How to Build a High-Performing Remote Customer Service Team

Customer service has become one of the primary areas of focus for many businesses. The importance of customer service has rapidly grown over the past few years because of the kind of impact it can have on the growth of businesses.

High-performing customer service teams can help increase your customer retention, improve your brand’s reputation, and lead to a rapid improvement in your ROI. But ensuring the performance of a remote customer service team can be challenging to say the least.

Your old ways of managing a customer service team might not yield you the best results while working remotely. You need to take a different approach and achieve the same results from your remote customer service teams. 

So, if you are looking for some tips on how you can manage a remote customer service team and ensure utmost performance, then this extensive guide will help you do just that. 

By the end of it, you’ll take away some super-effective tips that will make your customer service team much more productive and effective.

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1. Build your Customer Service Team with the Right People

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No matter what efforts you take or how much you train your remote employees, these steps will only improve your performance so much. Hence, it is vital that you start by picking the right people for your remote customer service team.

The customer service team who worked from the office may not be as efficient and invested in a remote work environment. Hence, while building your remote customer service team, you need to ensure that they have the following qualities:

• Ability to perform well without micro-management and constant supervision
• Should be able to prioritize tasks and manage time effectively
• Should preferably understand your company’s values and willing to align their work with it
• Should practice self-discipline

You cannot try your best to analyze these qualities in a potential candidate before hiring them as your remote customer service team.

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2. Use the Right Customer Service Solution

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Investing in a good-quality and efficient customer service solution is essential for improving the performance of your team. Without the right solution, your team may lose track of all the customer conversations leading to a bad rep for your company.

Try to look for a solution that allows you to keep track of all customer interactions, customer data, and manage customer relationships in a hassle-free manner. The tool that you pick should be easy-to-use and intuitive for your customer service team to learn and adapt quickly.

3. Create an Internal Knowledge Base for your Customer Service Team to Refer to

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The most significant change that comes along with a remote work environment is the lack of quick, face-to-face connections. 

In a traditional office workspace, if your customer service team had any problem or queries, they could just come to your office with the question. But the same is not possible in the case of a remote workspace.

Therefore, it is vital that you create an extensive knowledge base that is entirely for internal purposes. With this, your team can easily refer to the documentation and provide quick resolutions to your customers.

Lack of such a knowledge base will lead to higher resolution times and frustrated customers that might hurt your customer experience.  

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4. Use Project Management Tools for Improved Efficiency

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Your customer service team will probably be extremely busy with multiple queries and requests coming in from all directions. This may lead to overwhelm for your customer service team and ultimately lead to reduced performance.

To avoid this, you should consider investing in cloud-based project management software. This will help your team manage all the customer service tasks from a single place and prioritize them to ensure increased efficiency.

You would not have to micromanage your team and stress over the completion of all tasks. Through a project management tool, you’ll get a bird’s eye view of what your team is working on. You would have a fair idea about all the tasks that are pending with each member of your team.

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5. Set the Right KPIs for your Team and Monitor their Performance

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Measuring the performance of your team is essential if you want to improve the performance of your customer service team progressively. By setting clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you can give your customer service team a specific goal to work towards.

With the right goals and direction in mind, your customer service team is bound to improve their overall performance by multiple folds. Here are some of the KPIs that you can set and monitor your team based on that:

• The ratio of resolved tickets to the total number of tickets
• Customer satisfaction index
• Net promoter score
• Response times
• Time spent on each ticket

You can keep track of all these KPIs and monitor each team member to evaluate them based on their performance. 

You can also reward your most productive and high-performing team member based on these metrics. This leads to a healthy sense of competition amongst your customer service team members, leading to an overall improvement in their performance.

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6. Incorporate Team Building Activities

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Teams who know each other, work better together. And a great way to build the rapport and camaraderie of your team is through team building activities.

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Team building is essential to healthy work culture and is also a fun reward for your staff. It has been shown to enhance job satisfaction, employee retention, productivity and profitability.

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Final Thoughts

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Managing a remote customer service team can be challenging. And improving their performance and productivity may seem like a daunting task. But, you can take some measures to ensure that your remote customer service team does their best. 

Take help from the tips mentioned in this post, and you’ll definitely see a boost in their performance very soon.