3 tricks to take your customer service team to the next level of awesome

Most small businesses simply don’t have the resources to have a dedicated support team. This shouldn’t mean you couldn’t take your small team from nothing, to offering world-class support.

 

 

Desk gives you the ability to use a range of features that can help you be proactive in getting in touch with your customers. Speed helps in impressing your customers, but above all else people love to have a “how’s it going email”. This helps you make sure your customers actually got the resolve they were looking for, which in turn can help with attrition. A simple follow up goes a long way in showing that you truly care for your customer and the outcome of their interaction with your support team. Using a simple Time Rule that can be made in Admin > Cases > Rules > Time Rules you can set a simple reminder that all cases without a reply from the customer should be set to Open and a Label appended that lets your team know a follow up should be sent. You can even take it a step further and create a separate filter for these cases, so that your agents don’t get overwhelmed by them popping back into the main workflow.

 

While doing this will pay off, in terms of customer satisfaction, be sure not to go too far and follow up too many times. This could be perceived as pushy and intrusive. Remember that you want to be helpful and courteous, not pushy and annoying. You will have to set up some boundaries for this internally, but generally we suggest a maximum of two follow up emails would be ample.

 

 

Giving a support team the power make their own decisions without someone stifling them will help open up your teams power to in turn help customers.

 

The idea here is that the more autonomy you have, the more flexible you’ll be when helping customers. We often experience support that feels restrictive and scripted. This is because decision-making has been taken away from the support team, which ultimately leaves the customer worse off.

 

Extra Autonomy can be something simple like allowing your support team to go the extra mile when they need to, or just allowing them to provide the customer with what they need, without having to go all the way up the chain of command.

 

 

By using features such as Flex Agents you are opening up the ability for your support team to be have a much larger reach within your team. We have long aimed for “whole company support” and by giving everyone from your product team to the CEO access to speak directly with your customers you are able to decrease response times and give the illusion that your support team is much larger. The beauty of having part time agents is that you can keep support costs to a minimum but offer service that your customers will love.