/ Get the best from your customer service staff: 7 tips
Alexander Wijninga
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4 min
Do you have a customer service team? Great! Customer service staff are in high demand. That emerged from research by recruitment agency Randstad into the ‘hottest jobs of 2017’. Bringing these staff in is apparently no problem for you. But how do you keep them? And how do you get the most out of your customer service staff? In this article we give you seven tips for this.
Okay, there is a lot of competition for customer service staff. But does that mean you should simply take on all and sundry? No, do not do this. We foresee that you will then quickly end up in a pool of staff who see their work as a temporary job or as a way to earn some nice money. Take on staff who get their energy from holding challenging conversations. They also keep enjoying their work in the longer term. And if you motivate them in other areas too, by means of the following six tips, then there is a good chance they will keep working for you with pleasure for years.
We believe that these intrinsically motivated staff make the difference. Instead of a customer service that helps the customer towards a solution, you create a customer service that actually hears the customer. No, not hears out... but really listens to their problem or question and continuously responds to their emotion. Because when the customer gets emotional, you cannot help them straight away. You first have to give them the confidence that you understand them and feel for them; only then can you move on to offering a solution. Empathy is therefore a very important quality in a good customer service agent. Select your staff carefully for it.
Steering on performance; virtually every customer service department does it. That is logical too, because you want your customers to be helped properly. Even so, we advise you to look further than your customer service staff's personal performance and points for improvement alone. Our advice: set a team goal instead of an individual goal. That way you make the team responsible for the performance. You will see that your staff start helping and motivating each other to achieve this goal. Certainly if you put something nice against it as well.
A little extra is of course always nice! A voucher, a cake, a bunch of flowers or a bottle of wine. If you do your best to deliver good work a reward is always nice. It is even nicer if you can share that reward with the whole customer service team. So do not (only) reward individual performance, but reward the team performance. Then you celebrate the successes together.
Be original and think up some fun theme days for your staff. That is appreciated by many staff. Think for example of an annual dressing-up day, slipper or pyjama day. Just like the customer service department of MLS, a facility management company from Halifax, Great Britain.
To perform optimally as a customer service agent you need not only the right motivation, but also a nice workplace. Good acoustics are of great importance in this. It is not pleasant if you hear your colleagues talking around you continuously and can therefore no longer understand the customer on the other end of the phone. Many customer service departments therefore work with cubicles. ‘Boxes’ in which you can shut yourself off a bit and concentrate better. But those cubicles are not very cosy.
Our tip is therefore: give your customer service staff a budget to decorate their own cubicle nicely. A cool mouse mat, a nice poster, streamers, photos or a plant already works wonders. At Watermelon we give all our new staff a goodie bag as a gift. This fun package is always received with great enthusiasm!
Do you have intrinsically motivated and empathetic staff? Do you organise fun, surprising things for them? Have you ensured a nice workplace? Do you give them a little something now and then and focus on the team performance? Then only one thing remains. Making the content of the work more enjoyable. There too you can still do a lot for your customer service staff.
Those common repetitive questions, which as a customer service agent you have to answer again every hour, do make you a bit tired. However motivated you are... Staying enthusiastic is hard when you continuously have to go through the same routine. Help your staff with this! How? By automating repetitive questions and answers by means of a chatbot. Then your staff can focus on what they are really good at: answering challenging questions, dealing with difficult customers and bringing every conversation to a good conclusion.
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