decide to use, let it be easy to integrate and quick to adopt. Your best case scenario is a plug-in or integration that doesn’t require you to leave your workflow or tool (winkwink).
5. Make it fun!
We’ve heard that working in customer support can be challenging (understatement of the decade). So why don’t you bring some fun to your work? Turn it into a game? Gamification is a great way to engage your team and increase their motivation. Set up clear rules from the start, a scoring and reward system and some prizes (#swag)!
It goes without saying, that a happier team gets better results. Help your agents be more satisfied with their job and they will reward you by being more productive.
If you’re using Zendesk, check out Kaizo to start implementing these best practices today! Drop us an email at hello@kaizo.com!
