The Art of Excellent Customer Service 101 – Organizing Your Live Chat Teams

Posted on January 23, 2012 by bill_t

Okay, you’re all set. You’ve hired some sparkling customer service reps and sales folk with great experience and winning personalities. You’ve got Olark on your Web pages and you’re ready to go.

What next? Organizing your team into well, a team.  Sounds simple and sometimes it is if your business only requires an operator or two to handle all the sales and customer service inquiries.  But if you’ve got a high traffic site with quite separate areas for technical support, sales, developer support or any other variations, it becomes vital to organize in such a way to get the proper live chat operators connecting with the right site visitors.

Olark has a solution in one word:  Groups!

By using Groups you can designate chats originating on specific pages to go to only members of a specific group.

For instance on a page dedicated to sales info you might want only your crack sales team folks to get chat requests, and your tech support guys to get the how-to questions from your help page(s).  Or perhaps your CEO has offered to participate (we highly recommend as a best practice everyone in your company playing a role in interacting directly with your customers) but doesn’t want to get flooded with tech support chats – so you can segregate him/her to a special “Chat with the boss” page.  Use your imagination.

So how do you accomplish that?

In your Olark Dashboard in the Operators tab (where you’ll set up your sales and support reps with their operator accounts) you’ll find a button to “create groups”

Be brave and click on “Create Group” to  create your first group.

The Group is created as “New Group” (creative, eh?) but you can name it anything you like right away by clicking on the edit icon next to the default snappy name.

You can add as many of your operators to a group as you like by clicking on the add to group drop down menu which will show all your current operators  (ops can be members of multiple groups of course, if that fits your schema).

A small snippet of code (seen in the gray box above) is automatically generated, which you can copy/paste to place on the page right below the Olark chat code.  Put that in place and you’ve got team organization, baby!

Team organization via Olark Groups;  as simple as pie.

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The Art of Excellent Customer Service 101 — How to Hire the Right People

Posted on January 13, 2012 by bill_t

Okay, you’ve made the right first decision; Live chat for your Customer service and/or sales teams.   Good move.  You’ve got the Olark chat box installed, you’ve connected your IM client and added operators.  So what next to get the most out of the Live chat process?

If I’ve said this once, I’ve said it a thousand times:  All the cool/slick technology still is dependent on having the right people on the spot using it in such a way that it best represents your company.   It’s vital that the people who have boots on the ground, first contact with your customers and clients be truly excellent at their jobs.

So how to make sure you get:

* actual greatest CS rep known, Miranda D.  from Topspin Media in Santa Monica!

Instead of this:

What are those intangible, yet highly critical traits to look for when interviewing and choosing members of your support/CS team?  Is there magic involved and is there a way to quantify the data in  your search and make sure you never make a mistake?   Well no, no magic involved…..

I stick to a pretty basic set of  6 personality traits, which I endeavor to bring out from the interview process:

  1. Genuine warmth: A person that exudes friendliness, caring about other people and an upbeat and outgoing personality.
  2. Empathic: Able to understand other people’s feelings and relate well and be sympathetic to someone under stress.
  3. A good listener: A person who trends toward active listening in order to fully understand an issue or problem before acting
  4. Conscientious: It sounds basic, but it’s vital to have people who by their nature take pride in taking care of every little detail perfectly
  5. Anticipatory: This sounds as though it’s antithetical to #3 but it’s slightly different.   A person who is excellent at anticipating cause and effect can save much time in not just answering the main question but also digs deep to make sure every corner of the customer’s problem is fully resolved by the time the conversation is over.
  6. Optimistic: Again, it sounds basic, but an optimistic attitude is vital in avoiding burn-out as the daily exposure to people sometimes in stress and not acting in tune with their better angels can drag a person down.

Having a 6 point plan is easy.  Making the right decision isn’t always an exact science.  I use a combination of carefully crafted scenario questions  (thank you Psych 1A in college) and trust my gut above and beyond trying to quantify sometime soft traits.  I recommend bringing the whole interview team in on the 5-6 traits you’re looking to find and trusting your staff to give you strong backup during the process.   When you get one of the greats (like Miranda above) you often know it instantly.  Others you need to try out, guide and develop more slowly into becoming standout superstars on your CS team.

Good luck to you in building your team. It’s both harder than you think to find a pool of the right people, yet relatively easy to make the right decision once you know what you’re looking for.

Later,

Bill T

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Stress Test Your Help Desk

Posted on January 11, 2012 by LaurenCarlson

A guest blog post by our friend Lauren Carlson:

The holiday season may be done, but it’s always good to reflect on what we’ve learned in order to make improvements and resolutions for the new year. First, let’s look back at the holiday season. On my blog over at Software Advice, I suggested some last-minute help desk checklist items for companies to do in order to prep for the increased volume of inquiries. Companies that employed these found that they improved help desk management, making things run even smoother, and boosting performance going into the new year.

Here is the last-minute checklist that helped companies have a much happier holiday:

  • Create a holiday FAQ list – If you think about it, you can probably guess the types of questions you will be getting during the holiday season. Customers will have more requests in regard to gifts, shipping and product availability. Creating a FAQ list for your help desk and service center employees will help resolve more issues on the first call.
  • Cross-Train Staff – Many companies will hire seasonal employees to help manage the higher volumes of the holiday season. Another suggestion is to cross-train all of your employees to be a support agent. This provides even more service touch points in the organization, improving overall service across the organization.
  • Communicate availability – Everyone needs a holiday, even businesses! However, customers are generally under a lot of stress during this time of year and will want answers immediately. They understand that you may not be available 24-7, but it is important that you make is extremely clear when you will/will not be available, and let them know ahead of time. This will reduce confusion and stress for your customers.
  • Support your agents – Customers are stressed, but your agents are, too. It is important for companies to develop a plan of agent support, such as rewards, bonuses, in-office “treats” like chair massages or lunch. Keeping your service team relaxed and happy will ensure that they are able to provide the best possible service.

Another great use of the hectic holidays is to see how well your service center and other departments are performing. The holidays may be a crazy time, but they are actually a great occasion for performance monitoring. Why? Because it’s basically your day-to-day business activities on max speed. So you had 72 percent first-call resolution rates in August. Great. What about the day after Christmas?

I suggest five areas to monitor:

  • Employee onboarding
  • Internal collaboration
  • Peak load management
  • Emergency response processes
  • Customer satisfaction

You can read about each of these in more depth on my blog, but by analyzing these areas and identifying both high and low performing aspects in each, you can go into the new year with improved operations, resulting in improved overall performance.

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