Customer support agents form the backbone of the customer service that you provide to your customers, so, it’s imperative that you prepare them in the most appropriate manner. Here are the best tips to make your support agents more productive and yield the best results through your customer service:
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Working at a customer service center is quite a daunting task. You have to deal with a variety of customers and situations may not always be in your favor. The only solution is to handle every situation gracefully. There are certain things that a customer service representative needs to know before everything else. Let’s see what they are:
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1. Provide rewards and internal promotions:
Implementing peer recognition and rewards program is yet another powerful method of curbing agent attrition. It involves ensuring that each agent receives feedback that is directly tied to their performance and that they receive rewards when they meet key milestones. This enhances an agent’s motivation and helps build engagement with their work. On the other hand, filling open positions within call centers by promoting internal candidates can also help motivate them to work better. This can actually be used as an incentive for agents to work harder at their job and be sure to promote top performers.
2. Strive to tackle your advisors’ grievances:
Exit interviews are the ones conducted to gather information on why an advisor is leaving and to learn how a customer support center can stop attrition. Instead of these exit interviews, conducting internal interviews, after an employee’s first few weeks of joining, can help tackle their grievances and know their pain points before it is too late. Thereafter, strategies can be employed to exempt these grievances. These interviews convince the employees that the company cares and supports for each of them. It further boosts their morale and job satisfaction and leads to a lowered agent attrition rate.
3. Ease down the shift swapping process:
The rigidness of the schedule in a customer support center can result in staff missing important external events and lower job satisfaction. As a matter of fact, customer support centers are hesitant to allow shift swaps due to the negative impact it may have on workplace cohesion, contact between supervisors and advisors and service quality. However, working towards lowering the rigidness of the schedule and providing an easy swapping of shifts can greatly enhance employee morale. This can eventually result in a reduced agent attrition.
Average Handle Time (AHT) refers to a call center metric that calculates the average duration of contact between a customer and an agent. This includes both hold time and talk time.
The formula for calculating AHT is:
Average Handling Time = (Total talk time + Total hold time + Total wrap-up time) /Number of calls handled
A low AHT indicates a good performance, while a high AHT signifies that the call handling technique needs improvement. Here are some effective tips that help reduce the average handle time to a large extent:
1. Set up regular training sessions for customer support agents:
Customer support agents should have a thorough understanding of the company’s products and services so that they are able to contribute towards conversions and also resolve queries instantly. Agents should be trained at frequent intervals in order to help them reduce AHT. This training should include educating them about the usage of the contact center software and tools such as CRM and chat to ensure that the call is answered in the lowest time possible leaving the customer satisfied. Moreover the agents should also know whom to contact in case of any doubt and from where to extract any relevant information.
2. Record all inbound and outbound calls:
Recording every inbound and outbound call makes it easier to assess the productivity of an agent and other issues that might affect his or her output. This can also be helpful in case managers are not able to review calls in real time such that they can always refer to the recorded version and get the desired insights. Moreover these calls can be leveraged to train the customer support agents and improve their performance. Making them listen to some of the good examples of calls wherein the customer’s problem was resolved and the handling time was less can help them learn valuable tactics for reducing AHT.
3. Tailor agents’ workflow and processes:
Tailoring agents’ workflow and productivity can help optimize their productivity. Managers should work hard to spot inefficiencies and work out strategies to eliminate them thereafter. One of the best method of doing this is automating all their manual tasks so as to minimize their busy time and hence reduce AHT.
1. Arrange weekly meetings:
Arrange regular meetings for knowledge sharing. The basic idea is to discuss and understand the overall experience of your support agents with your clients. Try to understand what obstacles they face while they carry out a live chat with the website visitors, what kind of tricky questions customers may ask and how to resolve their queries. Agents can uncover important techniques of live chat support in this knowledge sharing process. This can aid in improving their overall performance.
2. Club videos with training sessions:
As a matter of fact, humans are visual learners. They tend to learn things more effectively if taught through graphics and videos. You don’t need to spend extra bucks on video tutorials. There are thousands of useful videos available on YouTube which can be utilized for this purpose. This is one of the best customer service training ideas that gives tremendous results.
3. Help them know their actual roles:
Yet another concept of your training should be to help your chat agents understand the actual role they need to play in building customer relationships. Educate them about the lifetime value of a customer as well as the consequences of a bad customer interaction. Let them know how the quality of customer support impacts on sales conversion, customer retention, and brand image. Once the support agents have this basic understanding, they will be more efficient in providing top-notch service.
4. Train them practically:
Practicing something practically helps you learn it better. Team up all of your agents and assign them different chat scenarios. Encourage them to try their best to deal with those given situations. Give them enough time to understand the whole support process, your products/services and most importantly, how to manage the live chat software. These practical sessions are very important to cultivate a capable workforce.
1. Review your live chat agents’ performance:
Make it a point to review your live chat agents. Their training should include mock chats, secret evaluation and much more. Apart from that, distribute customer success manuals amongst your agents where all important tips and techniques of online customer support have been mentioned in written format. This will help them to go through the important tips whenever they have any doubts.
2. Inculcate tech support along with live chat:
In order to create a power-packed support environment make use of live chat features such as canned messages and links, the ability to push files and screen sharing and co-browsing. Also, train your agents to go slow and ask short, simple questions to get to the root of problems and to make solving them easier and faster. More important than training your agents to provide tech support is ensuring they have the resources they need readily available. Ensure your tech support agents are provided with canned links for knowledge based articles, how-to tutorials, videos and other resources they need to help customers resolve issues or problems instantly. Make sure the agents know how to find the resources quickly and then send them to the respective customers whenever they need them.
3. Help them to be platform experts:
LIve chat agents need to have thorough knowledge of the platform they are working on and the tools they are dealing in. When chat agents are familiar with the tools they are utilizing while assisting customers, they perform tasks with a higher level of confidence. Task your agents providing both a customer and organization friendly experience when chatting. It’s important to be fully trained on all customer and agent facing platform features. For this purpose, customers might be presented with a pre-chat survey while initiating a chat request, which gives the ability to choose the reason for wanting to communicate.
Today’s era is an era of digitization. These days the purchasing decision of any customer is not only based on the quality of your offerings but also on the quality of your customer service and support. Customer support refers to the process of building a healthy relationship with your customers by convincing them that you value them and you are there whenever they need you.Thus, the quality of your support service can improve or destroy your brand image and ultimately your business revenue. So, you need to train your live chat agents with the right customer service skill. Here, we have mentioned some of the customer service training ideas!
1. Good product knowledge:
Educate your support agents about the products and services you provide. Good product knowledge not only improves the support speed but also helps to build a much stronger, long- termed relationship with the customers. If your chat support agents lack the knowledge of products and services you are dealing in, they will tell customers to hold for a while for finding the solution or transfer the chats to a more knowledgeable person, which becomes time-consuming. Therefore having proper knowledge shows confidence and builds trust amongst customers.
2. Good writing skills:
Live chat provides instant assistance to anyone visiting your site. Customers utilize the live chat option as it is the fastest way to interact with companies in case they have any queries. A key component of a live chat interaction is the agent’s ability to exercise good writing skills. Utilize the auto spelling and grammar check feature of your live chat platform to ensure efficacious agent communications. Tell them to keep sentences short and to the point. Agents must be able to write as if they were talking on the phone in order to keep the conversation flowing by mixing free form and canned messages. Interject the customer’s name while chatting to personalize the conversation and take care of punctuations.
3. Refrain from taking things personally:
There are instances when the customers are not in a good mood and they interact in an unexpected manner. Teach your support agents not to take those things personally. Complaints are gifts from the customers. They contain customer insights and are a great way to know what exactly are their opinions about your offerings and support quality. Tell them not to lie to the customer. If they don’t have the answer just admit it. Ask your live chat agents to spend some more time with the website visitors and dig personal info like customer’s hobbies, liking and disliking and so on. In this way, the conversation will be friendlier and the person on the other side will feel comfortable and relaxed.
Customer support is termed as a series of customer services offered to assist customers in making cost effective and correct use of a product. It includes assistance right from the initial stage of planning and installation, training, troubleshooting, maintenance, upgrading up to the disposal of a product.
Continue reading “All you need to know about customer support”
Today the consumer expectation of customer service has reached to heights. The default standard for most of the companies of providing phone support and email support is still prevailing, but if you want to differentiate your business and fascinate your customer by giving them an incredible experience you have to think for something extra. That is give your customer on demand support. Continue reading “Enjoy multitasking with live chat”
The easiest, most affordable, and most used service on the web is live chat. What does live chat mean to your customers? As a business owner, you need to make the most of it, that is to convert live chat conversations into measurable sales. Continue reading “What is live chat for your customers?”
You may not find it exotic, but you really do not have any excuse to not have a live chat as a customer service application for providing quality customer service. Live chat will link customer to a live, a real time-chat session with a customer sales agent. Now if you are a small business and having some success and keeping up the trend then till now you must have acknowledged the customer service is one of the watch words for the millennium year in on line sales. Continue reading “Lives Chat Gives You The “Multitasking” Option”
Live chat is the tool which gives you the freedom to chat and engage with your customers and thus increase your conversions on your website. You can also view who is currently browsing at your site and offer immediate customer support in real time. Continue reading “Grow Your Business And Engage Your customers With live Chat”
Live chat is all about real time communication between two users via computer. Once a chat has been started, any of the user can type the text with the help of a keyboard and the entered text shall appear on the other’s monitor. In this way the customer can satiate his queries with the help of live chat agent.
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Today the digital landscape has given the customers the liberty to be more influential than ever. If you want to ramp up your profits, you need to put your customers on the priority. Paying attention towards your prospective clients shall make your business succeed in the future.
Continue reading “Live Chat Helps You Understand Your Business”
The main attractive feature of live chat which has captivated the customers attention is its convenience. It is so simple for the users to get all the assistance right at the website without heading towards the phone, email or social media for support. Continue reading “Why should you have live chat for your company?”
On line presence of business has totally changed the marketing and selling strategies. Business are now required to fully support their on line customers, enhance their experience and provide them with quality on line support.
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Customer service will always be a game changer for every business, no matter what scale or size. So, it’s imperative that every business follows the latest customer service trends so as to keep up with the ever-rising customer expectations.
We made you familiar with the top customer service trends that’ll be big in 2018! Here are some more.
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It’s a no-brainer that every business around the globe needs to take good care of its customers in today’s customer-centric world! So, it’s imperative that they have well-trained, highly efficient customer service team.
But what if your company doesn’t have enough resources to accept new hires?
Quite a problem, right?
Continue reading “How to outsource the best customer service contact center”
A knowledge base on your website is a boon for your support agents and customers alike.
You ask us how?
Well, it’s no brainer that the customer service reps have to deal with a lot of queries throughout the day. Also, of all the queries that they have to face, most are simple and repetitive. The time wasted in helping all the customers with similar (and simple) issues can effectively be used to address more critical issues. That’s what a knowledge source can help with.
This implies, having an effective knowledge base is quite inevitable! Here’s how you can create an effective one.
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An omnichannel customer service is the best way to provide the customers with a seamless shopping experience, no matter wherever he/she is shopping from. This type of customer support includes channels such as FAQ web pages, mobile applications, social media and more. The basic idea is to let the customers avail assistance through their preferred channel of communication. Omnichannel customer service not only enhances the quality of customer support and provide you happy and loyal customers. There’s a lot more, that it can do for your business. Read on to know:
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