Hiring Training And Managing A Customer Service Agent: Fill & Download for Free

Today, businesses of all sizes are making excellent customer service a focal point of their business, and rightly so. A study shows that US businesses lose billions of dollar annually due to unsatisfactory customer service. On the other hand, great customer service has been shown to generate customer loyalty and improve sales. Here are some of the tricks of the trade companies are using to ensure that they are providing the best service to their customers.Hire people that fitsThis one is basic but nevertheless lays the foundation for the quality of the customer service a business can provide. Look for customer service agents appropriate to your business’ industry, scale, field, and style of service. If your business’ customer service is primarily done via phone, then hire customer service agents with excellent oral communication skills. Keep in mind that your customer service is only as good as the customer service team that you have.Train your teamNot only can your customer service agents enhance their competencies and gain new skills, they can also have a deeper appreciation of your business’ core values and service commitments. These, coupled with an understanding of their authority, empower agents to work independently and effectively give your agents capability to understand your customers better, satisfy their concerns, and build a long and lasting relationship with them on behalf of your company.Set up the right technological infrastructureUsing the right technology and applications can help your business optimize its customer service. For instance, many successful companies today use customer relationship management (CRM) software that is capable of storing and analyzing customer data your agents can tap real-time. In short, CRM software enables your agents to better understand your customers, address their concerns swiftly, and approach them in a more personalized, tailored manner.Another technology many successful companies use is Computer Telephony Integration or CTI. CTI is a software that integrates a CRM to a phone system, providing customer service agents with optimal ways to study detailed information, including analytics, about their customers. Our experts at Tenfold has written a free whitepaper, The Benefits of Computer Telephony Integration, which you can read up to learn more about how a CTI can help improve your business' customer service.

At LiveChat we built our customer service using our own tool – a premium customer support software, that includes functionalities of help desk and live chat, with advanced ticketing and analytic tools. Basing on our experience in providing the best customer service possible, I can suggest several fields you can focus your attention on to enhance the performance of your customer service team:Verify the efficiency of you team’s work. Check the performance of each of your agents, if only possible. Try to learn what holds them back from being even better. There is a chance though, some of your team members are not suitable to do the job you want them to do. Being a support agent requires a certain set of skills and characteristics, not many people have. Thus, you may eventually be forced to rearrange your customer service team and hire new people. In such case, you might find our Support Hiring Guide helpful.Train your customer service team members! Investing in your employees simply cannot be underestimated. Not only it will enhance the quality of customer service the team provides, but I will give you a higher chance of keeping quality talent in your organization. You probably know all too well how hard and expensive finding quality employees on competitive labor market can be.Implement more efficient tool for your customer service team to work on. As the way your customer service team operates was not enclosed with the question, I can only suggest broad solutions based on current customer service trends:Use self-service channels (like live chats, social media and online communities) to offer your customers an instant, comprehensive support. Nowadays, customers expect direct contact and immediate support. That is why social media and live chats are becoming more and more important. Customer service has actually become another field of stiff competition for consumers’ preferences recently. Thus, no self-respecting company can afford its customers to wait days for their queries to be responded. That is why role of emails in customer support decreased considerably.Avoid implementation of automations like chatbots and interactive voice response systems. Unless it’s really inevitable, at least. There was a time these technologies brought attention for their alleged cost competitiveness. They need to be used rather cautiously though, as the quality of service they provide is doubtful (to put it mildly) and can affect your company’s reputation.Use phone line and email-based customer support as a backup, for solving more complicated cases only. At LiveChat we managed to diminish the role of phone-line support to the minimum. We simply found it much more engaging our agents while being less efficient at the same time. Via chatting our agents are able to carry up to 10 times more queries at the same time, with no quality of service being affected negatively whatsoever.To learn more about how our customer service was built in LiveChat, you can check out this post.Also, feel free to give our software a try by subscribing for a free 30-day trial.

Let me blow the lid off the outsourcing business here for a second. 9 out of 10 outsourcing companies only care about doing the work they’re contracted to do, as quickly and as cheaply as possible. How do I know this? Almost all these companies pay per hour or per ticket answered. So, all the incentives in their workplace are around speed, not quality. Also, because they sign you up to a year-long contract, and don’t invest in training, they know they don’t have to keep quality high to keep you as a customer.So, with that in mind, if you care about your customers and your customer’s lifetime value, I’d stay away from outsourcing your support with most companies.Now, here comes the disclaimer. I work for a company called Influx that does things completely differently. We pay our agents regular wages, regardless of how many tickets they answer. We offer two to four weeks of free training up front with all clients, and we invest in regular QA audits and continuous training. We give clients direct access to all agents and managers on their account via a Slack bridge. We also don’t have any commitments. Clients can increase or decrease their volume with us each month as they want. The result? Consistent or BETTER customer satisfaction scores across all our clients AND we can answer 80% of tickets in 30 minutes because of the global nature of our business.Back to why companies continue to hire customer support outsourcing companies even though the quality is crap. For many companies in the world, they don’t care about their customers. Why is this? Because statistically, for many companies, they know their customers aren’t going to come back anyways, or they know customers are locked in a contract, so they have no incentive to offer excellent customer service. This is why these outsourcing companies flourish. The biggest of which is valued at $4 Billion last time I checked, and its stock has grown 4x over the last four years.What’s exciting though is many startups are increasingly using outstanding customer service as a differentiator. So even though the dark reality is that many entrenched companies don’t care about their customers, the smart upstarts are charging the game and offering all of us - the customer - a better experience in the end.Hope this helps sheds some light on the situation.