How to Build a Thriving Customer Service Management Team

Help Desk Software / November 2024

Building a customer service management team is challenging. It requires detailed hiring and training processes for various agent personas and implementing different workflows for solving simple and complex customer issues.

These requirements are often met with challenges, ranging from staff shortages and product complexity to a lack of clear communication and information overload.

Philippa Cresswell, Customer Service Director at East Midlands Railway, compounds this into three distinct challenges:

1. Lack of first-contact resolutions from frontline colleagues (which can exacerbate and prolong a negative experience before contact with the Customer Service Centre)
2. A potential inability to recognise and adapt to changing customer expectations and priorities
3. Changing or untimely information streams (creating a need to allocate additional resources to proactively seek updates)

To face these challenges head-on and set your customer service management team up for success, there are two key areas for investment; a winning customer support strategy for simple and complex issues, and utilising customer service tools.

A successful support strategy helps find the best ways to support your team’s workload, understanding what kind of work they handle and the effort involved. Choosing the right tools ensures everything runs smoothly and tasks are easily scalable.

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Understand Your Customer Service Management Needs

Like any planning and implementation process, you must first understand the current way of working. For customer service managers, that means knowing your support team’s needs and workload.

What Does Your Contact Volume Look Like?

Your contact patterns hide a lot of information, especially about customer request volumes. You can track how many requests come in daily, weekly, and monthly. From there, you can look for patterns when customers reach out most often – which helps with staffing decisions.
You should also monitor how long it takes to handle different types of requests. This can have an impact on how many team members you need available at any given time.

What Are the Common Issue Classifications?

Different types of customer issues need different handling approaches:

• Simple/Quick-fix issues: These can usually be solved with self-service options, either online via chatbots and knowledge bases or by phone by pressing specific numbers on the keypad.
• Technical problems: Issues that require someone with specific product or service knowledge.
• Complex situations: Issues that need input from multiple departments or product and technical specialists.

Using a mix of approaches will help to structure your team and choose the right tools. For example, if you’re seeing lots of simple, repetitive questions, investing in a good knowledge base should be a priority. If you have the same query at certain times of the day, then a self-service option could give you the most return on investment.

Customer Communication Preferences

Customer interactions form the basis of your business, and each one has its own preferences. With this in mind, you should pay attention to how customers like to get help:

• Some prefer finding answers independently with articles, tutorial videos, and FAQs.
• Others want to talk to a real person and explain their problem to a human consultant.
• Most people expect quick responses through live chat services and gen-AI chatbots.
• Some customers need detailed email explanations they can refer to later (also known as tickets).

Identify the Team Member Characteristics Needed

The difference between a successful and a poor customer service management team is the people you hire – your service reps. You need a mix of agents that are skilled in handling all types of customer issues across multiple channels.

An HBR study revealed seven types of reps; Accommodators, Competitors, Controllers, Empathisers, Hard Workers, Innovators, and Rocks. The most common type of rep in this study was Empathisers, making up 32% of all frontline service reps.

You’ll want to look for team members who show:

Exceptional Problem-Solving Skills

These are the gems in your team who can think on their feet and find creative solutions. Good problem solvers don’t just follow scripts either. They understand the underlying issues and can adapt their approach to match the urgency of an issue.

Emotional Intelligence

This is a personality dimension that goes beyond just being good with people. Look for people who can:

• Read customer emotions with empathy
• Stay calm when dealing with frustrated customers and not take it personally
• Adjust their communication style to match the customer
• Show genuine concern while maintaining professionalism with customers

Adaptability

Customer service changes over time as people adapt to new developments in the industry. To stay in line with customer expectations your team members have to:

• Learn new tools and processes quickly as they are adopted
• Switch between different types of issues and customers smoothly
• Stay positive when procedures change and take them onboard
• Handle unexpected situations with confidence and ask questions when needed

Communication and Listening Skills

Clear communication is the name of the game in customer service. Great customer service staff that are invaluable to your operation can:

• Explain complicated issues in simple terms while under pressure
• Write clearly and professionally to both customers and stakeholders
• Listen attentively and ask the right questions
• Communicate effectively with both customers and teammates, handing over issues between shifts and maintaining awareness of ongoing issues

Our Expert’s View On…

What Skills & Traits Are Needed to Build a Successful Support Team?

“It’s important to consider that the most effective customer resolutions are not necessarily the quickest, as some customers may need additional time and assurances to fully resolve their queries or concerns. It’s valuable for agents to have the skills [The ability to reframe their thinking and take a step back to consider a customer’s whole experience…empathy and listening skills…the initiative to engage with stakeholders], regardless of whether they are Controller or their defining characteristic is empathetic.”

Philippa Cresswell, Customer Service Director at East Midlands Railway

Create a Tiered Team Structure Set-up for Success

It’s important to build a customer service management team with well-defined roles and responsibilities. Defining a tiered approach to your customer service management can help create a thriving support environment.

Tier 1: Front-Line Support

Tier 1 support is the bedrock of your customer service. It is here where first impressions are made by customers, and must always be positive. Tier 1 responsibilities include:

• Handling common customer questions
• Managing initial customer communications
• Resolving simple issues quickly
• Identifying when an escalation is needed for more complex problems

A team member’s soft skills (or people skills) must not be underestimated here, as Laurie Williams, Founder of Man And Van Greenwich, explains:

“Insufficient soft-skills training can be the difference between a resolved issue and a frustrated customer. A team might know the product inside-out, but without empathy and clear communication, that knowledge goes nowhere.”

Tier 2: Technical Specialists

Tier 2 usually consists of Tier 1 support members who have upskilled and progressed with further domain knowledge. These agents have seen almost everything and use this experience to tackle complicated issues and queries.

Some characteristics that these team members exhibit are:

• The ability to tackle complicated technical issues
• Deep product knowledge
• Being able to be backup for Tier 1 team members when there are staff shortages or busy periods (staff shortages and high turnover rates can affect response times and overall service quality)
• Helping to develop solutions for common problems

Tier 3: Advanced Problem Resolution

When Tier 1 and 2 fail, it’s time to call in the cavalry. Tier 3 team members are less likely to be customer-facing. They are normally the technical specialists who are familiar with the procedures and technical systems. They are needed for:

• Handling the most difficult issues
• Working on system-related problems
• Developing new support procedures in partnership with management
• Working with product teams on fixes to systems and procedures

Quality Assurance Team

After the smoke clears, the QA team sees how incidents have been handled. Their reporting and performance metrics are the foundation of the service strategy. Some of the additional tasks that this teams performs are:

• Reviews on customer interactions with your team
• Providing coaching and feedback
• Identifying training where gaps are spotted
• Maintaining service quality in line with management expectations

Knowledge Management Team

Your teams will have the most accurate information at their fingertips. The Knowledge Management team gathers resources and data to create useful resources for the service team.

They are responsible for:

• Creating and updating help files and documentation
• Maintaining the knowledge base and updating it often
• Developing training material
• Capturing solutions to new problems, and steps needed to be taken by the service teams

Develop Workflows for Solving Simple & Complex Customer Issues

Handling Simple Issues With Self-Service Options

Sometimes the easiest way to solve a problem is to let customers figure it out on their own. So your customer service management team can succeed in these areas, you need to get certain aspects of the self-service process right:

• Look at what questions are commonly being aksed across all channels (email, live chat, chatbots, etc.)
• Build a knowledge base that is easy to navigate and covers all simple issues (a good example is Atlassian’s knowledge base)
• Automatically point customers to resources (your team shouldn’t have to do it manually)
• Keep an eye on what’s working and what isn’t (if nobody’s reading an article, it probably needs work)
• Let customers tell you when something’s not clear by providing feedback forms and surveys

As generative AI tools penetrate the customer service management market, less simple and common customer issues are being handled by human agents, which can be both beneficial for support teams and problematic.

Philippa Cresswell explains that “AI has the potential to allow agents to focus on more complex casework, which in turn can make their roles more interesting and improve job retention. It is important, however, that agents remain comfortable processing minimal support issues, as the reputational risk of errors with these tasks may be heightened.”

Addressing Complex Issues with Direct Support

Customer issues go beyond simple troubleshooting and product information requests. More complex and technical issues need to be addressed in different ways:

• Being available in time zones and on channels wherever your customers are (phone, email, live chat, social media, etc.)
• Problems need to be escalated and addressed right away
• Assign the right agent with the necessary knowledge and skills
• Keep in communication with customers and provide status updates once the problem has been resolved
• Learn from what went wrong and use failures as lessons

Implement the Right Tools for Modern Customer Service Management

With the foundations in place for building a thriving customer service management team, it’s important to ensure your support processes run as smoothly and efficiently as possible. This is achievable with the use of a customer service management tool, of which there are many to choose from:

Help Desk Software

Help Desk Software centralises, unifies, and automates customer support activities such as ticket management, customer interactions, and self-service resources. It is seen as an all-in-one solution that provides all the necessary tools to build a winning customer service workflow and manage a growing team of support agents – with the ability to integrate third-party tools such as live chat, chatbots, and remote support.

Knowledge Base Systems

70% of customers prefer to solve their own requests, making self-service resources, like a knowledge base, integral to successful customer support. Having a knowledge base allows customers to find answers on their own, freeing up the bandwidth of your support agents. Features to look out for include search functionality, content categorisation, and analytics to monitor usage.

Remote Support Tools

Sometimes you’ll need to directly assist customers with their systems, particularly among IT support teams. Remote support tools enable tech support agents to quickly fix issues without physically needing to see the issue. These tools are a game changer for troubleshooting technical issues that cannot be resolved over the phone or via email.

Live Chat and AI Chatbots

If you want to provide the best round-the-clock service then you should offer real-time assistance in the form of live chat and chatbots. These tools are proven to improve response times, retention rates, and customer satisfaction levels. AI chatbots handle routine questions and allow human agents to focus on more complicated issues, while also offering 24/7 customer service.

The global adoption of AI-powered customer service tools has enabled support teams to thrive. But, in some cases, there is still a sense of caution. Andrew Osbourne, Owner of Ozzie Mowing & Gardening, explains:

“Technology can be a bit of a double-edged sword. While automation and AI can help streamline processes, relying too heavily on these tools can take away the personal touch that customers appreciate. Finding the right balance is key.”

Successful Customer Service Management Examples to Follow

Zappos

Zappos doesn’t just sell shoes – they’re obsessed with making customers happy. Their secret is empowering their support team to make decisions. They’re always there when their customers need them – 24/7, no exceptions. Here’s What Sets Them Apart:

• A Customer-First Approach: Zappos puts customers at the heart of everything. No scripts, no rushing – their team is free to take time to help every customer.
• Staff Freedom: Support staff can make their own choices to help customers. There are no strict rules about call times or fixed solutions.
• Free Returns: Shopping is risk-free with free shipping both ways. Don’t like it? Just send it back at no cost.
• Always Available: The support team is there 24/7. It doesn’t matter when you need help, someone’s ready to assist.
• The Right Team: They hire people who naturally love helping others; no need to teach empathy when it’s already there.

Amazon

Amazon knows that most of its customers would rather solve problems themselves, so they make it easy. When Amazon is required to resolve an issue they are very quick to get the issue sorted, keeping customers happy. Amazon’s Customer Service Philosophy is to:

• Know Your Customers: Really understand what customers want and need before making changes. This helps create updates that matter.
• Start With the End Goal: Think about what customers want first, then work backwards to build it. It’s like planning a trip starting with where you want to end up.
• Trust Your Team: Let everyone share ideas and give them the tools to make them happen. Good ideas can come from anywhere in the company.
• Spread Out Testing: Different teams can try new things and learn from customer feedback. No need to keep innovation locked in one department.
• Think Long-Term: Focus on solving problems that won’t go away tomorrow. Build solutions that will still be useful years from now.

Apple

Apple’s Genius Bar allows customers to state their problem online, and finish it in-store. Customers don’t have to explain the issue repeatedly, as there is a clear history for each ticket. Apple is proactive and often catches problems before its customers do. Apple Store Employees Are Trained to:

• Welcome: Start with a warm hello and make each customer feel special when they walk in.
• Ask Questions: Check what the customer needs by having a friendly chat. This helps you find the right solution for them.
• Show Solutions: Give customers options they can use right away. Focus on what works best for them today.
• Pay Attention: Really listen when customers share concerns or problems. Show them you care about getting things right.
• Say Goodbye: End with a friendly goodbye and let them know they’re welcome back anytime. Make it feel more like helping a friend than just making a sale.

Stand-out Strategies Employed by These Customer Service Leaders

• They trust their support teams to actually make decisions
• They invest in good tech (because trying to save money on bad tech just costs more in the long run)
• They make sure customers get the same great service no matter how they reach out
• They’re always tweaking and improving things

Whether handling simple questions or tackling complex problems, it’s all about making things easy for your customers. When you do that right, everything else falls into place.