Creating the best, most effective customer service team has two different starting locations: the interview room, and the software box. The first step to making a great customer service team is to know who you are looking for when hiring.
What type of person makes a wonderful customer service agent? It’s important to make your choices dependent on a person’s bearing and demeanor as much as their paperwork, if not more. Customer service skills can be taught, but only to an extent. The best type of person for the job is someone who has a natural inclination for problem solving and compassion. A person who can radiate a positive attitude and truly feels for the customer will be able to provide better customer service than someone who came into the scenario just looking for a job or a paycheck. When interviewing for your customer service positions, look for candidates who smile, look you fully and confidently in the eye, act pleasant, and give a positive impression of professionalism. It may take a while to find the person with the right fit, but the wait will be worth it.
When you have nailed down who you want to be the face of your company from the customer service side of things, the next step is to ensure that you give that person the tools they need to succeed. A smile can go a long way, but it can only get so far without a solution at its back. A dependable, robust, powerful customer relationship management system is necessary to perfecting your customer support department. You representatives need to be able to categorize and access all of a customer’s information at a moment’s notice, without having to check and double check multiple systems for all the proper related data.
PhaseWare’s unbeatable system of collaborating information will allow your agents to have full control over the information they need, quickly and easily. Another side of providing the correct tools is the necessity of getting a vast, workable knowledge base up and running on your site—another area of PhaseWare’s expertise. The knowledge base is set up to be accessible to your customers themselves, but more often than not it will become an invaluable tool for your service department to reference time and time again when faced with issues and concerns. Using the knowledge base will not only decrease the amount of time your agents will spend searching for an answer, but it will also ensure that the answers you are giving are consistent and accurate across the board so that customers can learn to trust and rely on your service department to have the right answer, every time.