What are your remote support hacks?

Well, remote support hacks are personal to every person, team and company. What I feel are the best hacks are those that work at multiple levels - at an organization level, on a team level and for you individually. This can be achieved by defining 3 key tenets: process, routine and tools. Let me take you through the meaning and significance of these three aspects. 

1. PROCESS: This becomes the most important tenet because it governs how your entire organization tackles customer support. I have tried to briefly cover each aspect below:

   1. Hire the Right People: Besides basic soft skills and technical knowledge required for the support role, you also need to look for qualities that will allow an employee to excel at remote work. Some key traits include being a self-manager, self-motivator, and good communicator.

   2.  Provide Extensive On-boarding and Support: As remote support agents work across geographies and timezones, they may not be able to get help from their teammates right away. It’s therefore important that they get comprehensive onboarding and training so that they can work independently with confidence. 

   3. Route Customer Inquiries To the Right Agents: To Deliver a great customer experience, you need to design internal processes for routing customer inquiries to the right agents.  This will cut down on unnecessary wait time and minimize customer frustration while streamlining workflow to improve cost-efficiency.

   4. Ensure Proper Communication:  Effortless team collaboration is the key to success for any virtual team, and this can be achieved easily by using the right communication tools. They will allow managers to maintain a high level of transparency, minimize errors or delays, and streamline workflows.

   5. Implement Cybersecurity Measures: When your support team operates remotely and uses remote working tools, you need to be mindful of the cybersecurity risks that are prevalent with such a setup. Equip your employees with robust privacy tools, such as VPN, secure browser, ad blocker, and anti-virus solution. Also, make sure they’re running the latest versions of all software to minimize unnecessary risks.  

   6. Monitor and Track KPIs: While monitoring the performance of individual agents is important, you also need to consider how various factors come together to impact the performance of the remote customer support team as a whole.

2. ROUTINE: Inculcating a daily routine becomes essential in a remote working scenario as it helps you stay motivated and productive.

   1. Fix a working schedule and let your peers know when you will be available.  It is important that people are aware of your break timings to avoid any unnecessary communication delays.

   2. Catch up once daily, even if you have no updates to share, it is important to cadence with the team about what’s happening in their lives.

   3. Be vocal about what you are doing, the problems you are facing and your achievements. As a remote employee, you need to be extra careful about making your voice heard. This can be done by shooting a simple FYI email, or through any other medium of your choice.

   4. Refer to knowledge bases often. When you are working remotely, there might be certain changes in the product that you’re unaware of. To keep yourself updated, ensure that you keep an eye on your company’s knowledge base and FAQs. 

3. APPS: You are only as good as your tools. Make sure your teams have the right set of tools to stay motivated and productive!

   1. A full-fledged customer service application like Freshdesk.

   2. A good collaboration tool like Slack or Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams.

   3. A robust project management tool like Trello or Asana or Freshrelease.

   4. A time tracking tool like Timely or When I work