Christina Marley

Customer service is a team sport — and not just for your customer support team. Accept that you’ll never have a perfect grasp of every issue coming into the support center. Keep up with the big picture by maintaining open lines of communication with your team. And train every employee on your help desk software so they can all pitch in during busy times. Sure, you’ll want to pass highly technical cases to the experts, but everyone needs to be able to help out. Successful startups can tell you that when everyone spends time on the front lines, it’s easier to stay aligned around customers and maintain service levels when things get busy.

There’s nothing like talking to a support agent who really listens on all cylinders. Take time to understand issues and how they affect the customer’s business. When people know you value their needs, they’re more likely to stay with your brand. Encourage service agents to ask questions when interacting with customers. The more your agents know about your customers and their needs, the more of an asset those agents are to both your company and your customers. Your customer support team can also be an amazing source of product innovation. Some successful startups have the customer support team present customer feedback at every company meeting.

Robots are cool, but people would rarely choose to have a conversation with one. Show customers you aren’t a machine. At the end of the day it’s how you make people feel that matters the most. Don’t be afraid to add personality to your service, and encourage agents to add it to their emails. Or to fill the quiet time when they need to pull up account information by asking customers how the weather is or who their favorite sports teams are — basically anything that adds a personal, friendly face to your support operations.