Product Knowledge
Educate your support team on the products to maximize the chances of successful First-Contact Resolution. First contact resolution (FCR) refers to resolving a ticket on the first try, without having to search for an answer and get back to the customer. When customers have to wait hours or days for a resolution, it decreases trust and satisfaction.
Ideally, they would have first-hand experience using the product to put themselves in the customer's shoes. Ensuring that your front-line agents are knowledgable reduces the need for escalation to other team members. Dedicated help desk groups increase your FCR rate.
Maintaining a high FCR rate is important because 70% of customers say that valuing their time is the most important thing you can do to deliver excellent service.
Emphasize Quality over Speed
Customers care about quickly getting their problems solved so they can go back to their lives, but that does not mean that the interaction has to be soulless and automated. In fact, one thing that is equally as important as resolution speed is agent competence and friendliness during interactions.
Despite the overwhelming focus on quickly solving tickets, automating processes, and first-contact-resolution, ticket times do not necessarily represent good customer support and hardly ensures that they are being treated well. Having an outsized focus on metrics can lead to less personalized and thoughtful interactions with customers that truly allow your team to go above and beyond and deliver great support.
Mastering Tools
In order for agents to be effective, they must be capable of wielding the tools they're expected to use on a daily basis. Shadowing more experienced members of the team to observe how tools like Zendesk, Front or other Integrations and services are used goes a long way in terms of ensuring they're well-equipped to start handling customer requests.
Assign Mentors
Each new hire should be paired with an experienced teammate to help them reach performance expectations faster. Setting up a direct mentor-mentee relationship to utilize in their training and growth when they encounter difficult or novel situations will reduce their confusion and increase their self-confidence towards eventual mastery of the domain.
Even Load Distribution
Depending on the ticket assignment and routing strategies you have deployed, some agents might receive an outsized amount of requests, say if they assigned a customer with a great number of requests relative to other account, or if they're the designated expert for a particular issue that occurs more frequently than other issues.
Make sure that your agents are handling a near equal load (or as equal to it as possible) to ensure that their performance is correctly benchmarked to foster a healthy amount of competitiveness and reduce the likelihood of resentment and feelings of unfairness.
Measure Performance
You should always measure the efforts of your team. Aide helps you perform inbound analytics so you can evaluate to find weak links in the chain and make improvements where needed. Measure metrics like which topics are most recurring, which topics require the most back-and-forth, and so on. With this insight, you can continually improve your customer support team.
Use Aide
Aide helps you reduce onboarding time by automatically suggesting resolution steps for common issues including complex multi-step processes (e.g. managing user access, how to process a return or an exchange) and helps you learn from your ticket history to optimize your support operations and create and manage shared knowledge across your team.