How to Build a High-Performing Remote Customer Service Team

Key Takeaways:

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•  It’s difficult to build a customer service dream team without the right tools and technology, such as attendance management software.
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•  Setting strategic goals and trackable KPIs, measurable with a time tracker for work, will help you set your customer service team on the right path.
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•  Don’t underestimate the value of training and upskilling - especially in a field that’s constantly evolving and affected by evolving customer expectations.

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Read time: 6 minutes

Customer service has become one of the primary areas of focus for many businesses. The importance of customer service has rapidly grown over the past few years because of the kind of impact it can have on the growth of businesses.

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High-performing customer service teams can help increase your customer retention, improve your brand’s reputation, and lead to a rapid improvement in your ROI. But ensuring the performance of a remote customer service team can be challenging to say the least.

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Your old ways of managing a customer service team might not yield the best results while working remotely. You need to take a different approach and achieve the same results from your remote customer service teams. 

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So, if you are looking for some tips on how you can manage a remote customer service team and ensure utmost performance, then this extensive guide will help you do just that. 

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1. Build your Customer Service Dream Team

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Whatever measures you take to train your remote employees, these steps will only improve your results so much. It’s crucial that you start by picking the right people for your remote customer service team.

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The customer service team who worked from the office may not be as efficient and invested in a remote work environment. Hence, while building your remote customer service team, you need to ensure that they have the following qualities:

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• Ability to perform well without micro-management and constant supervision
• Should be able to prioritize tasks and manage time effectively
• Should preferably understand your company’s values and willing to align their work with it
• Should practice self-discipline

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You cannot try your best to analyze these qualities in a potential candidate before hiring them as your remote customer service team.

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2. Use the Right Customer Service Solution

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Investing in a good-quality and efficient customer service solution is essential for improving the performance of your team. Without the right solution, your team may lose track of all the customer conversations leading to a bad rep for your company.

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Try to look for a solution that allows you to keep track of all customer interactions, customer data, and manage customer relationships in a hassle-free manner. The tool that you pick should be easy-to-use and intuitive for your customer service team to learn and adapt quickly.

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Look for a customer service solution that helps you provide a premium customer experience and build long-term, strong customer relationships. Good analytics and performance tracking are also some of the must-have features to look for in your customer service tool.

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3. Create an Internal Knowledge Base 

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The most significant change that comes along with a remote work environment is the lack of quick, face-to-face connections. 

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In a traditional office workspace, if your customer service team had any problem or queries, they could just come to your office with the question. But the same is not possible in the case of a remote workspace.

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Therefore, it is vital that you create an extensive knowledge base that is entirely for internal purposes. With this, your team can easily refer to the documentation and provide quick resolutions to your customers.

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Lack of such a knowledge base will lead to higher resolution times and frustrated customers that might hurt your customer experience.  

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4. Use Project Management Tools for Operational Efficiency

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Your customer service team will probably be extremely busy with multiple queries and requests coming in from all directions. This may lead to overwhelm for your customer service team and ultimately lead to reduced performance.

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To avoid this, you should consider investing in cloud-based project management software. This will help your team manage all the customer service tasks from a single place and prioritize them to ensure increased efficiency.

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You would not have to micromanage your team and stress over the completion of all tasks. Through a project management tool, you’ll get a bird’s eye view of what your team is working on. You would have a fair idea about all the tasks that are pending with each member of your team.

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5. Set and Track Relevant KPIs

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Measuring the performance of your team is essential if you want to improve the performance of your customer service team progressively. By setting clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), you can give your customer service team a specific goal to work towards.

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With the right goals and direction in mind, your customer service team is bound to improve their overall performance by multiple folds. 

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Here are some of the KPIs that you can set and monitor your team based on that:

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• The ratio of resolved tickets to the total number of tickets
• Customer satisfaction index
• Net promoter score
• Response times
• Time spent on each ticket

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You can keep track of all these KPIs and monitor each team member to evaluate them based on their performance. 

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You can also reward your most productive and high-performing team member based on these metrics. This leads to a healthy sense of competition amongst your customer service team members, leading to an overall improvement in their performance.

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6. Leverage Team Building Activities‍

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Teams who know each other, work better together. And a great way to build the rapport and camaraderie of your team is through team building activities.

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A company like TeamBuilding specializes in team building exercises that will bring your team closer together and perform better. Team building comes in many forms, including office games, workshops and trust building exercises.

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Team building is essential to healthy work culture and is also a fun reward for your staff. It has been shown to enhance job satisfaction, employee retention, productivity and profitability.

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7.   Offer Virtual Training

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To stay relevant in the fast-changing field of customer service, your employees need to demonstrate agility and a willingness to upskill to keep pace with the industry.

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One of the best ways to build an agile remote customer service team is to offer regular skill development and training opportunities. It’s only with one eye constantly looking ahead that you’ll be able to build a robust, and high-performing customer service team that can deal with whatever challenges lie ahead.

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Continuous learning is one of the main roadblocks that stands between you and your ideal remote customer service team.

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How you deliver this will depend on your industry, your business, and of course, your employees.

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The best place to start though is with a skills audit:

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1.  Create a list of skills that you want your customer service team to possess. The list can include both hard and soft skills.
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2.  Gather information on your employees through surveys, interviews, or questionnaires. You can use AI language-based models to speed up this process and help make sure you don’t miss out any important questions.
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3.  Conduct skill tests if possible, to more accurately gauge the capabilities of your employees.
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4.  Collect and analyze the data, looking for patterns and areas for improvement.
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5.  Now all that’s left to do is determine the best delivery vehicle for training your employees in the relevant skill areas. It could be online courses, in-person workshops, Zoom calls, or other means.

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Consider using an employee monitoring solution such as Insightful to proactively identify strengths and problem areas among your employees. With time data you can more easily spot productivity trends and pull back the curtain on the reasons behind peak - and poor- performance.
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8.   Open Clear Communication Lines

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Communication has to be a two-way process if you want to build a high-performing remote customer service team. 

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In an ideal world, information would seamlessly flow back and forth between coworkers and managers. That way, problems would be quickly addressed, everyone would know what they’re doing in every moment, and feedback would be appropriately registered.

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While you may not be able to reach a utopian view of workplace communication, there’s a lot you can do to establish clear lines of contact:

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• Lean on virtual communication tools - tools like Slack and Zoom enjoyed astronomical rises to popularity in 2020 and 2021. Now they’re commonplace, so there’s no reason to overthink effective communication: choose a tool that works for you and your team, and implement it.

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• Take and provide feedback -  To build the best customer service team possible, you have to be able to both take and provide feedback. Offer constructive suggestions on how employees can improve their workflows and processes, but also make space for them to express their views and concerns.

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• Model customer communication - one of the best ways you can help your customer service team deliver the best possible service, is by modeling how you want them to communicate in your interactions with them. Don’t just tell them, show them through your words and actions how to treat a valued customer.

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10. Implement AI in your Workflows

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It doesn’t matter what type of team you’re building, if you want to prioritize operational efficiency - you should consider implementing AI in your workflows and processes.

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From hiring the right people to making their job easier so they can focus on the most meaningful work activities, AI has the power to drastically improve the way you and your teams work.

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Let’s use one of the most popular use cases for the customer services industry: AI chatbots.

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First, it’s important to clarify that an AI chatbot isn’t going to replace a human customer service agent. But what it can do is lighten the workload of your customer service team, so they can focus on doing what they do best: serving customers to the best of their ability.

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How?

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AI chatbots can assist in a number of meaningful ways, including:

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•  Around-the-clock customer support - the best customer service team is the one that is available 24/7 for all your customers around the world. An AI chatbot can make sure customer inquiries are addressed whatever the time of day.
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•  Instant response - even if your customer service team is great at what it does, the modern customer demands an almost instantaneous response. An AI chatbot can handle and vet initial customer inquiries before handing them over to the right agent.
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•  Scale without compromise - as you start to scale your business, you’re going to want to offer the same personalized customer support without compromise. With an AI chatbot you can automate certain processes and interactions (under the guidance of your customer service team) while still delivering tailored responses from real humans.

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Building your Best Remote Customer Service Team

Managing a remote customer service team can be challenging. And improving their performance and productivity may seem like a daunting task. But, you can take some measures to ensure that your remote customer service team does their best. 

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Take help from the tips mentioned in this post, and you’ll definitely see a boost in their performance very soon.

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Updated on December 21st, 2023