Running a remote team is challenging. Managing a remote customer service team is no picnic either, and comes with its own set of intricacies.

To achieve the outcomes you’ve set for your team, you have to run a tight ship. Here are several established ways you can make it happen.

Establish your audience

It may sound basic, but your team needs to know who they’re helping at the other end of the phone line, email, social media, or messaging app. By understanding the audience, your team will be able to:

• Deal with them more effectively.
• Meet customers’ expectations.

To ensure these outcomes, you’ll need to provide your remote team the proper training, which should cover the following:

• What are your audience’s pain points?
• What are their values?
• Where are they located?
• What are their demographics (e.g. age, gender, occupation)

Choose the right software

To function properly, your team will need at least the following tools:

Cloud-based project management software
For planning, organising, and managing team resources, you’ll need this kind of application. Why? Because emailing pertinent details isn’t enough.

In addition, a cloud-based project management software consolidates all the information in one place. This allows individual members of your team to access the information from anywhere.

Likewise, you get a convenient, high-level view of all your projects.

If you’re undecided which software to use, look for one that focuses on collaboration and ease of use. Two reasons for this:

• Teamwork is central to the success of each project, so you’ll need a tool that lets you communicate with your team easily.
  
  
• If your project management software is difficult to use, your team is more likely to commit mistakes and lower their output.

Customer service software
For monitoring, prioritising, managing, and resolving customer queries, your team needs a tool which ensures that no concern is overlooked.

With good customer service software, you avoid having to look at every customer interaction, which can be tedious and counterproductive. Whichever tool you choose, aim for one that has:

• Support via multiple communication channels
• The ability to assign tickets to colleagues
• Built-in CRM software
• Live chat support
• Real-time reporting
• A knowledge base (more on this below)

Create a knowledge base

To customers, speaking to someone knowledgeable about solving their problem is key. But even the most seasoned customer rep will occasionally encounter a concern that involves a bit more research.

Here’s the problem: because your team is working remotely, they can’t just approach you for help, especially if they’re in another time zone and it’s unreasonably late for you.

They can try asking you or their colleagues via email or instant messaging, but there’s no guarantee they’ll get a response in time.

The solution is to put together a knowledge base – a centralised repository of information – which your team can access when they need to know the answer to customer service issues right away.

Remember that immediate, responsive service is key to good customer service; it’s what customers expect today. A knowledge base will help ensure that.

Develop a team culture

Customer service can be an anxiety-inducing and tiring job. To make up for this, you need to develop a strong team culture that will help your people de-stress.

In a traditional office, this happens when people gather for cake in the pantry or go for a quick drink at the water cooler. Such instances let employees blow off some steam by chatting with their colleagues.

These moments, however, don’t occur naturally online. You’ll have to make a deliberate effort to integrate it into your team’s culture. You can start by introducing team building activities like:

• Virtual happy hour
• A dedicated channel for different interests (e.g. pets, sports)
• Movie night

Holding such activities will help develop rapport and unity among your remote team. This, in turn, will help them cope with the work’s difficulties, collaborate more easily, and be more productive.

Meet your team regularly through video

All teams need to connect with each other on a regular basis. But since yours works remotely, face-to-face communication isn’t an everyday option.

You can offset this through video chat, which has various platforms you can choose from. This includes Zoom, Skype, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, and Webex, among others.

Video chats are important in remote work because a large part of communication is non-verbal. You’ll out a lot if your team interactions are limited to email, instant messaging, or voice calls.

Without video, you won’t enjoy the benefit of meaningful details like body language, eye contact, and facial expressions – all of which are important in building rapport.

Set KPIs

The success of your customer service team is determined by the results they achieve. And the only way to find out if your team succeeded is through their key performance indicators or KPIs.

For customer service, your team needs to pay attention to several key metrics, which include (but aren’t limited to) the following:

• Customer Satisfaction Score – How customers are satisfied with a product or service.
• First Response Time – Average time it takes to respond to a customer.
• Net Promoter Score – Percentage of customers rating their likelihood to recommend a product/service to others.
• Customer Retention Rate – Percentage of customers retained over a period of time.
• First Contact Resolution – Number of customer queries solved at the first time of asking.

Of course, if you’re going to measure performance, make sure you reward your people when they achieve as well. It’s important for employees to be recognised for their hard work.

Hire the right people

If you want to bolster your remote customer service team with top talent, team up with Remote Workmate. Unlike freelancing marketplaces and job boards where you do everything yourself, we handle all the heavy lifting for you, including onboarding and payroll.

You can actually choose from our pool of top candidates right away. Simply click the button below to browse a wide range of profiles on our Hotlist page.