Customer service is not a revenue-generating arm of most businesses. 

Therefore, the attention remains on cutting costs and becoming more efficient. Not necessarily giving customer service teams the resources or agents they need to be the most effective. 

However, customer service is a critical aspect of any business, as it helps to ensure customer satisfaction and loyalty. Without it, you would be unable to retain customers like you currently do.

Ultimately, whether customer service receives the same level of attention and support as other teams in your organization will depend on your priorities and goals.

Here’s why you should give your customer service team more attention… plus some of these double as quality assurance hacks to give your team superpowers. 

1) Prioritizing the customer

If you read our previous blog on understanding the customer journey, you might have realized that prioritizing the customer is the main job of your “customer service team”. 

I know it’s shocking.

But most companies don’t know how to do this.

For reference, we talked about the Ritz Carlton.

The level of service is immaculate. 

You walk in and you’re treated like royalty. And they even extend this to the digital world as well. 

Instead of asking yourself, “how do we cut costs?” Ask instead, what are we currently doing that our customers love? Anything else that doesn’t affect your ability to serve the customer can go.

2) Provide quality training & call coaching

Read that again. 

We preached about coaching. And we think every agent on every customer service team should have access to quality call coaching along with quality onboarding.

If you don’t have a way to provide real-time call coaching to your agents, your customers will pay the price. Think of longer call handle times and lower first call resolution. 

Quality also comes from availability. If you’re stacking your managers with busy work and monotonous tasks, this gives them less time to coach. Which means the quality won’t be there.

***This includes having to manually listen to calls to understand where the team is performing and underperforming instead of automating this process.

With call coaching software, like Abstrakt, your agents can even request feedback when they feel necessary on any call. This opens up a two-way communication loop for feedback between agents and managers.

You’d be surprised how many teams love this!

3) Tie their KPIs to revenue

Just because your customer service team might not be a revenue-generating arm of your business, doesn’t mean you can’t tie their goals to revenue.

Here are some ways to do that:

1. Offer competitive compensation and benefits toward their NPS to help improve customer satisfaction rates. This can be simple bonuses or flexible work arrangements or whatever is driving your agents to perform. 
2. Show the retention value of keeping customers and how that affects the bottom line of the company. This includes the positives and negatives when it comes to customer churn.
3. Ask your customer service team! See what they care about, what they want to know, and start including them in those conversations.

4) Use technology & automate QA

When you automate QA, this means your manpower can shift to helping your customers as the emphasis is no long on post-call analytics and compliance.

You will still want to have someone in charge of overseeing QA because technology can only identify trends and put numbers together. Your QA manager should be able to come up with ideas and strategies that could be implemented to improve your calls and overall company compliance.

Plus have you measured how much time is manually being spent reviewing calls to ensure they fall in compliance?

Software, like Abstrakt, saves time and money.

You can check out more call intelligence software options here.

Here are some quick and dirty QA hacks for you:

• Define what it means to be compliant on calls.
• Use checklists and call feedback forms.
• Use one of our call scorecard templates below to help.
• If you can’t afford software to automate QA (which it’s cheaper than you may realize), at least provide real-time transcription so you can reference the call transcripts to analyze the above tips.

P.S. Steal this QA audit checklist for FREE.

5) Call scorecards & Speech Analytics

Speech analytics tools can analyze customer interactions and provide insights into customer sentiment, trends, and issues within seconds!

This can help companies identify areas for improvement and make data-driven decisions. Not biased decisions that may have human error.

On top of automating QA, this means having a standard call scorecard that your team can use to see how they are performing. Need a new template? 

Check out these call scorecards.

Give The CS Team Your Attention

Did we provide you with enough evidence to show how important your customer service team is?

We sure hope so.

Remember, just because they aren’t producing revenue doesn’t mean they can’t be tied to it.

Retention is just as important, if not more important than net new revenue when it comes to call centers and SaaS products.