Building a customer support team is a critical part of any business. A well-performing support team can increase repeat business, increase customer satisfaction, and improve your company’s bottom line.
To get your team on track, you need to hire the right people, invest in training, and establish a culture of excellence. This guide will teach you how to build a customer support team that’s both efficient and effective.
1. Hire the Right People
Hiring the right people for the right job can make a big difference to the success of your customer support team. It also allows you to focus on what’s most important – serving your customers.
A good first step is to clearly define your needs. This will help you determine what skills you’re looking for and can give you a good barometer when you’re interviewing candidates.
Next, identify the behavioral traits you want to see in a candidate. These are the innate drives that don’t change over time, and you need to be able to find people with them who can thrive in your customer service environment.
For example, you might ask applicants to do some role-playing in an interview to get a feel for how they handle certain scenarios and situations that are more common than others. This will allow you to gauge their empathy and emotional intelligence, as well as how they respond when they’re under stress.
2. Invest in Training
Investing in training is a crucial part of building your customer support team. It can have a direct impact on your team’s performance, which in turn can boost revenue and customer retention.
Your training needs may differ depending on the type of business you run and what your customers expect from support. But the overall goal is the same: to ensure that your team delivers a high standard of service that outranks competitors.
The training process can include a variety of learning opportunities such as instructor-led workshops, virtual classrooms, and webinars. It can also involve getting your employees to use the product or service they support to test their knowledge and skills.
3. Establish a Culture of Excellence
Having a strong customer service culture is crucial to the success of your business. Consumers are increasingly value-oriented, and they want to receive excellent customer service every time they interact with your brand.
The best way to establish a culture of excellence is to hire people who embody your values and are willing to live by them. This is not just about hiring new staff – it is also about ensuring that your existing team understands how they fit into the overall vision for the company and what their roles are.
This can be a challenge in some industries, but it’s absolutely possible to create an environment where people feel welcomed and empowered. It requires a bit of work and commitment, but it’s well worth it.
4. Measure Success
A successful customer support team is critical to customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. If customers aren’t happy with the service they receive, they will leave your business and shrink your profits.
To help ensure your customer support agents are providing excellent service, you should regularly measure their performance and satisfaction. This is a great way to detect any issues with your team and keep recruiting, training, onboarding, and other costs at bay.
The first contact resolution rate is a metric that identifies the percent of total tickets where you fully resolve an inquiry within a single response. Ideally, this number should be low so that you don’t have customers waiting too long to get a response from your support team.
Average response time (ART) is another metric that can be used to measure the speed of your support team’s responses to customers. This metric is important for customer satisfaction because it helps to set expectations about what to expect from your company and how quickly you can respond to their queries.
