What Is a Customer Service Hero?

Customer service can be a thankless job. Frontline agents, acting as the faces of a brand, are frequently subjected to frustration, apathy, and downright anger from unhappy customers.

At Gladly, we call agents customer service heroes. As such, they’re looked to for delivering quality assistance and personal, white-glove service without fail. In their CX heroism, these individuals hold the power to make or break a brand’s ability to connect and build lasting relationships with customers — which is why it’s so crucial to give them the tools they need to succeed and exceed expectations.

Why is it important for support teams to see team members as customer service heroes, not just agents? In this piece, we’ll explore:

• How the hero transformation increases employee happiness and retention
• How product offerings from Gladly make the transformation possible
• Success stories from Gladly customers who transformed their hero teams

Turning Agents Into Heroes

As we discovered in our 2023 Hero Experience Report, 89% of agents plan to stay in the customer service industry, while another two-thirds aspire to management and leadership roles within CX. This data is emblematic of how customer service heroes are hard-working, dedicated individuals with a career-oriented mindset — one that CX leaders should embrace while empowering them to do more.

Turnover in the CX field can be high, but what keeps support heroes engaged and motivated are the tools and training that make the ability to do their jobs and serve customers even easier. Brands need to invest in customer experience technology that minimizes friction between channels to give these agents every advantage they need.

Happy agents ultimately stick with their respective brands for a long time, and more efficient work drives consumer happiness that builds loyalty and long-term value unlike anything else in ecommerce. In a world where 59% of customers feel CX is losing a human touch, a well-equipped agent with rapid access to personal information and details can swoop in and change minds.

Collectively, if a manager asked agents who reach the status of customer service heroes how they felt about their jobs when they’re properly equipped and trained, they’d agree that they feel:

• Happier and more fulfilled in their service work
• More efficient, productive, and capable of handling any customer tasks
• More motivated to stay at their companies longer
• Inspired to act as an evangelist for terrific customer service and brand affinity

Why Gladly Cares

The key to building a sustainably successful support center is to focus on the people on the front lines. And yet, not enough brands are investing in the support team tools that make agents’ jobs or lives easier. Too often, agents are expected to do more with less, delight customers, and find meaning in their work — even as they struggle with imperfect technology like:

• Impersonal, ticket-based software versus a conversation-driven solution
• Excessive reliance on third-party channel add-ons
• Limited access to customer contact channels
• Inability to quickly and easily access important customer information via a distributed knowledge base

Keeping agents happy and in-house is not just a cost-savings mechanism for companies, but also a catalyst for better brand expertise across the board. Gladly thrives when partnering with companies that see customer connection as a fundamental competitive advantage. We provide the incentives and tools that make support heroes want to stay with their respective brands longer, deeply intertwining these frontline heroes with their parent companies and the products or services they provide.

Customer Service Heroes at the Brand Level

Happy support heroes aren’t just an internal benefit for employee retention. In the era of the loyalty economy — when brand affinity is the most valuable currency — an expert, confident staff can make all the difference in creating lasting and consistent relationships with shoppers.

Increasing consumer sentiment in the customer experience is proven to drive repeat customers — our Customer Expectations Report showed that 72% of shoppers spend more with brands that provide high-quality CX.

Heroes can also create revenue-driving opportunities on their own when they have the knowledge and acumen to better understand their shoppers. Upselling and cross-selling potential skyrockets when the right CX solutions are implemented, transforming a support center into an additional revenue driver.

A team of heroes even allows your organization to do more while hiring less. An efficient CX team composed of support heroes makes it easy for companies to provide proactive, loyalty-enhancing customer service. In doing so, brands embark on a long-term path toward greater brand affinity — and revenue.

Why Gladly Cares

With Gladly, the work of customer service heroes not only gets easier but also more impactful — thanks to technology that maximizes the potential and skillset of each employee. In the same amount of time it takes for an under-equipped agent to handle a routine task, a hero who’s using Gladly can accomplish something far more essential to creating customer connection. Heroes have more bandwidth to upsell or cross-sell to shoppers, offering payment in chat. They’re also set up to remember a favorite product and make a recommendation, thanks to fast-acting AI.

Gladly strives to create environments where brands’ bottom lines can improve. Our tools are built to simplify agent work to create the most streamlined support center possible, reducing the time between contact and resolution for every customer interaction. In empowering agents to become heroes, we achieve that goal and provide tangible results through support KPIs, better CX, and higher support ROI.

The Gladly Impact of Turning Agents into Customer Service Heroes

Achieving the level of support heroism that creates new revenue opportunities and retains loyal customers starts with the right CX solution. With Gladly, heroes get the instant power to do more with less work — including easy-to-use, out-of-the-box tools.

Gladly Hero

Gladly Hero is the flagship customer service product that champions a CX platform built around people, not tickets. We provide a simple, all-in-one interface to access customer conversations in a consolidated timeline, regardless of channel — doing away with legacy ticketed systems to deliver radically personal service at scale.

True to the name, Gladly Hero turns agents into customer service heroes by helping them deliver personalized, agent-assisted customer service. By organizing lifelong conversations instead of tickets, support heroes can see the totality of a customer relationship and build deeper, more personal connections with each customer at scale, regardless of channel.

Gladly Hero also boosts support hero productivity and efficiency thanks to automatic conversation summarization, real-time answer suggestions, and rapid access to customer details.

At Gladly, we define a hero as an agent who embraces the Gladly Hero interface to deliver more personalized service at scale. But the CX evolution doesn’t stop there — with elevated technology powered by AI, the capabilities of each CX employee get even more comprehensive, exponentially increasing the power of each agent and elevating them to become superheroes.

Gladly Sidekick

Sidekick equips CX teams with a highly intelligent generative AI. Sidekick enhances self-service capabilities and frees up support heroes to handle more pressing, high-level tasks.

Sidekick is the second piece of what elevates heroes to superheroes — providing a radically personal digital assistant for each customer at scale, tackling FAQs and simple payment requests while still recognizing agent opportunities for better, hands-on human service. With this benefit, Sidekick improves agent focus and decreases inbound volume in a significant, life-changing way for heroes.

Connect Community

Gladly Connect community provides 100% free learning opportunities for customer service agents, including a one-on-one mentorship program on top of numerous free classes, courses, and certifications.

Brand Success Stories: Turning Agents Into Customer Service Heroes

The process of implementing Gladly services and technology, and elevating agents into heroes, has been repeatedly proven by some of our customers. Here are some of their stories:

• Thanks to a clean interface from Sidekick, JOANN was able to onboard staff in just five days while decreasing their customer request backlog by 93%.
• At Bonafide, CX staff were fielding a high volume of requests and experiencing a long time-to-resolution. Gladly Sidekick unburdened agents by automating the first steps of an interaction, saving 65 support hero hours on average.
• After years of using a legacy system, Peak Design traded its old ticketed model for the Gladly Hero interface — saving the company $17,000 in workplace efficiency costs while achieving 100% automated order-tracking, returns, and warranties.

If you’re ready to supercharge your CX team and turn your agents into customer service heroes, try a demo of Gladly to see firsthand how our superior solutions provide transformative results at scale.

DEMO

Stop handling tickets. Start helping customers.

Sign up