Your customer service agents are hard-working employees who spend most of their time interacting with customers, directly or indirectly. And they are the reflection of the face and personality of the company when dealing with customers because the interaction your customers have with your reps is what they remember about your company.

Creating a customer service dream team and making them work with all they have is just as important as delivering an awesome experience for customers. If you don’t frequently search for the opportunities to improve the quality of your customer service team, then your relationships with customers will be on the death edge.

Let’s hunker down and check the below tips for helping you build your customer service dream team.

1. Use data to track customer service team performance

You can’t judge a support rep by pure intuition or say he did a good job because the number of requests he resolved is the highest comparing to other members. When it comes to evaluating the performance of your customer support team, you need to use data and some key metrics to analyz the effectiveness of your team. And with these metrics, you’ll know which way to go to improve your customer service agents.

So what exactly do you need to take a look at?

First – support queries.

How many requests from customer does you team have to take care of per day? How much time does it take on average for an agent to response to customer’s incoming request? How long does it take on average for one customer’s case to be closed?

Use predefined metrics to calculate if your support team is overloaded with the daily customer requests so you know if you need to add more members to the team or not. Or, find out if your team is taking too long to reply a customer. How many tickets/chat sessions should an agent manage at once?

For example, a support rep takes care of 30 customer’s requests per day but the customer’s replies or the average response time is low then it means this member doesn’t do his job carefully enough.

For email and ticket support, build a template and require your customer service staff to report their activity there daily. With phone and live chat support, especially excellent live chat tool like Subiz, support script and history are always saved as well as summed up in a report for you to easily track your staff’s performance.

Want more effective customer service tool suggestions? Read more here.

Second – customer feedbacks.

Use all the data you can gather on customer satisfaction levels via their testimonials or rating per each support session. Most customer service tools have this feature built in for you. Plus, don’t skip suggestions from customers also. They love it when you improve product or service based on their suggestions.

2. Make it fun and stress-free for your team

Imagine you’re in the position of your customer service member. You have a mountain of requests to resolve a day. You have to cool down many hot-headed customers. Sometimes, you even have to serve “troll” customers and still have to keep your manners. Besides, regardless of all these, you still have other troubles at the office and in your social life.

Now tell me: Is it stressful to be in customer service?

You know, approaching support requests with a big sigh will negatively influence the way one supports his customers, and sometimes that person himself doesn’t even notice it. So it’s very important to keep a happy mood and a comfortable, stress-free environment for customer service staff to work in.

How could you do that?

Buy some pillows and let your staff freely punch them to release their stress. Just kidding! Complaining about a bad customer request case or punching pillows doesn’t help reduce one’s frustration or make them feel better.

It might be better if you could add a small session each day for your customer service team to briefly give their feedback about all the things they did within that day. If there is any problem, the team could come up with a solution together such as a guidance to deal with similar case in future. Then a mentoring session to get over negative emotions with customer support should help your staff meditate productively.

There’s one more important thing. Look around you – is your current office’s atmosphere too boring or mind-numbing? Don’t kill the happy mood. Transform your office into a more interesting one with small games in the break time, or setting up special space for your staff to relax.

2. Motivate your team with reward and recognition

Excellent employees are always the gems of the company. Being recognized for their hard work means a lot to them. So, why not set a plan of offering rewards as a tribute to those who did exceptional work?

Firstly, think about what should be the rewards for your customer support employee. Should it be a monetary reward? Like, reward a bonus of $100 for the support reps that had the most 5 star-voted reviews from customers this month.

It seems to be a good idea but you should keep in mind that monetary rewards don’t always bring the result you expected. For example, instead of motivating one individual to improve his support performance, the reward makes members in the support team compete with each other – which is not healthy for company’s culture or the team’s productivity.

Buffer did have a good idea in motivating support members by offering a badge called “Support Heroes” for excellent support reps. It’s very easy to see the message that the job of customer service staff is to make people happy than just delivering a good support service. Hence, it motivates the employees themselves.

One small note before you go: don’t forget to set achievable goals and only reward truly noticeable achievements. Plus, don’t institutionalize rewards or make it the everyday job unless your staff will stop striving for them.

3. Bring it all!

Whatever challenges there are and however talented your team is, it always needs your effort to keep your customer service staff to go on the right track in bringing the norms and values of your brand to customers.

Nothing is worse than contacting a customer agent and realizing that he or she is having even a worse day than yours, right? Put your team together and help them overcome the obstacles in their work.

Like this article? Share it with your team and your friends! You’re welcome!