By now, it’s clear that the pandemic has forced businesses to pivot their offline strategies to a thriving online model. From conducting virtual demos to selling products via digital platforms, the business world has adapted overnight to the remote work culture.
This shift in the work dynamics has left the customer service teams feeling overwhelmed and vulnerable. If you find yourself at the short end of the stick, keep reading. In this blog, we’ll list five valuable strategies that can help your CX team go remote seamlessly and sustainably.
Remote Customer Service Tips: 5 Practical Steps
1. Live Chat for Sales & Customer Support
“Using live chat software increases sales conversions by 35%.”
One of the most significant setbacks of working remotely is the inability to assist customers 24×7 on a more personal and intimate level. Enter- a live chat feature that allows you to engage with customers conversationally.
You can think of this live chat functionality as a virtual guide that allows the brand to connect with visitors in real time and instantly. Plus, you can qualify leads and nurture them round-the-clock and throughout the customer life cycle by collecting user information via 24×7 contact forms.
That’s not all. Live chat automation (think: chatbots) can boost sales and enhance the overall customer experience. One way they can achieve the latter is by empowering customers to self-serve via an in-depth and updated knowledge base. Plus, on the business side, teams can collaborate seamlessly by sharing files, launching video chats, starting audio chats or phone calls, screen-sharing, and co-browsing, among others, at the click of a button.
Key takeaway: Using the right automation tool, such as live chat, can help you scale your business while providing individualized attention from the comfort of your screen. In today’s remote-driven work culture, live chat has become a necessity.
2. Work towards Conserving Team Unity & Creativity
Working remotely has a significant impact on our mental health. In fact, a lot has been spoken about how working from home can lead to increased feelings of loneliness and isolation. Now, if your employees are unhappy, you can rest assured that the quality of customer service will get hampered, and your customers will feel dissatisfied with the service. Plus, your productivity levels are sure to take a dip. So, here are some measures you can take to keep the work culture customer- as well as employee-focused:
- Keep the joy of spontaneous interactions alive by using video conference software to ‘catch up’ with team members (also known as virtual meet-ups). You could initiate fun remote team-building activities such as team lunches, pizza parties, Zumba sessions, etc., to drive team bonding and engagement:
- Encourage open and honest communication among team members to boost their morale.
- Appreciate employees as often as needed with heartfelt gestures and mindful incentives.
- Create a more friendly work atmosphere and a healthy team spirit where agents are given more freedom to make decisions and troubleshoot.
- Build a helpful repository or resource center with documents, educational videos, and detailed protocols that discuss the diverse issues employees and customers may face and how the agents can tackle the same. As you can imagine, this streamlines knowledge management and makes everyone’s life easier.
Key takeaway: When it comes to working remotely, most CX leaders focus on the technology part of it without paying attention to the mental needs of their employees and the physical demands of the work culture – a big mistake. If you wish to boost your sales and user happiness, you must ensure that your employees are happy with this ‘new normal‘ and can reach out to you as needed.
3. Invest in Useful Productivity Tools
Working remotely can be challenging – from collaborating with team members to keeping a sense of ‘who sent what’ email, the sheer volume of interactions on diverse channels can be frustrating.
This is where you need project management tools equipped with a shared inbox that allows you to view files and emails from a centralized place on the Cloud and offer easy-to-use screen-sharing capabilities if any team member gets stuck on the job.
Key takeaway: To get a decent head start on your day, you need the right tools at hand – from Cloud-based software that enable seamless collaboration to automated communication tools and social networking platforms such as live chat, trigger SMS, email, Slack, Nuovoteam, etc., multiple software and channels can take off some of the team’s workload and drive agent communication as well as productivity.
4. Collect Feedback from Customers, Employees, & Partners
As is said for customers, collecting feedback is equally important within your organization to understand what’s working and what’s not. Clearly, not everyone will be comfortable with working remotely from the get-go. You can make things simpler by asking employees and other stakeholders about what their pain points might be and working towards addressing their queries. From gauging their work satisfaction rate to understanding which automated tools might work best, there are a lot of territories you can cover.
Handy tip: You don’t always have to talk shop with your team. Mix things up a little by sharing personal news and engaging in casual small talk to blow off steam.
Key takeaway: The importance of collecting customer and employee feedback cannot be stated enough. You can establish relevant solutions and tackle issues from the roots by identifying the critical roadblocks.
5. Set & Monitor Customer-Centric KPIs to Track Growth
If you don’t measure the structure, processes, and service in place, you won’t know where your team is going wrong with respect to CX – be it lower conversion rates, poor customer feedback, or low employee morale, among other issues.
In other words, you need to create a crystal-clear road map for analyzing important customer metrics such as:
- Customer retention level: Focus on retaining and acquiring new customers by building a positive brand image; consider putting your brand logo everywhere and using business cards to appear more professional.
- Average response time: The faster and more effective your service, the happier your customers will be. This is where you can leverage automated replies for speedy, efficient responses.
- Customer satisfaction score: As a golden rule, roll out satisfaction surveys after a chat. You can send personalized follow-up emails or send surveys in-app.
- Net promoter score: NPS Survey can help you gauge the loyalty of a firm’s customer relationships. The higher the score, the more profitable the brand.
- Keep track of incoming queries: At all times, you must measure the volume of chats, calls, and requests in addition to monitoring your team’s performance.
Key takeaway: Measuring customer metrics is the next logical step in your CX journey to understand the effectiveness of all the CX measures. After all, you can’t improve what you can’t measure. In addition to monitoring the KPIs mentioned above, you can monitor call reports, analyze the time spent on each call, work on inbound-outbound analytics, and listen to call recordings for quality assurance.
Final Thoughts
With a heady combination of the right CX tools, measures, strategies, and mindset in place, working remotely can become a cakewalk (contrary to popular opinion). So try these tried-and-tested tricks and work on the fly like it’s second nature. To wrap up:
- Use live chat for improved sales and enhanced customer support.
- Work towards conserving team culture and creativity.
- Invest in useful productivity tools to drive efficiency.
- Collect feedback from customers, employees, and partners consistently.
- Monitor customer-centric KPIs to track growth.
What’s your recipe for success when it comes to remote working? We’re all ears.
