Retain Support Agents
Common reasons for this boil down to burnout, the feeling of ineffectiveness and lack of accomplishment. Failure to successfully prevent these will lead in your support staff to be unhappy, dissatisfied with opportunities for personal growth and eventually want to leave the team altogether.
Helping your team to feel accomplished, needed and valued within a great culture will not only boost morale, but also, and most importantly, encourage them to want to work in customer service and progress within the same department.
Prevent BurnOut
There are many reasons why people burn out, especially within a customer facing role. But, these can be prevented by nurturing your support team.
Give responsibility
Make every member of your team responsible for a project that’s something other than just working through a queue of support tickets every day of the week. Allow them the time to actually carry this out so their primary role isn’t affected, but be sure to ask for updates on progress to ensure there’s development on the project. Completion of these projects will help them feel accomplished at the end of the week, rather than burnt out.
Share team performance
It’s incredibly disheartening to work a full week without knowing how you’re performing. Keep track of your team members’ performance and openly communicate this with the team on a regular basis, highlighting outstanding customer service.
Give them clear examples and actionable feedback of why good or bad results occurred. This will help create an excellent team culture, showing them that they are all, individually, essential to the team’s success.
Hold regular 1–1s
Give them the opportunity to speak to you in private, let them vent, relax and share how they’re finding things. Note down anything you need to follow up on and be sure to do so. This will lead them to telling you immediately if something’s wrong, allowing you to help before it’s too late.
One Examples that comes to my head.
Hold monthly team huddles and encourage everyone in the team to share:
- one thing they were proud of
- one thing they really wanted to work on since joining.
Document this and use this for historical data.
Why : Helps pro-actively recognise their own progression, and influences them to set themselves new goals to achieve, this would help them to identify how they could help each other to accomplish targets by using the skills they had each acquired when successfully meeting their own.
