All companies are different, but every entrepreneur often faces similar problems whether that means fulfilling their support tasks or how to adapt to rapid growth. Here’s a look at some of the most common problems for remote support teams and how to provide them with the possible solutions they need.
1. Rapid growth
When the company grows fast, it is a thrilling time. Seeing big perspective motivates an entrepreneur more than anything. However, following this kind of growth pace can prove to be a big challenge. Your support department needs to grow with your customer base, and at some point you might find the staffing process difficult and time-consuming.
This is where you can consider turning to remote customer service providers. By doing this you will delegate staffing process to an outsource customer service team, freeing up your time for other business tasks. Training and onboarding will also become mainly their duty, not yours, and you’ll only need to check if the training is successful.
2. Outdated documentation
It happens to everyone at some point: you find new people to strengthen your support team, and start planning on their training schedule. That’s where you find out your existing training documentation needs adjustments. This happens more likely if your product/service is technological, and you constantly need to improve it.
There is no limit to perfection, and you can always find some ways to refine your training program. If you delegate your support to a remote team, they will have to do it for you. In any case, you’ll need to choose one person responsible for this task. A person with clear perspective and solid plan on how to maintain high quality of your training processes.
Understanding how to deal with upset customers should be an essential part of the training. You need to create documentation tailored specifically to that area to ensure that upset clients are communicated with properly and that their needs have been met. A set of rules and resolution examples should serve as a reference to your customer care team.
3. Coordination mechanism
When part of your team works remotely, ensuring that they remain part of the cooperate fold becomes a tricky task. You can see questions like “who is responsible for this” or “why should I answer to him, he is not my boss” rise up. With a remote team it’s easy to lose track of some tasks, so placing someone to be in charge of this kind of coordination is the answer. Someone needs to be in charge of the whole process, revise each person’s actions and ensure tasks completion.
Choose a specific channel to maintain ongoing communications between the team members, like Slack. It will help them ask each other questions and get the answers they need, share knowledge together and understand what’s going on in the support department. It’s also a convenient place to store contact details (such as Skype handles, phone numbers, emails, and anything else you add to your profile).
4. Company values
It’s hard to pass on your idea of the business and your passion towards it to the next generation. And when part of your team becomes virtual, this issue further escalates. How do you make your remote assistants care?
Think about it during the hiring process. When you are looking for a remote customer service provider, you need to choose a team that shares your company values. You need to aim for similar principles and practices. During the interview, opt for behavior-based questions to see how this particular remote team makes its choices. Study answers to past performance as it is a good predictor of future results.
You should also express your core values through platforms like social media pages, corporate booklets, and blogs. Be descriptive and provide real-life examples, so people can better understand more about your mission and values.
5. Conflicts in team
Conflicts between people are, unfortunately, unavoidable. Everyone has different opinions on various topics, and that’s the natural flow of things. Here are two practices that can help an entrepreneur resolve these issues.
Assign a responsible person for each case
A dedicated person in charge can listen to all parties, sum up feedback, and provide a resolution of the problem to the whole team. It is important to count in every opinion here. When all the preparations are done, the team gathers for a discussion and works out a solution to the problem. You can turn to voting for the best decision if no consensus can be achieved.
Respect privacy
At some point people will want to discuss problematic issues privately, without the whole team involved. While an entrepreneur would normally encourage your coworkers to share their frustrations, you should also stay respectful to their private conversations with other team members. Sometimes the issue can be resolved faster and easier this way.
Valentine Grishkevich is a part of Dream Support team. Responsible and serious, thoughtful and silent, Valentine finds great inspiration in helping people and digging into the nature of things. She is also keen on writing structured articles about customer service. No lyrics, just facts in bullet points.