Best Practices for a more Efficient Customer Service Department

From fostering repeat business to managing your brand’s reputation, your ecommerce company’s approach to customer service is critical for lasting success. But before you can help your customers, you need to be able to help yourself – and unfortunately, many customer service departments struggle with underlying talent management issues that impact performance.
    
As representatives of your company, customer service agents can be a defining factor in the customer experience your business is known for. While innate people-skills are a valuable trait for agents, it’s useless to customers if the agent has not been thoroughly trained. Don’t exclusively focus on training agents to follow scripts and internal procedures – incorporate the same types of training you give to sales associates. Sales training can help customer service become experts on your products and brand, which increases their productivity since they can answer customer questions in the first response and handle multiple inquiries at once (over chat, email, and/or phone).

But in order to be effective, this productivity must be channeled according to specialization. For instance, customer inquiries can be grouped into two buckets:

• Sales – customers want to clarify product information, shipping, and return policies, or get advice for selecting a product that meets their needs.
• Service – customers want to solve a problem, which could require purchase history research, technical troubleshooting, escalations, and coordination with other departments or 3rd parties.

The workflow for each bucket is drastically different, so expecting agents to handle inquiries from both can negatively impact performance. Sales inquiries won’t get the speedy, responsive attention required because the agent may also be bogged down in technical research. Meanwhile, because service inquiries can take longer to resolve, distracting the agent with sales chats makes the service interaction take longer than necessary. While an experienced agent can handle both types of inquiries, you may see better results and efficiency by having agents focus on one type at a time.

By thoroughly training your agents and having them work on inquiries that follow the same workflows, you’ll increase the effectiveness of your customer service department – and in turn, you’ll have more satisfied customers.