5 Simple Ways To Help Your Customer Service Rockstars Continue to Rock

By Christina Porter, Director of Customer Success at Gladly

In the high-stakes world of customer conversations, excellent service is delivered by Rockstar agents. Whether you run customer service in house, hire seasonally, outsource, or all of the above, your consumers know the difference between a great agent and everyone else. Consumers who experience excellent service from will be more loyal to your brand, tweet great things about you, and buy your products again and again.

One core principle we think about here at Gladly, is to start with people. Put people first and at the heart of everything you do and others will feel it.

Here are five simple ways to keep your customer service rockstars rocking:

1. Begin With The Basics
While you likely have done most of these things, it never hurts to make sure you have your bases covered.

• Flexibility is becoming more important in everything from work schedules, to office/desk location, to shift-swapping.
• Meet Health and Wellness needs. The traditional definition of what healthy means has expanded: Kitten, puppy, and even gerbil visits to the call center are great for health. Makes sense given the known therapeutic benefits of cuddling with adorable fur balls — allergies being the exception. Holding mindfulness workshops is also beneficial. The simple act of building friendships can be “more important to a company’s bottom line than pay and strongly correlates to productivity, safety, customer loyalty and profitability” according to Nate Brown. Ensuring agents take their breaks is important because eye strain can take a toll on productivity. Bathroom breaks? Yes please.
• Safety first. Providing a physically safe environment is basic but important to ensuring that your team can focus on their job and not worry about their security. Secure badge entry to the building and allowing people to work overnight shifts from home and not the office are just a few starting points.
• Change it up. Building in some themed days can help spice up the daily routine. Healthy “Wipey-Wednesdays” and indulgent “Donut-Wednesdays” can be combined to clean house (literally) while simultaneously filling tummies with yummies.

2. Share Your Vision & Mission Actively

• Agents need to know your Company Charter. More specifically, how is #CustServ a key part of the business? Rockstars want to connect to the company vision and mission to fully represent the values you stand for as they build relationships. Help them by finding ways to thread your company vision into everything they see, hear, and do.
• If you are trying to write your own vision — check out this great article.

3. Create The Culture
“Culture naturally flows from your company vision and mission” says Sean Hawkins. It is typically organic as opposed to pre-defined or dictated and often needs to be shown by example.

• Especially true for management and executives, culture is defined far more by the behavior of it’s employees, rather than from words written on a page.
• In fact, the single most important success criteria of culture is that a company’s leadership team must fully hire to and live by its values 24 x 7 x 365.

4. Develop and Challenge Your Team
Rockstars want to take risks and learn more. They want management to set challenges and support them as they go for it. Laughing at work is the best — so if they occasionally fail after taking said risk, try responding with humor.

• Ditch the scripts. Debi Mongan believes that if your agents “are trained well, you don’t need to stick to word 4 word scripting.” Opt for outlines instead. Along the same vein, implement snippets, not canned responses.
• As for training: Call centers can go even further being flexible by offering training via different “methods, platforms and toolkits” for agents to choose from as suggested by Leslie O’Flahavan.
• And, during low volume periods, schedule off-time where peer to peer learning can be delivered for continuous improvement. Mentorship, job shadowing, rotations, and coaching with seasoned vets encourages learning at scale.

5. Recognize People and the Work
No surprise here. Most everyone wants to know their work is meaningful to the business. Being specific and timely with praise helps build a culture of support and success.

• Open praise and peer shout-outs are no-cost ways to celebrate your stellar Rockstar culture.
• Yodeling Pickle Awards (this is a thing), Walls Of Smileage (what if these were smiling customer selfies wearing your company colors?), and a Lego based feedback system (Nate Brown) are just a few of the creative ways that Rockstars are recognized for their work excellence.

Honorable Mention: Measure
Call center KPI’s, metrics, and surveys also help drive your best performers to go beyond customer expectations. But, keep CSAT survey data and non-essential call center statistics limited to your numbers team. Let your Rockstars share inspirational stories of how they have helped real customers instead.

How does your company put people first? Let me know your thoughts.

Shout out to last week’s #ICMIChat forum for inspiration and great snippets for this story, especially: Gregg Gregory, Debi Mongan, Jeremy Watkin, Sanjeev NC, Patrick Russell, Scott Ontiveroz, Kaye Chapman, Nate Brown, Jeremy Hyde, Sean B Hawkins, Jeff Toister, Jenny Dempsey, LeslieO, Evan Watson — and anyone who I may have missed for your forum contributions.

And, if you want to learn more about Gladly and our rockstar customer service platform, reach out to us today.