3 easy tips for building a successful customer support department

Okomo
Okomo Blog
Published in
3 min readSep 17, 2019

Every company, from a small familiar one to a big corporation, knows that the customer is the most important pillar that sustains the whole business. Without them companies lose their purpose and wont’s be able to survive. Thus, customers are the ones that in the end pay the salaries and take companies further.

The single most important thing to remember about any enterprise is that there are no results inside its walls. The result of a business is a satisfied customer.

Peter Drucker

Therefore, it is important to take care of them, to nurture a positive relation between your customer’s and your company, making them have a great experience and interaction with you customer support team.

This will happen if your support team is well built and structured, if your team has the right tools, the right mindset and knows the company’s politics and philosophy to deal with customer’s and prospects. Through this article we will help you define what is crucial to have a successful customer support team, what you need to provide and the means to do it. Just keep reading!

Which is the role of your customer support department?

The first thing to think when building a customer support department is its role. Each company is different, either for what it sells or provides, or for its goals. Having well defined objectives for your customer support department will help outline the responsibilities of your team in a solid way. To help you determine the role of your customer support department and its team’s responsibilities ask yourself questions that will help you determine the guidelines of its construction: “Will the team deal with soft sales?”; “Which is the core function of the department?”; “Are technical problems our responsibility?”. Make a list of the questions that will help you outline the structure of the department. Then, gather your colleagues for a brainstorm. Take note of their answers and input, this way you will have different points of view to help you make the better decision.

Choose the right team

After choosing the functions and roles that are going to be performed inside the customer’s support department, it is essential to choose the right professional who will assure that the goals of the department will be fulfilled. Either you fill the positions internally or you are going to hire, make sure that the professionals you choose have the right skills that are coincident with the guidelines that were defined to the department. Abilities like clear communication, assertiveness, patient and empathy are must haves in any professional working on customer’s support, the other ones are related with the goals of the department: specific technical knowledge or commercial awareness, whatever the manager makes they have to go accordingly with the previous determined strategy.

Invest in the right software solutions.

As a leader, your duty is to find solutions to help your team’s best performance, making their job easier in a smooth workflow. A miscalculated tool or software choice can become an obstacle to the team, making obstructions to their daily tasks and consequentially result in the team’s demotivation. Search for easy solutions and tools for your customer support department to use to communicate and share information. Okomo is a simple and user friendly 4-in-1 solution, that will not only allow customers to contact in a simple and uncomplicated way, but also help your team’s workflow and productivity.

A well-structured support team and department are crucial to create a solid service culture for your company. Solving problems and nurturing an empathic relationship between your customer support department and with customers themselves can be challenging, but when everything is well planed and designed it is simple to improve the workflow and productivity of the department. Learn how Okomo can make your support and service department succeed and how it can help your team in a simple and easy way.

--

--

Okomo
Okomo Blog

Okomo is the most seamless & personal way of interacting with online customers and prospects. Find out more: okomo.com/