The importance of developing a strong culture in your Customer Service team

Dec 08, 2022 at 01:50pm

A powerful, vibrant customer-centric culture is a strength that cannot be compromised. It is of the absolute essence to treat employees as internal clients, thanking them for their input and acknowledging their issues. Internally, people must understand the value of their work, and feel empowered and respected. This supportive environment helps them deliver the best level of service to customers.

While understanding that no two companies are the same and that every industry has its own customer niche, customer service managers need to dedicate themselves to defining performance measurements while implementing the client’s own vision and the company’s values.

For example, at Rapid Phone Center our employees understand their clients’ organizational culture and are in sync with their clients cultural values. Our customer-centric culture is tangible with our staff and our customers.

Everything that we do has had a direct impact on how we lead our customer experience teams, allowing us the right tools to better develop our people and create highly skilled team members that act as trusted advisors and advocates for our clients.

Based on our experience, we find 6 core elements that make up a great Customer Service culture:

1. Positivity

Though it might sound basic, it is absolutely essential to have a positive attitude when it comes to servicing customers. Agents are problem solvers, and if there is a negative environment for problem solving, a lot of things can go wrong. Optimism is a must.

2. Attitude of Hospitality

Have you ever walked through the lobby of a hotel and been completely swept away from your feet by the hospitality of the host and staff? We want you to feel the same way when you call in. The client should feel thoroughly comfortable and gracefully serviced. This attitude of hospitality begins on the center floor, with agents and managers treating each other in a hospitable manner to evoke the spirit of what we must pass on to our customers.

3. Clear goals

Without goals, we are like leaves flapping in the wind. No direction and no aim is not good. However, many teams make the mistake of confusing their performance indicators with goals. Tracking first call resolution is tracking a key performance metric, not a goal. Goals have to be centered around larger items. For example, one of the goals could be: ´´To reduce customer churn by 25% in Q1 2023´´. This goal follows the SMART method which tells us goals have to be specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. Using this method we are able to write our goals in a way that specifies our destiny both in time and space, which provides a strong direction for the team.

4. Closed feedback loops

Feedback loops are extremely important in a call center environment, or any team for that matter. A feedback loop occurs when we collect data from an agent´s performance and then relay what we were able to extract from our analysis to our agent so that their performance might improve in the future. When data goes full circle in this way, agents are able to gain the benefit of new information and use it positively.

The most effective closed feedback loops have 3 qualities: they are short-term, meaning they analyze the most recent call interactions the agent has had, they are in analyzed real-time by agents, which provides the agent with the most immediate data to act upon, and they are targeted, which means the data analysis is focused on a specific area of improvement, for example wait times.

5. Strong QA managers

Leaders are necessary in every team and there is no distinction in a call center organization. A QA manager brings the voice of experience and knowledge to a team of agents. Managers and QA supervisors are tasked with the hard duty of making sure that the client's vision is implemented while the call center agents are working at optimum capacity.