It’s hard to find a universal consensus on just about anything nowadays. But an impressive 96% of customers say they’ll leave a business for poor customer service, according to Forbes. This underscores the critical role of customer success team management in building a strong support system for your business..
We created this guide to help you do that. It offers tips for finding, managing, and paying for your ideal customer support team. So, without further delay, let’s get into it.
Finding Your Customer Service Team
The first step in building a support team that will win you repeat business is choosing the right people for it. Here are a few tips.
Look For Traits in Addition to Experience
When you interview people to join your team, it’s only natural to focus on their previous experience in the customer service industry. It can be really helpful to hire people who won’t need much training and can offer a strong level of support from day one.
But traits are also important to consider. They determine the kind of people who are joining your team and can have a huge impact on culture, fit, and, ultimately, customer service performance.
For example, you want people who deal well with criticism from customers, go above and beyond to help, and have the kind of attitude that you want to represent your business. Someone could have all of the customer service experience in the world but lack these traits, and that would likely make them a poor fit for your company.
The bottom line is that you should be thinking about the type of people you want on your customer support team – not just whether they have enough experience now.
Advertise Openings on Several Platforms
It’s also important to advertise job openings across more than one platform. Doing this will ensure you get as many applicants for your open position as possible, so you have the best chance of finding your ideal hire.
Online job boards are great for this. You can post nearly identical help-wanted ads across all of them in a few clicks. That way, the right candidates will find you no matter where they’re looking for jobs.
Consider Outsourcing Some of Your Needs
Finally, it’s also worth considering whether outsourcing is a fit for your company. It costs a lot to hire a full-time team of customer service agents, train them, and make sure they have all of the hardware and software they need to do their jobs.
Outsourcing can potentially save you a lot of money. You just choose a provider and they’ll handle all of this for you. You won’t have to worry about building a team from scratch, investing in a ton of new equipment, or spending your valuable time working on training.
The net result of outsourcing is that you get your ideal customer support team put in place faster with lower costs and less work for you. You’ll just need to make sure you choose your outsourcing partner carefully, which the team at The Cattalyst can help you with.
Best Practices in Customer Success Team Management
For a customer success team to excel and secure repeat business, effective management practices are crucial. Here, we delve into the essentials of customer success team management. In this section, we’ll cover some tips you can follow to improve your support staff in sustainable ways.
Customer Success Team Management – Track the Right Metrics
The first question you should ask yourself is what customer service success means for your business. This will tell you which metrics you should be measuring to evaluate your team’s growth over time.
If you don’t measure customer support performance, you can’t objectively say how your team is doing. It also becomes more challenging to see whether you’re making progress. That’s why we recommend starting by determining the metrics that matter to you.
In all likelihood, you’ll probably want to track more than one metric to evaluate different types of performance. For example, some common customer service metrics include:
- Net promoter score (NPS)
- First contact resolution rate
- Customer churn rate
- Overall resolution rate
- Repeat business rate
- First response time
Metrics like these all tell a different story. For example, first response time lets you know how fast customers get in touch with an agent when they have a problem. Net promoter score, on the other hand, tells you the percentage of customers who advocate for your business after receiving support.
Using these metrics together gives you the complete picture of your organization’s customer support strengths and weaknesses. It’s the foundational information you need to make decisions that help your company thrive.
Support Your Team With Tools
An integral aspect of customer success team management is ensuring your agents are equipped with the necessary tools and resources to excel in their roles. You don’t want a lack of tooling to be the thing that holds you back from reaching your goals.
This means hardware and software. For example, on the hardware side of things, your team may need phones with certain features, good headsets, fast computers, and other products. On the software side of things, your workers may need good auto-routing software, access to your company’s CRM, and other technologies.
The key here is figuring out what your workers need to perform the way you want them to perform. That may mean zooming in on your average customer support journey and asking for feedback from your team.
Put Leaders In Place to Help
It’s also worth remembering that you’re not alone in this process. You can enlist the help of other leaders in your company to create the kind of customer service team you can be proud of.
Placing strong leaders at the helm is a cornerstone of successful customer success team management, guiding daily operations and fostering a culture of feedback and continuous improvement. You may also want to look for people who can help you train your workers on an ongoing basis to take some of the load off of your shoulders in that area as well.
Offer and Accept Feedback
Another factor to consider is that you probably aren’t on the ground dealing with customer support requests on a daily basis. Your team is. That makes it worth considering the feedback these employees can offer.
For example, a worker may clue you into an operational problem you would have never experienced on your own. They can also tell you their impression of common customer complaints and actions that customers tend to appreciate.
At the end of the day, you make more informed decisions when you have access to more information. That’s why it’s important to encourage feedback, whether you, ultimately, decide to act on it or not.
Offer Ongoing Training
It’s unrealistic to expect the customer service team you hire today to be perfect tomorrow. Plus, the kinds of issues and challenges these workers face can evolve over time as you sell new products, offer support across more channels, and make other changes to your business.
Those are two of the key reasons why it’s a good idea to offer ongoing training for your customer service team. Doing so will help them adapt and thrive no matter what the future brings, and should help to keep them more engaged with your business.
Paying For An All-Star Customer Service Team
Okay – we’ve covered how to find employees for your customer service team and how to manage the team in a way that gets you the results you want. The next step is figuring out how you’re going to pay for all of this.
Since your biggest cost will be employee salaries, you can look into strategies for reducing the number of people you need on your team. You have a few options here.
One is to build tools that let customers answer more of their questions on their own. This can include a knowledge base that customers can visit on your website to get answers and guides to common issues.
You can also think more about outsourcing some or all of your customer support staff. Outsourcing with trusted partners can give you the support team you want at a lower price since outsourcing providers tend to operate in areas with lower costs of living.
Just know that strategies like these exist if you’re having a tough time figuring out the budget for your ideal customer support team. There are also companies that can help you figure out what your best path forward looks like.
Move Forward With The Cattalyst
At The Cattalyst, we have decades of customer support industry experience and deep relationships with some of the top outsourcing firms across the world. Whether you need help coming up with a better customer support strategy or you’re ready to outsource now, we can help you take the next step toward your goals.
Embrace the path to excellence in customer success team management by contacting us today. Get in touch with us today for a free consultation Let’s explore how we can elevate your team’s performance and impact.
