Businesses require a variety of marketing and advertising strategies to create brand awareness and appeal to the right customers. Customer service, for instance, is a crucial element in keeping the patrons engaged and happy with the brand. It makes the customers feel appreciated, valued, and well-treated, creating an excellent brand-customer relationship.
Besides improving your brand image, good customer service also gives your business the competitive advantage you need to succeed. And the best part? You get to increase your organization’s profit and total revenue. But with tons of businesses switching to remote working, customer service has become more challenging than ever. Read on to find out more about managing a remote customer service team and how to improve your tactics.
1. Upgrade remote equipment
Among the biggest barriers to the productivity of a remote team is their equipment. If you’re serious about improving your efficiency and you have the budget to spare, the first gear to invest in is your team’s computers. You want something portable and powerful enough for handling numerous tasks.
Luckily for you, computer system providers can build customized mini PCs to suit your business or industry needs. For one, a rugged mini PC offers reliable support for demanding workloads and processes. Most of these mini-computers are known for their long-term reliability and tough capability, making them ideal for more demanding industrial solutions.
Other essential gears that you can provide your team are a second monitor, webcam, headphones, and extra portable hard drives.
2. Invest in the right internal tools
Besides the hardware, your team needs the right software or internal tools to provide better customer support. In general, it can impact your business workflow, organization, communication, and management. Your remote customer support team needs tools for communication (Slack or Google Hangouts), collaborative documentation (Microsoft Office Online or Google Suite), task management (Asana or Trello), and other cloud-based software. Just make sure not to use too many tools as it can be counter-productive.
Your support team is more likely to miss or mix up messages if they’re using too many communication or collaborative tools. As much as possible, messages from multiple channels should be centralized into one inbox. Aside from a shared inbox, other essential features that your customer support helpdesk should have are an intuitive interface, two-factor authentication, scalability, third-party integrations, and metrics and reporting.
3. Prevent micromanaging
Switching to a remote work setup often urges business leaders and managers to micromanage their teams. The problem is, micromanagement never helps with team performance or productivity. In fact, it can negatively impact your staff’s morale and job performance.
Give your remote customer support team the trust and space they need to get things done. Create plans and schedules that won’t force your team to work overtime. Give them a chance to implement and devise their own action plans. Instead of controlling every single action that your employees do, improve communication and be more considerate. Giving your remote team trust and displaying genuine interest in their opinions and decisions can make them feel more confident towards their work.
4. Create a fun and positive culture
If you want to keep your remote employees happy and satisfied, you need to start building a positive team culture. The lack of physical interaction can promote negative behaviors and attitudes that ruin the team spirit. The worst is, this can lead to a bad culture of unconstructive criticism and gossiping.
Tolerating such a culture can hurt your remote team’s collaboration or productivity. The simplest way to create a sense of fun is through daily rituals. Setting up games or fun interactive meetings can help set the tone and mood for the day.
Recognizing the achievements and milestones of your team is another effective way to maintain a fun and positive remote team culture. Celebrate work anniversaries, employees’ birthdays, or job promotions. Show your staff that you remember important events and honor their wins.
You can also meet up at your local food joints for face-to-face meetups at least once a week. Virtual meetings are good enough, but physical meetings can promote a stronger team bond and positive company culture. These simple strategies can make your team’s remote work more interesting and satisfying.
Remote customer service typically comes with increased support requests or workload, more frustrated customers, physical and mental distractions, and trouble maintaining a work-life balance. With these strategies, you can help your team tackle these problems and work efficiently for your brand improvement. Have a talk with your remote customer service team to know what specific concerns you need to solve.
