Want better customer service calls? Start with your team.
In baseball, it’s important to assemble the best team, finding the right players for the right positions. When you’re looking for that winning combination, it’s crucial that each person is in the place where they can do the most good. You can’t put a catcher in the outfield, and ignoring your players’ talents and specializations will lead to confusion and losses. This strategy also applies when you’re building your customer support team.
Customer phone support has two main goals: successfully resolving customer issues, and short hold times. While it’s easier to look at the stats you get for each of those goals in a vacuum, both of them mix with and rely on each other to help define a truly successful calling team.
When you’re looking at successful issue resolution, the complexity of customers’ requests should be taken into account. A quick call about a login or billing issue is not the same as onboarding a new client or processing a full order. But many times, a call is judged more on its outcome than the process that took place between the team member and the customer.
Similarly, hold times are easy to look at by themselves: it’s just a number, and lower sure seems to be better. However, when companies prioritize short hold times too much, customer satisfaction often drops. Someone who’s rushed through a fix might call back again and again until they actually get the help that they need, and employees who feel the pressure to perform on a time crunch won’t be able to truly help them.
So how do you solve both of these problems?
It all happens before a single call takes place, and it happens with your team. Take the time to analyze each of your players: what are their strengths and weaknesses on calls? Are they more business-like or conversational? Which products or services do they know the best? And on what kind of customer issues are they viewed as an expert? This doesn’t mean that each team member should only answer one type of question, but if possible, you should prioritize to whom each call should go.
If you can identify the strengths of your team, you can customize the customer experience to reflect them. You could change the branches of the support line’s phone tree or create unique phone numbers to direct customers for help on specific types of issues. This will bring them to the best support team members to answer each question. The result will be the best service, the fastest issue resolution, and an overall lower hold time, since each customer will be speaking with the best team members for their individual requests.
When you pay attention to the strengths of your team, you’ll create customer support that knocks it out of the park on every call!
