Building a Remote Customer Care Team: Everything You Need To Know
Around 86 percent of people are willing to pay for a good customer experience (CX). And around 49 percent of buyers are known to make a purchase when they receive a personalized experience. Due to these statistics, there are a large number of businesses that compete to have the best customer experience.
Your care team is the main touchpoint for the customer. Hence, it’s crucial for you to build a customer care team that will deliver an excellent customer experience.
Moreover, it’s cost-effective for companies to leverage a remote team for customer care. They will take advantage of the reduced costs, access a bigger candidate pool, and give round-the-clock support and care to customers in various time zones without any additional costs.
However, managing a remote team is challenging, especially if you wish to deliver a premium and personalized customer experience.
Common Challenges a Remote Customer Care Team (And You) May Face
They may face difficulty communicating with each other. Communication is essential, and considering sharing and discussing information is important because every team member needs to be on the same page.
Tracking each other’s progress and monitoring the results to see if anyone needs help; improves productivity.
Ensuring the team members are delivering a consistent and on-brand customer experience.
Enabling the individual members to work independently, especially if the supervisors are in different time zones.
Implementing endpoint safety measures to protect the customer’s data and information.
Here are some precise ways to improve and overcome these challenges.
Building a Functional Remote Customer Care Team: Tips
While these are tried and true methods, they will only work if you try hard to implement them in your team and they also follow through.
Start by Hiring A Team That Has A Customer-Centric Mentality
It’s a given that a customer can only have a quality experience when your remote team has good interactions with them. The interaction between the care team and the customers determines how the customer experience. Hiring a qualified team is the key to delivering a unique customer center experience.
However, hiring the proper team is challenging; you should learn about some pointers to look for when picking them.
- The individuals should have standard soft skills like empathy, patience, the ability to read the customers, positivity, attentiveness, and communication skills.
- They need to have technical knowledge about a general understanding of your business and your product or service.
- They need excellent collaboration skills and a history of working virtually (it would be ideal if they had experience working in virtual teams).
- They should be capable of thriving under flexible management.
- Good time-management skills and self-management. They should also be motivated enough to complete their tasks on time.
- They should have a customer-centric mentality that will drive them to think creatively and out of the box while prioritizing the delivery of premium customer experience.
Implement Could-Based Communication Along With Functional Collaboration Tools
Project management is an excellent example of a cloud-based software application. These applications increase communication and allow members to share their information and files without problems. This also acts as a cost-effective option, especially considering how the collaboration feature saves tons of money.
Moreover, a unified communication program gives the team members a more personalized interaction with the customers; they can contact the customers through phone, chat, social media, phone, etc. To have a seamless care experience, you should synchronize all the interactions in one centralized location.
Additionally, good software also allows the employees and supervisors to check and keep up with the progress regardless of being in different time zones.
It’s Best to Set up a Searchable and Centralized Knowledge Base
Typically, a customer will expect your care team to help them resolve their issues quickly. In fact, 99 percent of customers stated that interacting with knowledgeable representatives is a vital element of outstanding customer experience.
Moreover, a remote customer care team member shouldn’t walk over to the desk and ask for assistance whenever they have a question they don’t know the answer to. Because of this, you need to provide those members with adequate resources so they can resolve the queries the customers may have autonomously.
Additionally, your team needs to be capable of updating the information, adding answers, and asking questions on a daily basis. This creates a supportive environment, ensures the knowledge is up-to-date and relevant, and it also increases employee engagement.
You Should Implement Customer Care Software
A customer service software platform will allow you to manage customers’ interactions throughout the touchpoints in a particular location so that no team member can detect where the conversations left off; this improves the quality of the customer experience.
A few of the key elements to look out for in customer care software are a ticketing system, survey tools, live chatting, customer self-service, (customer) sentiment analysis, and communication capabilities. These software platforms will also allow the supervisors to oversee the metrics and customer interactions on a unified dashboard and so they won’t have to micro-manage the team members individually.
For instance, managers will see the number of calls taken and the hours worked. They will also oversee any high-priority issues, resolved issues, and tasks assigned to each team. This helps them ensure that each agent is being productive and delivering premium quality customer experience.
You Should Implement A Detailed Onboarding Process
A well-orchestrated and thorough onboarding process is especially important for getting remote workers up to date since they won’t likely have direct access to their colleagues and supervisors because of the time difference, yet they still have to make decisions autonomously.
To deliver an outstanding customer experience, your agents need to understand the internal process, operational procedures, and communication protocols so they can solve the issues adequately or so they can route the inquiries to the appropriate department.
Additionally, seeing how remote team members need to connect to your systems and have direct access to the customer information using their equipment and network, it’s crucial to ensure the security of these connections and check how private their networks are. Data breaches are costly and also negatively impact the customer experience.
Bottom Line
Caring for a customer care team doesn’t be as complicated as some people think. Once you learn and implement these tips into your system and hire the right team, you will be able to deliver a smooth and ideal customer experience.
