Customer Support

How leadership can help prevent customer support team’s burnout

Learn what you, as a leader, can do to prevent burnout and keep them motivated.

Workplace stress is real, especially for customer support teams. Your support team members are the unsung heroes of your company.

They practice empathy towards your customers. However, being empathetic is not easy. Often customers are rude in their way of complaining and your customer support team is the one facing it. Over time, it becomes hard to practice empathy in such conditions and with little to no appreciation, it results in burnout.

If your support team is lacking motivation, chances are they are already facing burnout.

Here’s what you, as a leader, can do to prevent burnout and keep them motivated.

Set an informal discussion to share the team’s experiences with the customer to enjoy and learn from failures

It can be a round table chit-chat during evening breaks or something as simple as a slack channel where the team can share their experiences with the customers. Some worse, some good and some funny.

Let them get creative and share jokes or memes around their day-to-day struggles.

Hire different resources for different time shifts

Do not overload one or two team members to be always available. As motivated as a person can be, in the end, we are all human and we all get fatigued.

Make sure you hire different resources for different time shifts. There should be a right balance in the working hours of your support teams.

Leverage automation via AI and ML to kill the redundant tasks

Integrate your website with AI Chatbots and Knowledgebase so that customers can help themselves around without the need to talk to a support rep. Identify the redundant questions and either kill the query with a tooltip or product change or simply by showing the process in the knowledgebase.

Provide your support teams with proper tools and training to manage their tasks easily

Help your support teams stay productive. Invest in tools that can help them manage their work and KPIs. For example, provide them with a dashboard or tool where they can easily translate a customer inquiry from a foreign language and can easily reply back in the customer’s language only.

Another example can be, investing in Grammarly, so that your customer support teams do not create blunders due to silly mistakes.

Schedule regular 1:1s with them

This is your chance to get closer to your team members. Make sure they do not hesitate to share their professional as well as personal challenges with you.

Set the right expectations or goals with them.

Show them how their work aligns with the larger vision of the company.

Allow remote work and flexible timing to your support team

If you’re not doing this already, start right away and do it more often. This helps them manage stress and take some time off work and spend time with their family and also manage personal challenges.

Create a culture where the team celebrates customer support executives

Every time a customer support executive provide your customers with a great experience, celebrate the efforts of that person with the team. This will motivate other members of the customer support team to provide better customer service which in turn will benefit your organization in the long run.

Have you implemented any of the above as a leader? How do you, as someone in a leadership position, help your customer support team?