How to Manage a Customer Support Team from Home

The world as we know it has changed. Companies are scrambling to find ways to stay afloat and make the remote work model "work." Of all the departments, the customer service department is the hardest hit. Imagine being at the front line, managing cancelled subscriptions, angry and confused customers filing for disputes and what not. Imagine having to do all this from HOME and making sure your performance remains optimal at all times. It's tough. For employees, more so for managers and leaders who have to manage a vast team with no processes in place.

Assuming this is the first time your organization is going remote and you're tasked with managing your customer support team's performance remotely, this piece is just for you.

The advice given here is a reflection of the conversations I've had with several remote team managers over the past month. In a nutshell, here's what they recommend.

Customer support team members often have to follow standard, canned responses.

These statements indicate a lack of empathy and makes the call increasingly harder, more frustrating for both the rep and the customer. At this point, reps should be allowed to be more human and make use of better responses that shows they care.

Better sentences could be:

This almost feels like a complete culture change and it should be. If you're not bringing in new ways or new processes to manage this difficult time, you're not likely to succeed with customer satisfaction. In the long run, how you handled your customers during a rough period defines your success as a business that cares.

If it takes three days to resolve a customer query, you're doing it wrong.
If it takes more than 24 hours to reply to an email, you're doing it wrong.

Revise your processes with the aim of providing prompt support. While customer support teams may have ignored this basic rule in the past, right now, nothing is more important than catering to customer requests as soon as you can.

Part of this revision will also include checking your department's performance in terms of response times and establish a standard email response time policy.

There are plenty of tools and solutions out there that can help you with managing your team's customer support response time while working remotely. The idea is not to pressurize your team, but to optimize performance, retain customers through quality customer service & make managing a remote team less challenging.

According to Ed Fry, 'Your sales, marketing, customer success, and entire customer-facing operation is only as good as your data."

If your customer support team is dependent on your marketing and sales team for information, then it's imperative for everyone to have access to a unified source of truth.

If your teams are operating in silos with each having their own database or data source, it's going to wreak havoc. Because working from home means everyone's working at different time zones or hours, the dependencies are higher.

This is the right time for you to actually be data-driven if you're not already. This is the right time for you to ensure that your teams, tools & processes are in sync to deliver efficient sales and marketing experiences.

Enough has been written on the best WFH tools for remote teams, so I won't be giving you any lists. We all know that Zoom, Asana, Trello etc are some of the most common tools for project and task management. What's critical is to understand whether these tools are relevant to your industry, your company size, your team structure and your desired goals.

For example, some teams prefer Asana over Trello because it focuses more on accountability.

Some prefer Skype over Zoom and Slack because it allows for less-distracted conversations.

Some prefer Jira over Zoho because it allows for easier customer ticket management.

To know what works for you and your team, you will have to dedicate enough time on compiling your processes, mapping them on different software solutions and identifying whether it helps you meet operational efficiency goals.

The right stack of tools depends on many varying factors and should be chosen after you've done your research and worked with your teams in identifying key metrics that you want to measure.

Companies with chaotic processes & toxic work cultures will find it extremely difficult to thrive in this period. Employee morale is already down and work is difficult to manage. If managers use bad coaching practices such as performance review threats, bullying, sarcasm or resort to micro-management, they are creating what will be a ripple effect of negativity - frustrated employees will not be able to perform well at their jobs, which means customer service will be equally affected.

Experts recommend making collaboration and integrated coaching as part of the remote work culture. Reps and managers are no longer working face to face, so collaboration needs to be more than just calculating the total amount of calls taken. But there should be a fine line between collaboration and micromanagement. Coaching and collaboration should happen as part of the job and not as an additional task that needs to be performed at a specific time or day.

Working from home has never been easy, but with the pandemic, it's even more challenging especially for customer service reps who have to go on calls without any infrastructure or support in place. Since it's uncertain when we can go back to work again, it's necessary to ensure that proper systems, remote tools and processes are deployed for remote customer service teams to do their best jobs.