How to Manage a Remote Customer Support Team

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In the past few years, businesses have started collaborating with external experts, agencies, and even hiring remote employees more frequently than ever before. Now that the world is forced to adapt to the new pandemic as well, more brands are jumping onto the remote bandwagon to adjust their processes in an attempt to preserve their financial stability. That said, more offices are closing, and more brands are sending their teams home in favor of remote work.

One of the greatest challenges of such a move is helping customer support agents to do their jobs efficiently and effectively, and to be able to communicate with customers without issues. To help you manage your remote customer support team, we’ve complied a list of useful tactics you can employ, and use them to adjust your business more quickly and transition your support department without harming your customer bonds.

Create a go-to communication policy for the crisis

Like many other companies, it’s likely that yours is dealing with an influx of customer complaints because of the coronavirus pandemic and the changing business policies. Although you cannot make everyone happy in such an unfortunate situation, you can definitely do your best to mitigate the consequences. However, you should also reduce the stress your agents will face while dealing with those increasing complaints while stuck at home.

While you’re still adjusting to remote work, your support agents need all the guidance they can get. Before you send them home, or as soon as possible at the very least, create and share a go-to document with clear response suggestions, brand voice and language guidelines, and an overarching systematic approach to resolving issues. When they’re not at the office and they cannot ask you directly, it’s up to you to provide them with detailed guidelines on how to handle customer complaints without stress or frustration.

Rely on advanced tech tools for communication

If your support department used to rely on landline phones and other traditional tools, you need to rethink your remote setup. Thanks to the cutting-edge voice over internet protocol (VoIP) technology, businesses can now use network-based phone systems that can be used remotely without reducing the quality of communication with customers. Tekie provides IT managed services across the United States for such services.

First of all, make sure to educate yourself and check the best VoIP system ratings online to find a provider that has all the necessary features for your business. These comprehensive services often include more than just phone calls. You can also look for packages with video conferencing, sending voicemail to email, and the like to simplify your daily interactions not just with customers, but with other employees, too. With the right, reliable tools for the job, your support agents will have a much easier time handling the increased workload and the remote setting, too.

Empower team chats and video conferences

Monday meetings are easy to move to the online realm with the help of the right reliable tools such as Zoom or Skype. However, if you reserve those meetings for your management only, your support team might feel a little lost and forgotten. This is why you need to make sure that you take the time to connect with your remote customer support team regularly.

Frustrated agents cannot do their jobs properly, so devote enough time to their needs and facilitate transparent conversations to collect their feedback (and actually act on their suggestions). Video calls should be a go-to strategy to engage with your remote support team and help them manage their work from the comfort of their homes.

Don’t halt your training system

The importance of employee training cannot be emphasized enough, but during a crisis, and in remote settings, such an issue can often end up on the back burner for too long. This is not just bad practice for your staff, but it can also lead to customer dissatisfaction, incompatible and inconsistent brand messages across your channels, and chaos in your support ranks. When your employees don’t have the needed skills and knowledge to handle something, they’ll likely make mistakes that can cost you your reputation.

That is why investing in employee training even in remote settings can be pivotal for your brand. That said, you can easily set up weekly conference calls, workshops, and presentations online for your employees.

Use your digital tools to reduce their workload

The pandemic has brought on so many changes in how companies can set up their processes, how they can process orders and shipments, and how they can regulate their return policy. All in all, these changes can be very hard on your business as well as the customer. Knowing what to say at any given time is a great start, but you should also be prepared for an onslaught of requests and queries that sound pretty much the same.

In such instances, you can actually help your agents by adding a dedicated FAQs page covering these common topics. Also, you can leverage chatbots to take over some of the workload that requires less human interference and can be done with simple information sharing. An effective ticketing system lets you filter the agent-worthy queries from the repetitive questions a chatbot can resolve with ease.

Wrapping up

In these trying times, it’s expected to experience setbacks and issues in brand-customer interactions, but you should never allow that strain to harm your relationships for the long haul. In fact, you should use these strategies to improve and strengthen your communication approaches, your mindset, and your customer support agents’ skills. These guidelines can help you do just that during this crisis and beyond, so that you can grow your reputation as a business that supports its employees as well as its customers.

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