Improve Your Customer Support Team Performance – 5 Things You Can Change Today

With the customer expectations constantly rising, it’s only a matter of time before you have to take measures to improve the performance of your customer support team. Luckily, there are certain things you can easily change today. Learn how you can take customer support to the next level right now.

There’s no doubt that the modern marketplace is extremely customer-driven. In such an environment, ensuring a seamless customer experience becomes necessary, especially since the expectations are constantly rising. Luckily, there are certain things that you can improve right now to offer better customer support. As a matter of fact, with advanced tech solutions, these improvements are now easier than ever. 

Why is it worth to offer excellent customer service in the first place? Because it affects the level of trust and brand loyalty, among others. No wonder – a positive experience is often what keeps the customers satisfied, and willing to purchase from you again. Actually, customer support has undergone some changes over the years, and taking good care of the customers can now easily give you a competitive edge. Here’s what to improve in order to ensure better customer support. 

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5 things you can change to offer better customer support 

#1 Improve organization

It might not seem like much, but being organized can help your support team immensely – if there are many people involved in it in particular. With plenty of calls being answered on a daily basis, it’s easy to lose track of some details or, even worse, vital pieces of information. In order to prevent that, you should offer your team an effective system of organization and make sure they make good use of it. You can take advantage of advanced tools and available resources – CloudTalk, for example, aims to take the chaos out of your phone support process and lets you focus on growing your business instead. Once you choose the right tool, though, remember to introduce it properly to your team. It should help you increase the performance of your employees, and reduce the stress they might be under. 

#2 Get to know your customers

Apparently, 72% of consumers say that when contacting customer service, they expect the agent to know who they are, what they have purchased, and have insights into their previous engagements. And rightly so, as having all details handy not only reduces the time needed to serve a customer but also makes the agent’s job much easier. Basically, knowledge is power – even though the amount of information passed along the communication channels might be overwhelming at times. Most of the companies already store customer data in their CRM, help desk, ticketing system, and other solutions – the only trouble is to integrate them all. When integrating these tools with a right call center software, however, there’s no need to search for information – everything that regards a specific customer is displayed in one place. Because of that, you’ll know exactly who’s calling you before even picking up the call, and you’ll see all past interactions. 

#3 Enhance your team’s communication skills

Even the most advanced tech solutions won’t replace experienced call center agents, provided that they are excellent communicators. In fact, good communication skills are essential to any customer support team – simply because a polite conversation in which the agent can talk through the issue and offer a reasonable solution is usually what the customer expects (speaking of – here’s how to improve communication with your customers in 3 simple ways). Still, the agents should not only be able to communicate effectively with customers – but also with one another. This way, you can avoid misunderstandings and make sure that important details are passed properly within the team.  

#4 Take care of the greetings and messages

Nowadays, customers seem to expect real-time, personalized support. Call centers are a great channel for providing such a service, specifically if you use powerful software to offer personalized greetings and messages. You can customize the messages on different “occasions” – such as call queues, voicemail, or IVR greetings. Why should you, though? Because customization allows you to adapt to your customers’ needs and thus, improve their experience.

#5 Keep everything consistent

Let’s start with the obvious – in order to serve your customers properly, your support team has to know your product or service extremely well. However, you should also strive for consistency. Agents should be fully capable of solving the issues in a similar (and effective) way, and their actions should be in line with the overall strategy for your business. Essentially, every customer should have a positive experience with your brand, no matter the circumstances.  

As you can see, providing good customer support is not exactly rocket science – it’s mostly about having a well-functioning call center, obtaining more information about your customers, and serving them properly. By addressing those five points, you can easily change your customer support for the better. And it’s definitely worth the effort – especially since companies that excel at the customer experience drive revenues 4% to 8% higher than their competitors. 

What else can you do to improve customer support? 

• Offer support for any channel – be it web, social and mobile,
• Leverage the power of cloud-based solutions, as they can help you meet the needs of your customers without the necessity of an on-premise deployment,
• Enable the conversation with the right person at the right time – you can use a powerful call center software to keep all your communication in one place and connect with specific team members across the organization whenever needed, 
• Make sure that your agents have full insight into your customers’ interactions with your business,
• Speaking of insights, take advantage of the available data to measure and improve communication with your customers – even in real time, 
• Optimize your efforts continuously – the trends in modern customer support change, but if you keep an eye on the recent developments and constantly analyze the performance of your team, you can ensure proper customer support at all times. 

Make sure your modern support team will always pass the test

Despite all the changes in the customer support realm, the rules stay pretty much the same – provided that you treat customer service as a priority. Basically, if your support team is able to handle the issues at hand fast and the agents have enough knowledge and competence to solve those issues in a proper manner, it means that you’re doing a good job. 

At the same time, treating customers with respect and courtesy surely makes a difference, but so does using technology to your (and your customers’) advantage. Actually, powerful tech solutions are already changing the dynamics of customer service and help you provide the best experience possible. And that’s hardly surprising – with so much communication and organization needed, modern call center started to rely on advanced tools to offer excellent customer support. 

The key is to find the right balance between efficiency and “human touch” – and that’s precisely why we recommend using a modern call canter software to keep everything in one place and let your skilled agents take proper care of the customers. Luckily, there are some great solutions you can take advantage of in order to take your customer support to the next level.

Take CloudTalk, as an example. It lets you communicate with your customers, send their details to your CRM, manage their orders from one place and make data-driven decisions based on the insights you have. No matter if you employ several agents or handle phone calls rather rarely, it can fully adapt to your needs and the size of your business, so that you can provide exceptional phone support to your clients at all times.  

Keep in mind that customers no longer base their loyalty on price or product – instead, they stay loyal with companies due to the experience they receive. If you can’t offer them the support they need, they’re more likely to switch to another company. Make sure that doesn’t happen and take a step towards better customer support right now.