Customer support teams play a vital role in the success of a business. Lower wait times can have a huge impact on customer satisfaction, which is why you need to take steps to ensure your teams are as productive as possible.
Want to know how to do that? Here are 5 ways to give your customer support teams a productivity boost:
1. Optimize Processes
Making changes to the operations and processes of your support teams can help them to be more efficient - thereby improving productivity. This can be accomplished by identifying issues, inefficiencies, and areas that need improvement.
Monitoring and time tracking software such as Controlio can help on that front. By tracking employee work hours and activities, you can spot delays, workflow bottlenecks, and other issues that need to be fixed for your business processes to run more smoothly.
2. Automate Tasks
Nowadays there are various SaaS tools that can automate many customer support tasks - especially those that are time-consuming and repetitive. Automation can help simplify or even eliminate certain tasks, and free up time that employees can spend on more important tasks instead.
3. Enhance Training
Making improvements to training can help develop the skills your customer support teams need to be more productive. Typically you’ll want employees to go through onboarding training, and then maybe look into different types of mentoring so they can shadow productive agents and learn the ropes.
Monitoring tools like Controlio can be used to keep tabs on employees and identify areas where further training may be required. It can track how long employees spend on various tasks, and their utilization of tools and software to determine whether their skill levels need improvement.
4. Recognize Success
If you want your team to be motivated and engaged, you should make it a point to recognize their successes. Highlight employees who are productive and perform well by giving them a shout out or acknowledging their achievements in some other way.
Additionally you may want to take it a step further and reward them to incentivize productivity and make other employees follow suit.
5. Allow Flexible Work Options
Letting your employees work remotely and choose their own hours can significantly improve productivity. However it can be difficult to manage, which is where monitoring tools like Controlio come into play as they’ll let you track attendance as well as work hours, and ensure your employees are focused on their tasks.
If you do opt to allow flexible work options, be sure to plan it out carefully and clearly outline what is expected of employees.
Although it isn’t easy to improve the productivity of customer support teams - the steps listed above should put you on the right path. As you’ve probably noticed it isn’t about ‘forcing’ employees to work harder - but instead, supporting them and optimizing processes so they can get more done.
Ideally you should start by implementing one or two initiatives and track them to see how effective they are before moving forward and tweaking them or implementing other initiatives instead