Customer Support Hero Resources

Your ecommerce customers expect top-notch and personalized service experiences from your brand, so going through the motions and simply responding to them via phone call, email, or text with their first name is no longer acceptable.

You need to elevate the service your brand provides, and the first step in doing so is empowering your agents to build deep, long-lasting relationships with your customers. But how do you do that in a scalable and efficient way for a growing company? By building a strategy that enables autonomy and arming your team with the right tools and knowledge to take charge.

To learn how you can get started on this path, check out these steps you can use to empower your agents to connect with your customers.

Tactics to empower your team

Unfortunately, customer service horror stories are tales we all can tell. Whether it be long wait times, lack of consistency, or poor communication, these negative interactions are what constitute the bad reputation associated with customer service.

But contrary to popular belief, we can’t always blame the agent; the poor experiences usually have to do with under-equipped team that don’t have the proper tools or training to meet your customers’ needs.

The good news — you don’t have to buy pricey tech or hire a huge support team to improve your customer service.

Low-cost ways to give your customer experience a boost

A great customer experience is the product of many different parts — from your social media ads, to your shopping experience (online or in real life), to your customer support. All these things matter to your customers, and can mean the difference between a one-time sale and a lifelong customer.

Understanding your customer journey from beginning to end is key to ensuring you’re providing an exceptional experience at every step of the way. And the best way to dissect that experience is by leveraging your data.

Use data to tap into your customers’ needs

See customer service that revolves around customers – not tickets.

PRODUCT TOUR

The customer experience has shifted from an important consideration to a critical business differentiator, thanks largely to the pandemic and its role in drastic changes in customer behaviors and expectations. With more and more customers opting to shop online, brands are forced to deliver a personalized shopping experience akin to brick-and-mortar stores online without reducing agent productivity or efficiency.

With conversational commerce, you can develop a strategy around live chat that leverages the power of conversation to offer personalized, consultative shopping experiences that drive sales and revenue.

Learn how to get started with conversational commerce

It’s something that plagues all customer support teams, and one of the most common complaints from agents — cherry-picking tickets.

In short, ticket cherry-picking happens when an agent side-steps the usual ticket-routing process and instead picks a different ticket from the queue to work on that would not have otherwise been assigned to them. It’s incredibly frustrating for support agents and can skew individual performance as the rest of the team is left to handle more complex customer issues.

One of the reasons cherry-picking occurs is insufficient onboarding. If your onboarding process is rushed or needs to be more thorough, agents are left to fend for themselves to measure up to the pressures of performing.

Learn how to eliminate ticket cherry-picking

A help center is a self-service station that allows customers to solve basic issues independently without needing a support agent’s help. More and more, shoppers want to handle their problems themselves, meaning your brand needs to build a consistent and up-to-date help center for faster resolutions.

This task isn’t as daunting as it seems — improving your help center functionality can be achieved in four steps.

See the steps to get started

To provide truly exceptional customer service, your agents need to express empathy while communicating with your customers. If you’ve ever worked in customer service, then you understand a positive tone and a helpful attitude go a long way — and you also know that being kind isn’t always as easy as it sounds.

Sometimes customers are angry, upset, or frustrated when they call, but at the end of the day, they want one thing — to feel heard and understood.

Many tried-and-true exercises can help enhance our ability to be empathetic towards our customers.

Check out our favorite empathy exercises to help your team

A great customer support strategy doesn’t just solve the customer’s problems at hand — it also includes cross-selling and upselling to those customers.

Cross-selling and upselling support your company’s growth goals and reveal more revenue opportunities. By using the right technology and offering the best training, your agents can turn support centers into profit drivers.

Dive into cross-selling vs. upselling

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People Match routes customers to the best support hero, every time

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Customer service is no stranger to high attrition rates. Whether it’s burnout or impossible performance demands, call centers reach as high as 42% in employee turnover.

Recently, however, employees are becoming less likely to resign officially and are “quiet quitting” instead.

Quiet quitting is the workplace trend of employees doing the bare minimum as a result of feeling like going above and beyond doesn’t actually reward them.

If your agents are quitting quietly, this could significantly affect your customer experience and your customers’ overall perception of your brand.

Learn why your employees may be quiet quitting and how to reverse the trend

Are you still measuring satisfaction and loyalty by asking how likely your customers would recommend your brand on a scale from one to 10?

If the answer is “yes,” you’re missing out on crucial data for new opportunities to improve the customer experience.

The best way to measure contact center performance is to use a combination of contact center KPI metrics that cover customer satisfaction, loyalty, and effort. For example, coupling NPS with CSAT, CES, and social media monitoring unlocks more insights into the customer experience.

Learn how to measure contact center performance

Nobody likes waiting on hold, especially when there’s a pressing issue or emotions are already running high. Average handle time (AHT) is an important contact center KPI for brands to track, as it can pinpoint opportunities to improve efficiencies within customer support teams and processes.

Average handle times vary between companies and depend on factors such as the channel, the technical complexity of products, the brand’s approach to the customer experience, and the robustness of their customer support platform.

When it comes to answering the question of how to reduce AHT, you might think the only option is hiring more agents. But there’s another way.

Get a hold on average handle time

Modern brands are very familiar with high call volumes. Whether the influx is from supply chain issues or the holiday rush, customers usually turn to the phone first to get answers to urgent questions.

The unfortunate side effect is long wait times for customers on the phone while your other channels are idle.

While there isn’t a one-time solution for these sudden surges, consider the next best thing — actionable, cross-channel call reduction strategies that quickly get customers the answers they need. Examples include providing value with your IVR, leaning into SMS, and creating a robust FAQ page.

Reducing call volume and wait times

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Shoppers today expect more than just a friendly response when they contact a support center — they expect the support agents they interact with to know the answers to their product questions.

In fact, our Customer Expectations Report found that 66% of customers prefer brands that know them and can recommend things they would like.

Brands need to employ customer service agent training to build expertise in their catalogs and invest in technology to optimize their brand’s product information management and accessibility to help service agents become product experts.

Unlock your support agents’ potential

The best brands know that acquiring and maintaining top talent is essential — especially for shopper-facing support teams. These individuals are integral to the business because, on top of tackling customer queries, they are also valuable revenue drivers.

But how do you go about interviewing and hiring the best candidates? And what happens after that? Businesses must train their support teams to create personal, delightful customer experiences that develop trust and build loyalty to stand out.

Three training tips for flawless customer service

If you’re drowning in customer service requests, duplicate workstreams, and high agent turnover, chances are, you aren’t embracing natural communication.

You might think a support center is naturally communication-driven. However, contrary to popular belief, solving customer service tasks differs from serving customers.

And some CX companies make the mistake of demanding people adapt to their systems. So, what’s the distinction between systems-based and people-based customer service platforms, and what are the critical capabilities for customer conversations that are missing from most customer service platforms?

Learn what’s missing from customer service conversations to foster loyalty

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Here’s a not-so-surprising fact — highly engaged workplaces are 14% more productive overall than their less supported counterparts.

That’s why it’s essential to ensure autonomy and self-improvement are central to maintaining talented customer support agents.

Start by recognizing that your agents have various skills, such as patience, empathy, and a natural inclination for problem-solving. With their skills, what customer service roles can they grow into within your organization? What skills are your agents missing, and how can you help get them there?

Ways to invest in and expand agent career growth

A common myth is that customer service is a “dead-end” career, full of frustrations with no room to grow. The truth is that working in customer service is a pathway to plenty of future career possibilities.

Customer service provides agents with many transferable skills like communication, multi-tasking, teamwork, and subject matter expertise.

These customer service skills provide new opportunities for interested agents because they apply to many other career paths, such as sales, marketing, management, and human resources.

Transferable support skills

Take a page from Andie Swimwear’s book and develop service guidelines to help your agents get a clear vision of the soft skills you expect from them. Andie re-established their support team by removing ticketing altogether in favor of a conversation-driven approach, forming the basis of their new “concierge” service.

Under this new umbrella, they devised transparent best practices for incorporating personal touches and using historical conversations to inform reps, so customers didn’t have to repeat themselves. Shoppers were happy, and agents were far more confident in their work, knowing they had a precise reference point for properly upholding their brand’s standards.

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Fabric and craft retailer JOANN Stores is constantly experimenting with ways to embrace digital innovation, with their customers and employees at the forefront of every decision.

Learn how the JOANN team reduced their support backlog by 93%, successfully managed the holiday season’s 25% increase in customer support contacts without burning out their agents, and increased both their customer and employee satisfaction.

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