Tips for taking the pressure off your customer service team

Tips for taking the pressure off your customer service team An unexpected turn of events can cause upheaval in a business, and when the norm rapidly becomes a thing of the past, your customer service team are often the first to feel the strain.

Things can be about as far from ‘business as usual’ as it’s possible to get, but whatever challenges you face there are steps that you can take to divert some traffic away from your customer service team, giving them the time and resource needed to deliver the level of support that your customers expect.

In this guide, we’ll give you an idea of some of the things you can do to alleviate pressure; from the point that disruption hits to some longer term measures that you can take to make sure that your customer service team is ready for whatever’s around the corner.

Real people. Real reviews. Real insight.

PART ONE

Be quick to react The best approach to dealing with disruption is to plan for it in advance; have an idea of some of the things that could go wrong and a clear course of action of what you would do under those circumstances. If we’re honest however, these things are easily said in hindsight, and realistically, the biggest challenges we face are the ones we never saw coming.

Here are some steps you can take when the unexpected hits.

1. Assess the situation

Here are some things to consider:

This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to enter headless chicken territory when faced with a big and unexpected challenge.

→ How does the situation stand to impact the way you do business?

In order to help your support team prepare to deal with the problems ahead, it’s important that you take the time to look at the bigger picture and determine how the situation stands to affect your business, how it will disrupt the customer experience that you offer and where you need to act first in order to minimise the fallout.

→ Which parts of your customer experience are likely to be affected?

Customer Support Guide

→ Which areas will create the most disruption?

→ What are the most common questions that arise and what is your short-term response to those questions? (Remember to update when you get more information) → Where do you need to act first?

PART ONE

2. Brief your team A well-informed team is one that can help deal with issues quickly and efficiently. It’s important to make your official responses clear, especially in the short-term when you may not have all the answers.

A false promise here or inaccurate response there can lead to lengthy, time-consuming issues that can be tough to resolve further down the line, so the more organised you can be early on, the better. If possible, draft a crib sheet that they can work off and if you’re struggling for time, get other teams such as marketing to help you pull something together.

→ TOP TIP! If the wider business has a thorough awareness of the issues you’re facing, it will help to keep future messaging consistent, prevent any unwanted questions being thrown your way and potentially mean there’s extra resource on hand if you need it!

3. Talk to your customers It’s not what goes wrong, it’s how you deal with it that counts, and one of the quickest ways to reduce the number of immediate inbound support queries is to tell your customers what’s going on quickly, and in as many relevant places as possible.

By immediately managing your customers’ expectations, they will be less likely to pick up the phone when they get wind of the fact that there could be a problem.

Don’t forget: Put an alert on your homepage and any relevant web pages. Don’t worry if you don’t have quick access to a developer - there are affordable tools out there that allow you to create simple pop-ups Post across all relevant social media channels.

Whether it’s a pinned tweet or a Facebook post, head to where you know your customers hang out, and give them a simple explanation of what’s going on, and what they can expect as a result

Customer Support Guide

Send an email out to existing customers with outstanding orders, bookings or who are already engaged in business with you. This is a service communication not a marketing communication so isn’t affected by GDPR Create an FAQ page to address the most obvious questions that will arise and add to it as you learn more Do an audit of your marketing activity. Is there anything going out that could be inappropriate or irrelevant?

Do you need to adjust any feedback campaigns?

How else can you communicate with your customers?

Remember to update email signatures and utilise online help centres, automatic replies and live chat if you have it available

From here you’ll need to make regular updates and potentially add in extra communication as the situation unfolds. It might sound like a lot of work, but these measures can significantly cut down the strain on you support team.

PART ONE

4. Make your team a priority Employees who feel their voice is heard are 4.6 times more likely to feel empowered to perform their best work (Forbes)

Make sure they have everything they need to do their job, whether it’s answers, training, up to date software or functional equipment

This is a powerful stat and it’s easy to take those on the front line for granted once you get into the swing of things. It’s always important to keep one eye on the wellbeing of your team, but even more so when the pressure is on.

Use your other departments for extra support, for example putting in place customer-facing communications, email templates or even manning additional phones

Don’t forget: Ask how your team are feeling. Using Feefo Surveys to collect private and anonymous feedback from your staff is a good way of encouraging them to speak up, and you could get some invaluable insight into how well your processes are working, or not!

Customer Support Guide

Be clear that your team and their efforts are valued.

You could create a reward system or just make regular acts of kindness to boost morale. Take the time to congratulate staff that have been praised through your customer feedback. Every positive experience is another customer who may use your business again in the future

PART TWO

Lighten the load Now you’ve got some time to catch your breath, you can put things in place that will help longer term and be of benefit day-to-day, as well as helping you deal with future issues.

1. Take your FAQs out of the equation The last thing you need when things get tough is handling general enquiries alongside more complex ones.

Some people prefer to talk to a person, so you’ll never eradicate it completely, but by having the right information, in the right place, at the right time, you can drastically reduce the number of basic queries coming into your team.

As with your crisis response, you need to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

2. Identify your FAQs There are two effective ways to do this: →

Ask your support team and look at tickets created, or conversations logged. They speak to people on a daily basis and will be able to confidently identify the answers that they give time and again.

Customer Support Guide

→

Analyse your customer feedback. You’re probably getting a steady flow of responses from the very people you’re trying to help, and those common themes will be present if you look closely. Sounds time consuming, we know, but there are tools available such as Feefo’s Performance Profiling that use AI tech to automatically sift through your review content and pull out reoccurring themes to save you time and energy.

PART TWO

3. Make sure the answers to these questions are clearly displayed in the right places throughout your customer journey.

Don’t forget: Provide as much help as you can where it’s needed most. Constant enquiries or returns about sizing?

Make sure a size guide is easy to access, especially on those products where it’s likely to be an issue.

Frequent questions about returns and delivery?

Make sure the answers are easily accessible on your checkout page. Concerns about quality? Make sure customer reviews are visible to provide reassurance Create short how-to videos. They’re a great way to help a customer navigate and understand your product, without losing the personal element of a customer service representative Allow customers to post video and photo reviews so that others can see the product in context

Customer Support Guide

Make sure review content is easy to access. The chances are your customer query has already been answered by another customer. Tools like Feefo’s Smart Themes separate your review content into common themes under tabs at the top of the page, making it easy for customers to find information on products they’re looking for

Is your website easy to navigate? You’ll be amazed how complicated user journeys can cause a headache for your support team. You can use quick feedback solutions such as Feefo Surveys to ask users about their online experience while they’re still on your site, and from there you can address any issues

Make sure you collect service feedback after every interaction that customers are having with your support team – from initial enquiries to updates and complaints. The customer feedback you receive will help you understand exactly what your team are dealing with, any new issues that you’re facing, and where you can take action to alleviate unnecessary pressure.

PART THREE

Learning from the past, planning for the future It’s important that we learn from the unexpected and make plans for the future.

The more we experience, however unpleasant, the more we can prepare, and ultimately, that will be the biggest saver of stress and time in the long run.

1. Create some plans of action Once again, it’s time to take a step back and look at your end-to-end process; identify some potential scenarios that could disrupt your customer experience, whether small, medium or large, and create some basic contingency plans based on experience that allow you to be as reactive as possible.

Don’t forget: Create a hierarchy for escalating within the company - Perhaps you have experts or seniors that can deal with certain issues before they get out of hand Get a step-by-step communications plan in place for each scenario and make sure you can easily execute it. Create time savers such as ready-togo email templates, automatic responses and easily implemented web call outs so you can cut down your reaction time

Customer Support Guide

Solidify your social media plan and create some guidelines - This includes working out which channels you’d communicate on, and how you’re going to manage the communication within your teams Identify your spokespeople – A CEO or a company executive, for example Consider proactive damage control - Is there some training that could help stop issues from arising?

This is where you’ll apply most of your hindsight from previous experiences!

Collect customer feedback - Figuring out your customers’ issues and frustrations will help you create a set of actionable steps

PART THREE

2. Get ahead of the curve by investing in the right tools Customers expect speedy service when dealing with a business, (40% of customers want customer service reps to take care of their needs faster) and there’s no reason why their expectations are any lower in times of panic.

Giving your staff the tools to get the job done quicker, and the time for them to get to grips with it, will provide them the best possible chance of weathering any future storms.

You may want to consider: Help desk software and a ‘ticketing’ system

Reporting tools

These are the keys to keeping everything in one place, so you can track and learn from your conversation histories. There are loads of tools to choose from, all with different capabilities.

Improving your processes means collecting a lot of data, and a lot of data can be overwhelming.

Invest in a reporting tool which brings everything into a single dashboard that can be used by your whole team to spot issues and make impactful changes.

Shared project management This will help your team stay on track – it’s basically a shared to-do list with your customer service team where they can record everything from what bugs need fixing to which knowledge base articles need to be written.

Customer experience surveys Integrating surveys into your ticket flows offers a great way for your customers to feel heard, as well as an effective way of collecting plenty of insight which can help your customer service team run more smoothly.

Analysing your feedback Your customer feedback holds more insight than you might think, and by monitoring it more closely you can identify areas that may cause issues in the future and address them ahead of time. Tools such as Feefo’s Performance Profiling use AI technology to automatically analyse your review content and identify common themes both positive and negative. It then identifies which need to be addressed urgently and what you need to monitor as well as showing you what you should promote!

If you’d like to talk about how Feefo’s tools can help take the pressure off your customer service team and improve your customer experience, get in touch! sales@feefo.com | 020 3871 8457 | www.feefo.com

Real people. Real reviews. Real insight.