The 5 Golden Rules to Motivate Customer Service Teams

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Customer-focused organization with massive customer loyalty realize that it’s their customer service team members that matter most in delivering the type of customer experience that keeps customer coming back.

And because the customer service expert can make such a difference, the most successful organization go to great lengths to ensure that the right atmosphere created in the workplace and that management creates the right type of environment to motivate good customer service and keep team members excited and engaged so that positive experiences remain consistent throughout the service delivery.

There’s no denying the importance of customer service.

You can learn from them by making sure that these 5 golden rules are part of your winning customer service management strategy and part of your service experience vision for the future. It’s not enough to just know what is good customer service, you have to practice good customer service, and manage customer service effectively to get the benefit from delivering exceptional service.

5 Golden rules to motivate customer service teams

By sticking to these easy to follow steps, you’ll give your customer service team members the treatment they want and need to stay motivated in the quest for great customer service.

1. Communicate with customer service team members

One of the fundamental tools that you have at your disposal in motivating customer service teams is to improve communication between front line customer service staff and management behind the scenes. It’s nature to see customer service as an entry level, low-skilled position, but the impact of service on your business is undeniable. Open the communication channels and really listen to what you customer service team members have to say about the state of service in your company.

The more comfortable your customer service team members feel communicating with management, the greater insight management will get to make the right decision for the customer experience in the future.

2. Arm your customer service staff with resources

It’s easy to destroy any motivation your customer service team has by just keeping them from being able to do their job. Going back to view of customer service today. Because it’s seen as low-wage, low-skilled work, customer service teams too often lack the resources and equipment to do their job right. Bad equipment will hamper even the most skilled and motivated customer service agent you can find.

Better equipment can translate to better service, if your team members are motivated. Poor performing equipment leads to lower quality and often delays the service your customers receive. And let’s be honest, do your customer appreciate low quality service and long wait times?

So good computers, phones, and work places shouldn’t just be reserved for sales, marketing, or developers. Your customer service team also needs to best tools in order to deliver impact to the customer.

3. Take good care of your team members

Armed with the proper tools to do the job right, your customer service team is now ready to take customer service to the next level. Make sure that you don’t ignore them. Take care of them, their skills, their abilities, their talents and deliver effective customer service trainings to sharpen their skills for maximum impact.

A proper customer service training is a great resource at your disposal to motivate your customer support staff. Trainings not only help develop skills, but can often be used as simply a morale boosting team activity. If you’ve been over the basics already, take some time during your next training to pump up your customer service agents. They’ll leave the training inspired to take service to a whole new level.

4. Encourage positive performance from your team

Every second that you spend directly with one of your customer service team members is valuable. Most customer service people get ignored. Management too often dismisses opportunities to develop their people and think that they can just plug in just any person into their position. Even if you could, you still face costs associated with hiring and training new customer service employees so in the end, it’s better to keep an employee than to have to find another, and hope that they can do better.

Take the time to encourage your people in their work. Make sure that they hear from you when they’re doing a good job. If there’s one thing that all service professionals wish for more is feedback. Tell them how they’re doing. Give them more than just a report on their numbers. Metrics are important, but how is the quality of the service? That’s the type of feedback that is valued the most.

5. Manage your customer service team’s workload properly

Finally, even with all four motivation rules in place, you can quickly send your employees running if you don’t properly balance the workload they have to handle each day. No matter how talented your team members are, if you demand too much from them, it’s only a matter a time before they burn out. Burn out in the call center is real, and it’s dangerous. Call center turn over often gets attributed to many different reasons, but most of the reasons really can be attributed to burned out call center agents.

Be considerate of your people and their desire to deliver exceptional service. Break, downtime, activities, and the occasional celebration will make sure that they stay engaged, feel cared for, and are positively encouraged to continue delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Learn from the experience of others

You don’t have to wait until you’re feeling the pain of managing a large customer service call center to learn from the experience of others. Looks at what Comcast customer service does, what to customers appreciate? What are their frustrations? How about AT&T customer service, are they getting it right? Look at what others are doing in customer service and keep the good while making sure you don’t fall into the same traps they suffer through and struggle with when it comes to their customer relationships.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Flavio Martins
Flavio Martins is the VP of Operations and Customer Support at DigiCert, Inc., a leading provider of enterprise authentication services and high-assurance SSL certificates trusted by thousands of government, education, and Fortune 500 organizations. Flavio is an award-winning customer service blogger, customer service fanatic, and on a mission to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage win customer loyalty. Blog: Win the Customer!

2 COMMENTS

  1. I am in Canada, one of the worse cases of bad customer service is Rogers Communications.

    I am guessing 50% of their calls are fixing issues that previous agents messed up.

    I have a friend who worked for one of their outsourcers, Rogers breaks amost every rule in the customer service book, overworked call centre employee, poor communications, lack of coordination between call centre and retail operations, poor customer service tools, poor website that drives customers into their call centre, poor procedures, I could go on for hours.

    Maybe some day, someone in telecom will see customer service as a differentiation, some have tried, however, very few can actually follow through.

    In our case in Canada, only 3 National wireless companies and huge profits to prop up their failing land-line businesses. Its a shame.

    This friend of mine saw 40 out the 60 in her training class last less than 5 months, she never had any meaningful discussion with her manager, had 3 managers in 5 months, resources were poorly designed (designed to upsell vs assist in problem resolution), team had poor attendance due to burn out and being yelled at by customers.

    Maybe Rogers and their outsourcing suppliers need some heavy duty consulting. They are an embarrassment as a company.

  2. Thanks for the great article.

    Some other ways to motivate your team will be:

    1. Maintain a balance between personal and professional life
    2. Create the proper team spirit
    3. Develop a healthy competition
    4. Create the perfect product to offer
    5. Make them understand how important they are
    6. Share achievements with the team

    To know more on this topic, you can check out my blog: https://www.revechat.com/blog/10-effective-ways-motivate-customer-support-team/

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