Summer is over, but you’re not ready to crawl out of your hammock just yet? Ease back into work mode with the best CX articles hand-picked for you from Supportreads.com.
Supportreads.com is a community-curated content hub for articles related to customer service and success, sales, remote work, and leadership. Find your favorites, upvote them, and submit your own content.
Enjoy these five articles chosen for you by our folks at Klaus (the makers of the support QA and conversation tool that shoots your customer service quality through the roof).
Inside Help Scout: How We Implement Whole Company Support
You don’t usually expect a response to your support request from a CEO, do you?
Customer-centric Help Scout has a different take on this. Their company policy requires everyone in the team to spend some time in the queue answering incoming emails – including the CEO – to sync the entire company with their customers’ needs and expectations.
Here’s why Help Scout practices Whole Company Support:
✨ Keeps the customer at the center of everything the company does. Diving into support interactions helps build context around customers’ requests. Everyone understands how people use the product and services, why they need it in the first place, and how they could improve the customer experience.
✨ Deepens the team’s understanding of their own products. Helping customers use the product is the most efficient way to polish the team’s product knowledge.
✨ Helps them build a better product by looking at it through the eyes of the customers. It’s an essential perspective that ensures the team is really in tune with your customers’ expectations.
✨ Strengthens the team by making everyone work towards the same goals. Building products for people they’ve worked with boosts the team’s motivation and helps them understand the impact they’re making.
? We love this article because of the unique and practical insight into how a company has tamed the mythological creature called Whole Company Support.
Should I Let My Staff Complain About Customers?
Elizabeth Wellington explores the thin line between healthy venting in the support team and toxic complaining that kills relationships and brings the team culture down.
Learn how to:
✨ Manage venting in your team;
✨ Identify toxic commenting;
✨ React to inappropriate complaining;
✨ Handle complaints voiced to you.
? This article covers a delicate topic in a very systematic and in-depth manner, providing loads of valuable strategies on how to manage venting in a support team.
Social Customer Service: Lessons from 5 of Our Favorite Brands
Everybody talks about social customer service these days. All support teams want to master this lucrative CX-marketing combo technique.
So, we’re excited to share the most valuable lessons from the top brands who know how to make social customer service work. Here are the best picks by Mention:
✨ Make every customer feel cared for like @teamnike when solving issues on Twitter;
✨ Go behind solving customers’ issues, in the way @starbucks does when jumping in and retweeting conversations about themselves,
✨ Wow your customers with creative and personalized responses like the legendary Jen from Skyscanner.
✨ Speak the customer’s language and have fun with it, like @netflixhelps customer care team.
✨ Invest in agent training to make sure the entire team delivers consistent and outstanding customer experiences.
? If you haven’t seen Jen’s response to a message sent to Skyscanner, head over to the article because you don’t want to miss this.
The Magic of Goal Setting: A Simple Framework for Managers and Teams
Paige Costello, the former Director of Product Management at Intercom, shares valuable insight into how to plan your team’s work and maintain productivity throughout the week.
Key takeaways:
✨ Take five minutes on Monday to plan each team’s activities for the week. Break it down into individual tasks for each team member using the spreadsheet example provided in the article.
✨ Take five minutes on Friday to review whether your team accomplished all of the goals you set at the beginning of the week.
? We love the simplicity of this goal-setting strategy and the philosophy of making each person responsible for achieving their own goals without excessive micromanagement.
5 Cases of Misunderstanding with Customers and Simple Solutions for Each of Them
Why do some customer interactions go haywire even in the most experienced support teams? Eliza Medley looked into situations like this and discussed the most common misunderstandings, their causes, and solutions in Nicereply’s blog.
Key points:
✨ Lack of active listening because agents are overloaded with information and struggle to focus on customers’ questions.
✨ Communication in a hurry, which is often the case when support volumes increase and agents shift from quality to quantity.
✨ Hasty decisions caused by jumping to conclusions without looking at the whole picture objectively.
✨ Unstable service in terms of quality and consistency, leaving customers confused about your company policies.
✨ Ignoring the customer’s communication style and using an inappropriate tone doesn’t match the person’s expectations.
? This article received a thumbs up from team Klaus for the actionable advice to help support teams avoid misunderstandings with their customers.
We hope you enjoyed our fall picks from Supportreads.com. Here are our previous favorites, in case you missed them.
There are hundreds of praiseworthy CX and customer service articles waiting for you at Supportreads.com. All pieces have been carefully picked out by your colleagues from the global support community, so we’re confident you’ll like them.
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Read the previous Supportreads.com digest: The Best CX Articles from Supportreads.com
