If you want to support your customer service team in achieving their best work, then consider employee empowerment's role in maximizing the talent you have at your disposal.
Employee empowerment gives your staff members greater independence to make decisions and carry out their roles without interference or micromanagement from above. It requires a robust network of resources and knowledge to implement, but doing so can increase employee satisfaction while also boosting productivity.
Here we will offer you our top customer service tips on how to empower your team by providing greater autonomy while giving them the right tools, training, support, and tech to do their best job.
So, what do we mean by customer service empowerment?
The customer service team represents the only face of your business that most customers will ever see. Therefore, ensuring your team is dynamic, productive, and offers responsive interactions is vital. Empowering your frontline staff means allowing them to make decisions and draw on their experience and training in carrying out their duties.
This can be done in a variety of steps, all with the goal of arming your staff with knowledge and skills. You can ensure that your customer service representatives have the high-functioning resources they need to carry out their jobs, including phones, computers, and relevant software (perhaps allowing them to take notes, record interactions, manage customer relationships and conduct surveys).
Training is an essential element too, and can take many forms. You can train your employees to use the resources you’ve provided, and, importantly, outline clearly the expectations of the role and what counts as good customer service for your business. It’s especially valuable in offering training schemes, including mentorship programs, to new recruits. This might seem expensive, but there is a wealth of online training resources available that can teach your employees about phone etiquette and active listening. Another cost-effective solution is to hold ‘lunch and learns’ to allow your customer service representatives to share knowledge with other staff members, perhaps once per month. You can also take an active role in guiding your team by sharing resources and helpful articles that you consider useful and relevant.
Maintaining an internal knowledge database will help your staff become more responsive to customers, with easy access to material that helps them learn the ins and outs of customer relationship management software and the other specialist tools that they will use every day.
Evaluation will help you track customer service metrics and achieve customer experience optimization. For example, you can monitor response times, call times, and the number of issues a representative resolves. As well as pointing towards areas of improvement, this also means that you can recognize and reward employees who excel in their roles.
Checking in frequently with your team will allow for a consistent feedback channel. If you make sure you have greater visibility, it encourages employees to ask questions and offer suggestions. You can also use the opportunity to praise high-flying staff members.
Why is it crucial to empower your customer service team?
Your customer service team is the gateway to increasing brand loyalty. How does this work? Well, giving greater empowerment to your team will make them more confident in their abilities, and this impression will carry over to the customer. 83% of customers value customer service so highly that it is the most critical factor in deciding where they buy, aside from price and product. Not only that, but a positive customer experience can lead to 75% of your customers being willing to spend more with your business. This is what it means to build brand loyalty; a positive experience that customers remember, enticing them to return for repeat purchases.
When in a customer service role, it’s essential to project authority and credibility. When your business takes this advisory role towards the customer, giving them the tools to make informed decisions, it means they are more likely to place their trust in you going forward.
Nearly 80% of consumers surveyed by PwC in the US suggested that efficiency and knowledge are two of the most significant factors in deciding whether they choose a business.
Achieving this degree of customer experience transformation is possible by empowering your employees. Your team can offer a higher quality service by giving them the right tools, training, and resources. Customers don’t want to feel like they’re being passed from pillar to post or put on hold for a long wait.
Training and knowledge are key to helping your team members respond to issues using their own expertise without needing to refer to anyone above them for help.
This means that customer service issues can be addressed on the spot. A frustrated customer can easily become a satisfied one, given the right approach by a good customer service representative. According to Salesforce, 92% of customers can be retained after a positive customer service interaction.
Ultimately, empowering your employees will make them happier too. A LinkedIn study placed employee empowerment as one of the three most important factors in employee retention. Employees who feel they have a voice in the workplace are likelier to remain in their jobs. The alternative, micromanagement, is time-consuming and places limitations on staff who need to be responsive and available to customer concerns.
Top customer service tips for building an empowered team
When creating a strong customer service team, recruiting the right people with the right qualities is crucial to thrive in a customer service position. In addition, it will be easier to train and impart knowledge to these employees in the future when you seek to empower them in their roles.
Deliver an effective onboarding process
New employees will need an effective onboarding process to learn about the role. This may include specific training on your product or service, customer service soft skills, key job expectations, and success metrics. It’s important to ensure that onboarding is delivered at an appropriate pace to avoid overwhelming new hires with too much information.
Provide appropriate training
Training doesn’t end with onboarding. There are always opportunities during an employee’s time with the company for new training programs to stay sharp with phone etiquette training, new customer service insights, skills training with new software, and regular knowledge-sharing opportunities, possibly involving senior staff members.
Give them the right tools & knowledge
Your employees need the appropriate resources to perform at their best. Customer service can be enhanced by using live engagement tools like video chat and AI chatbots for 24/7 support. There are plenty of help desk solutions, too, like ticketing systems, customer relationship management software, and social media platforms for varied interactions.
Provide the correct technology
Sophisticated hardware solutions can be transformative for customer service, for example, investing in high-quality phone systems and computers that allow for quick, responsive working. In addition, the right hardware will allow you to host effective, top-quality software like customer relationship management programs to keep track of important customer data and their history of support requests.
Regularly update resources & professional development
Keep your team motivated by offering continued professional development. Many employees now seek growth opportunities in their roles, an increasingly critical factor in employee retention and satisfaction. As more employees look to the future of their careers, employers are feeling the necessity to build professional development and learning opportunities into their roles.
Champion autonomy
Offering independence to your customer service team means allowing them a channel to offer feedback, ask questions, and exchange new ideas. They will feel freer to apply their expertise and experience to deal with issues without needing to refer to others. It’s essential to back up talk of autonomy and independence with action and demonstrate trust in your team.
Offer coaching & mentoring
You can boost the morale of your best performers by giving them an essential role by mentoring and coaching new hires. Offering and mentoring positions can foster a feeling of being valued and allow experienced employees to share their specialist knowledge and tips based on their own experience. Building relationships like this between employees will serve to strengthen your team.
Encouraging active listening
An essential part of customer service is the ability to listen attentively. Train your employees to respond with clarifications, making the customer feel like they’re being listened to with care and attention. Ensure that your team members allow the customer to speak so their interactions feel more like an equal exchange.
Unite to empower customer service
A significant step to achieving greater autonomy in your customer service team is eliminating confusion and removing obstacles to their work by giving them greater clarity.
You can implement a long-term solution by creating a handbook on how to speak to customers alongside a ‘support lexicon’ - common, agreed-upon phrases that match the tone you want for your brand, which also considers crucial aspects of good customer service.
You can also make a customer objections document, which is essentially a list of queries and common objections that customers have about your product or service. This document will help supply your customer service ‘front line’ with the necessary information for their role and can usefully inform other departments.
Establishing your customer service processes and workflows will support employees in their decision-making. While it is important to allow autonomy, you must provide guidelines for staff to follow so they’re not working blindly.
By applying these steps, you can ensure that your customer service teams have clear reference points for action and will reduce the number of questions you receive.
Measure employee performance
Once you’ve given your employees the tools, training, and framework for them to succeed on a more independent basis, it’s time to consider evaluating performance. There are several KPIs that you can apply to measure employee performance in customer service.
The first response time is a great indicator of efficiency. It is the time between the first chat attempt made by the customer to the moment that the customer service representative responded. Following that is the average resolution time, which takes a wider view of the average time to address an issue once the conversation has begun.
You can look into total resolved conversations to see how many issues a particular representative has successfully dealt with. A chat survey will also serve you with feedback from customers, determining whether their customer service experience was a positive or negative one.
These key indicators can build a more extensive overview of employee performance, give you insights on where to improve, and provide praise for high-performing employees.
Take a whole company approach
Involving your whole company in your customer service approach can be a truly transformative dynamic. Making sure everyone is involved in product and service training, receiving customer feedback, and involving them in feedback and consistent dialogue will raise standards across the board and implement a new business culture of employee empowerment.
If the entire workforce gains a greater understanding of the customers' points of view and their pain points, it ensures they can deliver the best quality possible, no matter their role.
This is what it means to be a ‘customer-oriented’ business, where a company considers customer impact with every decision based on the extensive information they have, thanks to active listening and interactions.
Companies such as Ritz-Carlton are at the top of their industry because they prioritize the customer experience, going as far as taking notes about breakfast preferences and favored wines in their CRM, to records of birthdays and other anniversaries.
The hotel chain spares no expense in providing for its customer service team, offering employees the option to use up to $2,000 as needed for any customer issue that arises. This is a prime example of a company unafraid to back up words with action when it comes to incorporating top-quality customer service at every level of the business.
Empowered businesses in action
The art of providing good customer service often means examining how well other brands perform in this area. Apple’s customer service philosophy places the customer at the center. You can have the convenience of a local Apple Store appointment with just a few clicks of your mouse. There are customer service agents available to offer customized advice in real-time. While thousands of free online videos cover all aspects of the business, empowering the customers with intimate knowledge.
Netflix provides another great example of a brand offering control to the customer. A personalized viewing experience is guaranteed when engaging with Netflix, thanks to movie and TV show descriptions to inform the audience and previews to help aid decision-making.
Your business can draw on these best practices, taking into account the personalization and intimate knowledge on offer to strengthen the customer relationship with your brand.
The benefits of empowerment in customer service
From the customer perspective, empowering your customer service team provides many benefits that, as a whole, add up to a more positive general experience.
Greater customer satisfaction
An empowered customer service team with the independence to respond directly to queries will more likely deliver direct and immediate answers to customers. After all, there is nothing that your customers will want more than to find immediate assistance without having their valuable time wasted.
Greater customer empathy
When your customer service team can’t provide answers, then it is their job to provide a sympathetic ear to customers who experience issues or are dissatisfied. Empathy can be a two-way street; when your customer feels listened to, they are more likely to feel positive toward your business.
Deeper customer insights
Your customer service team’s insights can go a long way in improving your product or service, with the opportunity to benefit the entire organization. In addition, a stronger relationship between your customers and your service team will strengthen the insights you develop.
Achieving greater efficiency
Empowering your customer service team means smoothing out inter-organizational processes. With a quicker flow of information between different departments, your company as a whole can become more responsive and efficient.
When you empower customer service teams with better training, resources, and tools, it works like an effective equation. The autonomy and happiness of a well-functioning customer service team equal improved employee satisfaction and retention. Once this is guaranteed, the result will be happier, more informed customers who gain a connection with your business and a sense of brand loyalty, meaning an increase in revenue, brand reputation, and credibility. The best part is that with these practical customer service tips, you can begin the empowerment process today.