Supporting Customer Service through Covid 19

Having to navigate the impact of COVID 19 on business has been the most difficult task for most managers (especially customer service). With high gripping of finance with cash flow and management, there has been a salient choice about furloughs and layoffs.

A study was carried out on over 1 million customer service calls and it was found that most customer reps are having a difficult time communicating to their customers during these times majorly because of the dramatically increased level of customer emotion and anxiety in a service call. Due to the fact that remote work is new, customer reps has also been put bin difficult places because of the lack of the infrastructure and support they enjoyed during the physical contact and as a result may find it a struggle more than usual to help customers.

Tips for Navigating Through Difficult Times

1. Update policies to reflect the current reality in solving customers’ problems, and also customer rep should also use advocacy response while responding to a compliment.
2. Managers should also employ integrated coaching for the staff. Though they may be a slight lack of visibility but that is where trust from the managers come into play. Also, managers can do an open-ended questioning to find out how their customer calls went, what the customer reps are facing in terms of strengths and challenges, and how they are feeling. All this can as well be done virtually by scheduling several mini-check ins across the day with their customer reps using video conferencing.
3. Use collaborative tools to help customer reps communicate with their other colleagues. Modern collaboration tools like slack and instant messages can help reps create a workspace for themselves and get ideas and perspectives from colleagues.

This pandemic has put service reps, managers and leaders under the pressure. They have likely never experienced it before. But with a focus on the right skills and support from able managers and peers, there is no reason that service organizations cannot successfully navigate and even flourish during these trying times.