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5 Tips On Fostering The Culture Of Collaboration In Customer Service

5 Tips On Fostering The Culture Of Collaboration In Customer Service

Customer satisfaction plays one of the most crucial roles in business success. Almost any business that has thrived through the years and grown immensely mastered the art and science of providing quality customer service and building suitable systems to support a customer-centric culture. Studies indicate that 84% of consumers think of a company’s customer service as a critical factor in deciding whether to purchase from a company. Accordingly, only 3% indicate that it doesn’t play a role in the buying process. This tells us that any business with ambitions of customer growth needs to think about customer retention by providing excellent after-sales service.

Customer Service and Collaboration

Companies use technologies for all sorts of after-sales processes. They use it to automate customer support processes, provide prompt feedback, and triage concerns better. A customer service department might often neglect to build enough systems to allow for collaboration between staff. This lack of attention might often lead to several problems, including concerns falling through the cracks due to a lack of turnover, repetitive concerns, or slower ticket resolution. Just like any aspect of company or business operations, customer service requires collaboration and constant communication to be efficient. Virtual customer service software developers have emphasized creating solutions that allow customer support agents and personnel to collaborate more seamlessly. By doing so, companies can cut down wait times and solve customers’ concerns and problems faster.

How to Become More Collaborative in Customer Service

To succeed as a customer service department, and as a company entirely, customer service must become more collaborative. Here are some practices that will encourage more collaboration among customer service staff.

1. Use one customer support portal

When managing a customer service desk, some customer service managers or teams make the mistake of using multiple channels. Jumping between emails, chat support platforms, and even SMS can be confusing for teams to manage. What might help is having one customer support portal for all staff to refer to avoid miscommunication or missed concerns. There are various customer support software ticketing systems that allow customer service departments and staff to manage and access one singular portal. Sometimes even just having one shared inbox to refer to can help avoid the clutter of multiple conversations with one client, leading to less disarray and confusion on both the customer and customer service agents’ sides.

2. Provide as much context as possible

When managing customer service concerns— especially those that might take a few back-and-forth conversations to resolve fully— it’s good practice to keep a central log of conversations and notes about clients’ various concerns. These logs are the best way to give context to a staff member in case someone might have to step in mid-resolution or if there might be a handshake between two different teams. Hipporello helps keep logs innovatively by using a kanban board to manage customer service concerns. By integrating with Trello, a project management system, customer service teams can log conversations as comments and put in attachments a customer might send to provide more context to their specific cases.

3. Improve knowledge bases together

Running a company knowledge base— a web page or site that provides answers to frequently asked questions— is one of the best ways to provide instant support to common customer concerns. Up to 45% of companies offering a self-service knowledge base have reported increased site traffic and decreased phone calls. And who better to develop and improve these knowledge bases than customer service staff? By constantly collaborating and communicating, after-sales teams can improve a company’s knowledge base and cut costs and improve productivity by miles.

4. Exchange best practices

The rise of data science and analytics has made it so much easier for companies to measure and compare notes. Many customer support software ticketing systems also give performance management analytics and data like average time spent on concerns, number of emails exchanged, number of unique problems per category or class of issue, and so on. Some customer service collaboration examples around sharing best practices include using this data to figure out more effective ways to resolve cases and issues or reviewing data to share what works and what doesn’t when collaborating on areas of improvement.

5. Maximize software usage

Using customer support software isn’t just about using technology for the mere sake of using tech. Software exists to make things easier for staff to focus on the activities that matter most. It’s not a secret that many customer service personnel give up on collaboration, team review, and systems check because they run out of time simply taking care of customer service management’s administrative side. Using software helps by automating tasks like responding to simple queries, user tracking, and so on. Check out these customer service software examples from CompareCamp to find the software that will give your team enough time to collaborate and brainstorm regularly.

Customer Service: Worth the Investment

Customer service has its own respective costs for sure. But statistics indicate that an improvement of 5% in customer retention rates can lead to profit increases of 25% to 95%. That’s why investing in the right tools and training to facilitate collaborative customer service will never be a dead investment.

Service Desk for Trello allows you to collaborate with your team easily. As Trello is an easy-to-use project management tool, it makes it easier for customer service teams to handle customer tickets by providing a collaborative board. All you need to do is to add Hipporello Service Desk Power-up to your Trello board to get started. The power-up comes with a web portal, which can be customized. Forms filled from the web portal and emails are received as Trello cards, of which you can assign to team members to resolve the requests. Moreover, it allows you to send emails to customers directly from the created cards for the request. With the help of the two-way conversation happening on Trello, all your team members can be informed about the thread of communication with the customer while the agents do not need to switch tools to communicate with customers.