Remote team best practices

While remote customer support used to be a brand strategy to ramp up support globally and minimize overhead costs, today – it is a necessity. 

But most companies remain indifferent to allowing the employees to work remotely, especially when it involves the customer support team. This is only because they haven’t created a standardized system for internal collaboration, tracking, and attributing the efforts put in by support agents. 

With the right tools, technology, and managing techniques, remote customer support can be adopted seamlessly:

#1 Train your support team to manage time 

When the distinction between workplace and home starts disappearing, time-management skills become crucial. And with time zone difference playing a major part in managing these remote support teams, it is imperative to have proper time distribution.  

Send your team visuals and tutorials of how to organize their working time. The first step that must be taken is to distribute the time according to two criteria the urgency and importance of the task. Classify them like this:

1. Urgent and important (SOS)

2. Not urgent and important (Complex tasks with later deadlines)

3. Urgent but not important (emails, and quick-fix responses)

4. Not urgent and not important (keeping tabs on social media)

Advise your employees to not take a rain check on the second type of task as it will help them keep track of their schedule and stay organized--irrespective of the deadline. This way, proper training can help your remote team remain focused and time-conscious.

Tools for managing time: When I Work (shift-scheduling), Timely (comprehensive time tracking).

#2 Route customer inquiries to the right remote agents

KPIs such as average hold time, average transfer rate, and first contact resolution rate have a significant impact on the CSAT score of your contact center.

To improve these metrics and deliver a great customer experience, you need to design internal processes for routing customer inquiries to the right agents cost-efficiently.

Implement advanced ticket/call routing and strategies, such as geographic routing and skills-based routing to send tickets to team members that are best equipped to handle their needs. This will cut down on unnecessary wait time and minimize customer frustration while streamlining workflow to improve cost-efficiency and customer delight.

Tools for efficient routing: Helpdesk like Freshdesk, Jira Service Desk, and Zendesk.

#3 Ensure proper communication within the team

Team communication is key to success for any virtual teams and using the right communication and collaboration tools will allow managers to maintain a high level of transparency, minimize errors or delays, and streamline workflows.

Video conferencing software (Skype, Zoom) can facilitate face-to-face communication and productivity apps (Slack, Google Hangouts) helps ensure that every team member has access to the latest information in real-time.

Managers should establish a team check-in schedule and foster constructive feedback in team communications. They should also give performance reviews based on KPIs to help individual team member focus on specific areas for improvement.

Tools for communication: Zoom (hassle-free video calling), Slack (instant messaging with seamless integrations)

Apart from the above pointers, endpoint security is a major concern for remote support teams. Equip your employees with robust privacy tools, such as VPN (ExpressVPN, IPVanish), secure browser, ad blocker, and anti-virus solution. Whatever time-tracking, project management, and customer support software you’re using, make sure they allow you to monitor KPIs with robust reporting functionalities.