Customer support can be the difference between a struggling and a highly successful enterprise. In addition, customers increasingly judge brands by the level of customer support they offer. As a result, businesses need to focus on customer support almost as much as sales in today’s competitive market.
But how do you ensure that your customer support team consistently exceeds expectations? The best way to do so is to implement professional customer service coaching tips that encourage, uplift, and educate customer-support team members.
We, at Helplama, have compiled six invaluable and time-tested customer service coaching methods that highly successful enterprises follow. Learn about them in this 3-minute-read!
6 Ways to Improve Customer Service Coaching of your Enterprise
The six highly effective methods of customer service coaching are as follows:
1. Set goals
Rather than relying on platitudes, it helps set specific goals for your customer support team to reach. For example, rather than saying, “You need to improve customer satisfaction,” you could say, “Customer satisfaction rate is down by 20% since last month, you need to bring it back up.”
When you give specific goals, employees are clear on what they need to achieve. When setting goals, you should also provide employees with the tools to achieve such goals. This will significantly maximize the chances of success of the team.
2. Coach in private
Always try to avoid calling employees out in public. This creates resentment and bitterness in the minds of the executives. Instead, you should hold regular one-on-one (over several days, if need be) customer service coaching sessions for the executives to air their grievances constructively.
Having the session in private ensures that your customer support employees do not feel embarrassed in front of their teammates. In addition, this will help the employee focus on the substance of the criticism rather than get caught up in team dynamics.
Another advantage of this coaching method is that you can provide each member the individual attention they deserve. This will make them feel valued and a part of the organization.
3. Don’t neglect the positives
When conducting coaching sessions, you should always stress the positives of the executive. You should celebrate their wins as much as you admonish their failures. Ignoring the positives could make the executive feel that the management ignores their good qualities and performance.
Executives are humans, and they need validation from their superiors rather than just criticism. Applauding the positives of the executives will help the executive believe that the complaint is fair and that they possess the ability to make the changes needed to receive even more positive feedback in the future.
4. Focus on behavior
Rather than berate them for who they are, you should only talk about how they can improve in actionable terms. For example, rather than saying that the executive is “lazy,” you should say that the executive should make an effort to “address 15% more calls next week.”
Focusing on the solution to their behavioral issues will provide an actionable goal to the employee, and they will not feel like they’ve been personally attacked.
You should try to explain your position in terms of numbers to make it as impersonal as possible. This helps executives distance themselves from the criticism and not feel hurt while achieving the goals.
5. Encourage self-assessment
It’s essential to let employees perform self-assessments. For example, when starting a coaching session, you should ask the customer support executives how they feel about their performance. Encouraging self-assessment will allow them to introspect, and employees are more likely to correct their own mistakes in the future.
Rather than spoon-feed your executives and be a coach help-desk, self-assessment is an excellent way for organizations to “automate” the feedback process. Executives have the capacity for self-criticism, and more often than not, they know what they are doing wrong and how they’re falling short.
Your job is to provide them with the tools necessary to do better in the future.
6. Identify issues
Collect data on the performance of all the customer support executives. This data should help you identify any issues with the performance of each executive. For example, are customers happy with the service they receive and is the executive solving most problems within a single call?
Collecting and analyzing large amounts of data can be a daunting task but can be worth it. Through the data, you can objectively measure the performance of each member of the customer support team. In addition, identifying and relaying the gaps in their operation is the best fodder for their future performance improvements.
Building a world-class customer support team takes investment, resources, and time. However, the results can be a game-changer for a brand. Customers provide repeat business to brands that take care of them, and providing excellent customer support is a way for brands to show that they care. Customer service coaching is the way to get there. We hope you have found these customer service methods helpful.
If you’re looking to outsource customer support, we at Helplama can help. We offer ready-to-deploy and customizable customer support as a service to businesses. Our expert support team can handle your calls, emails, and chats in your way, seamlessly working as an extension of your business.
Here are a few ways in which outsourcing your customer service to a pre-trained team may be better for your business. Do book a call with us if you want to know more about our services.
