Managing a Customer Service team can be a challenging task, especially in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. With the majority of the industries working from home, remote work seems like the new norm. While a remote workforce is on the rise in Customer Service, it also comes with its own set of problems and questions. Some of the repeatedly asked questions are:
- How to keep everyone accountable?
- How to keep the Support team members motivated and productive?
- How to provide uninterrupted service to consumers?
In this blog, we will discuss some of the tried and tested techniques for bringing some order to the chaos by uniting distributed teams.
Invest in a quality Cloud System
Emails are great but continuous email streams can get messy real quick. That is why successful companies invest in robust helpdesk systems. A centralized location with all customer complaints, queries, and agent’s resolutions can help bring visibility to the customer support processes.
A cloud-based tool, such as HappyFox Helpdesk provides customer support agents with all the necessary information to serve customers well, irrespective of their location. With features like Omnichannel Ticketing, Multi-Language Support – a Helpdesk is a viable solution for customer satisfaction and retention.
Collaborate Collaborate Collaborate!
There is no dearth of collaboration tools in the market right now. Tools such as Google Hangouts, Zoom, Slack, Microsoft Team are dominant players in the team meeting game right now and proving to be very convenient. With the ability to collaborate with internal and external people through instant messaging and calls, video conferencing, sharing files in seconds; working together or even just a fun team building activity, from the comfort of your home has never been easier.
To take it a step further, Slack and Microsoft Teams when integrated with a helpdesk such as HappyFox, provides you with instant ticket notifications. Creating, replying, and updating tickets from within your collaboration tool makes management of incoming traffic much more manageable.
Use the Knowledge Base
Using a single knowledge base software can go a long way to manage external help pages for customers and internal knowledge for your contact center for employees. This promotes self-help for both parties leading to a more smooth transition from the office to the remote.
With HappyFox, you get access to both internal and external knowledge base in one tool, giving you access to articles that can be shared on social media, also accessible on a mobile device. With HappyFox’s multilingual knowledge base, you can create articles in over 14 different languages, taking ‘FAQs’ to new heights.
Track your Team’s Activity
Quality customer service often leads to long-term relationships. That is why it is imperative to understand your consumer base and customer issues. It is no longer enough to just meet their expectations but to exceed them. But with the volume of touchpoints, it can get difficult to see how well your remote employees are doing at customer service. Being able to set strong goals for your customer service agents and assessing key performance indicators (KPIs), such as Average Response Time, Abandoned Calls, etc – proactively helps customer center managers identify opportunities for improvement.
Using a Business Intelligence tool can come handy when data is humongous and time is not enough. Using a tool like HapppyFox Business Intelligence can help you quickly drill down into your data, providing a holistic view of your customer service ecosystem. Setting benchmarks in the tool can help keep your teams motivated and productive too. It can help you identify your top players and also your ‘not so well’ performing agents. A self-service tool like the HappyFox BI tool can give you the power to enable your team in a matter of a few minutes.
Deflect Tickets using Chatbots
With sweeping changes to the nature of the work environment across the world, work from home can be stressful for even experts. It is totally understandable that this new way of working comes with a learning curve. But this does not mean that there have to interruptions in productivity.
Chatbots are powerful tools that when implemented well can save you a lot of time and effort. These bots act like the real-time frontline workers and take care of simpler issues and queries – like order statuses or installation manuals. HappyFox Chatbots are an AI-based bot solution designed to fit your exact business needs. This allows the remote customer support team agents to focus their time and effort on more complex problems, ones that require human intervention through phone calls or emails. Chatbots are your allies across different time zones.
Conclusion
“With a projected worldwide market size of more than $1.3 billion by 2024, chatbots will be a driving force for business communications.”
Intellectyx, 2019
The “work from home” model has proven rather beneficial for businesses – allowing them to cut down on physical location expenses and also providing remote workers with the opportunity to maintain a work-life balance. The leaders must realize that a successful transition to fully remote work can take time but at the end of the day, the digital transformation of your call center is the way to go to provide the ultimate customer experience.
