4 Do’s and Don’ts When Providing Remote Customer Support

Following the corona virus outbreak, organizations has adopted remote working. Unlike the past, remote working is a necessity and not a privilege.
remote-customer-support

Although the culture of remote working has been in existence for long, it is a new thing for most companies. Therefore, without an ideal plan, setting up a remote workforce within a short duration for support can be problematic for organizations. Remote customer support is a service that enables computer systems to be assessed, monitored, and repaired, and among other things; from a remote connection and over the internet.

Certainly, the first priority for organizations is supporting their customers. To assist you and your team get more from remote working, this guide has do and don’ts to keep in mind. This is out of our own experience as we remotely manage our support team.

As you support customers remotely DO the following:

1. State a clear procedure for your team

Naturally, any big change like remote work overwhelms teams. Thus, you need to provide the teams with good guidance. To do so, start by building a well-documented procedure for them. Besides that, state clear objectives and KPIs for your team. After that, list an action strategy to assist them remain on track and have better performance.

In any case, your knowledge base is outdated, the appropriate time to update it is now. This ensures the collaboration time does not affect the agent resolution times.

2. Have regular communication with your team

Communication is key in remote working. Indeed, you need to communicate well with your teams to receive the best from them. When working remotely, your team members cannot walk up to their colleagues to discuss about work or get an answer.

business-meeting

For this reason, it is important you ensure that you have the ideal tools for communication in place. For example, you can use G-suite, Microsoft Teams, Flock, or Slack for internal communication. If you want to have video conferencing, you can use Skype or Zoom.

Nonetheless, some cases might need you to not only communicate but also over-communicate. For example, if the system is experiencing downtime or during a planned maintenance. Over-communicating is normal for organizations.

3. Invest in the appropriate tools

Irrespective of the size or distribution of your call center/ support center, you need the appropriate communication and collaboration tools. You want your team to focus on their job, instead of using their energy in trying to make the tools work.

The market has a broad array of free tools that you can use in your work. Furthermore, during these tough times of COVID-19, collaborations tools are helping companies by reducing their prices. For example, Soapbox and Loom. It is advisable you ask your team to list the tools that they may need to enhance their productivity.

Without doubt, these tough times may force you to look for ways to reduce your costs. However, from our experience, you should avoid that when it comes to tools. Remember, tools are essential if you want to streamline the functioning and operations of any company.

4. Educate agents to smoothen the transition

Remote working is probably a complete new thing for most people. This means people will make many mistakes. Thus, educating your support agents is vital in ensuring the change to remote working is smooth.

The best thing to do is make the agents announce their log-ins and log-outs over one channel. Ensure the agents alert their team members when taking a break. As a result, it helps all support channels remain staffed.

In addition, ensure your agents know the benefits of working in silent room to avoid disturbances as they speak to customers or potential clients.

When providing remote customer support do not:

1. Bargain on the quality of service

During this COVID-19 times, we are all experiencing difficulties. Getting overwhelmed now is natural. Even so, that is not a sufficient reason of neglecting customer service.

The communication platform of most companies may hinder their agents from working remotely. Although some companies may allow remote working, some agents have slow internet connection that might hold voice conversations. In such a case, you need to search for other alternative solutions of serving customers well. The best solution is to use an ideal cloud system to ensure the quality of service remains high.

call-lead

2. Take the change fearful

It is obvious that the concept of remote working might be scaring. In fact, it can be problematic at first, more so for companies giving it the first trial.

Nevertheless, it is essential to get into remote working and take it as the new normal. Actually, some of the major brands in the world work either entirely remote or using a hybrid model. Remote working has worked many, and it should work for your company.

Before you get worried about the outcomes, you should be patient and allow your team to settle.

3. Micromanage

Among the worst things a manager can do is micromanaging. Once you hire the right people, you need to trust them with the assigned work. Stop checking their progress each hour.

After all, micromanaging is a bad habit. This might hurt your productivity as well as that of your team. Thus, even when you are concerned about the performance of your team, give them some freedom. Eventually, you will notice that your team is capable of doing the assigned work without supervision.

Instead of checking on them every hour, have a framework and inform them what you expect from them without any uncertainty.

4. Use reactive customer communication

If you want to send a reminder or update to your customers, make sure that you send it early. This is vital for critical updates on low account credits, plan change, or payment reminders. In short, communicate to early enough about anything that might hurt their operations.

During a pandemic like corona, you can easily get overworked. Same as your customers. Giving the enough time to act is important. As a result, this helps in growing their trust and confidence in your brand.

Final Thought

Supporting customers remote might be a challenge during this difficult time. However, you can use this guide for support and sales teams undergoing this change. With time, their productivity will increase, as they will easily adopt the transition.

Make reliable and secure collaboration with partners through Yuwee connect.

If you have any comment, or question about remote working, use the comments section.