5 Essential Needs for Customer Support Teams

Customer service representatives can have a variety of responsibilities:

• CSRs are the first line of support for customers,
• CSRs must provide a positive, helpful experience,
• CSRs must be in-tune, if not experts, for the product and/or company,
• CSRs must be masters of efficiency, quality, and thoroughness.

Aside from an amazing staff with an innate sense of compassionate and the willingness to help others, here are 5 other essential tools and tips necessary to support your Customer Service reps, and provide a great customer-experience:

1.  Customer Support Platform

These days, it takes more than an answering machine and an email address to properly engage with customers. Tools like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Desk.com, and Parature are essential for building customer profiles and inquiries, providing templates for repeat inquiries, developing an auditing system for success measures, and tracking content on social platforms. Additionally, they also provide great support in social media platforms as well.

2.  Updated FAQ Pages

Building thorough, thoughtful FAQ pages will also help decrease the incoming ticket queue, and lower your customer service costs.  Do not assume that building an FAQ page or a knowledge base is a one-time ordeal.  You should be pruning, improving, and updating your FAQ pages frequently!  Consider adding video “how to” responses, or visual walk-throughs.

3.  Response Expectations

Approaching each customer inquiry with an “ad hoc” mentality is not the best route. Beyond establishing an SLA (service level agreement), you need to develop a desirable, supportive experience.  Build policies around your product regarding make-goods, develop a tone you wish your staff to carry (a persona, perhaps?), understand safety or product concerns and plan for fringe case scenarios.

4.  Communication and Connection

Often CSRs are siloed from the core product team. The best companies make sure that a representative of customer service always has a seat at the development table. Aside from your QA team, no one knows your product better (the positives, and the negatives).  Audit your staff, cull information from the team regularly, and make sure there’s always a connection between Customer Service and development, marketing, production, and community.

5.  Admin Tools

Sometimes customer support platforms do not completely cut it.  Key in-experience and site usage data is invaluable to a CSR. Being able to see how many attempts a user makes to purchase an item, how long a customer has been with a company, the value of an account’s in-experience network is, and how much time a customer spends online are so valuable in accurately dealing with a customer support issue.  Without a proper, CSR-focused admin tool, your staff is flying blind, and just playing a difficult guessing game with your customers.

Izzy Neis
Director of Engagement & Strategy

Felicia Ho
Project Manager