Empower Customer Service Agents in 5 Easy Steps

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Ecommerce customers seek a high level of quality and personalization from the brands they frequent. It’s no longer acceptable to only be able to reply to a call, email, or text with a first name. Brands need to take the next step and empower customer service agents to create deeper relationships with their shoppers.

For many brands, the pathway to growth through customer service is not so clear. Brands need to create a strategy for uplifting service employees. In particular, they need to understand what customers expect, what agents need to deliver proactive customer service, and what upselling opportunities look like. Tap into a new area of revenue and loyalty-building possibilities with the following steps to empower customer service agents.

5 Steps to Empower Customer Service Agents

The more you can free up your agents to be proactive and act organically on opportunities with customers, the more confident they’ll feel in their work. Let’s look at five tactics and technologies that your ecommerce brand can start using to empower customer service agents to work better and smarter.

1. Give them the knowledge to work independently

Customers love when agents create personal connections with them. In fact, 44% of shoppers want their favorite brands to know their names and past purchases, according to Gladly’s 2022 Customer Expectations Report. Rather than leaving agents scrambling, give them the ability to easily draw on past customer information and product knowledge on the fly so they can handle a range of customer requests.

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2. Open them up to revenue-generating opportunities

Customer support teams can do so much more than just field an endless stream of questions. The revenue opportunities are there if brands do the work to uncover them, and modern brands are seeing their customer service teams drive revenue. We found that 66% of customers say they prefer brands that know them and can recommend things they would like.

When agents have the ability to know customers on a deeper level and understand their wants and needs, they’ll have the confidence to recommend complementary products that can provide a brand new revenue stream for the brand.

3. Foster clear communication and collaboration

A support center is not an island. Rather, it’s an ecosystem of smart and hard-working individuals with different areas of expertise. Provide your agents with the ability to communicate freely and frequently on customer service tasks. Using Gladly, Kuru Footwear tapped into native collaboration functions that transformed internal communications for better efficiency and improved productivity.

[ Read more: Agent Churn – The Costs of Losing Agents and How To Stop It ]

4. Take the routine work off their plates

Self-service is becoming more common in brands’ support centers. Customers receive an easy path to an answer without needing to start a conversation. Meanwhile, agents get a reprieve from routine and repetitive tasks that can distract them from more pressing or complex customer queries.

5. Use an easy, accessible support platform

The above steps to empower customer service providers can only take place when support staff have the tools they need. With Gladly, not only are these strategies all possible, but they’re also made far easier through an accessible platform that supports these behaviors inherent to a support agent’s day-to-day work.

Gladly’s Customer Profile: Gladly gives support agents easy access to historic customer information, letting them refer back to it to create more personalized relationships with each shopper and succeed in meeting their needs.

Gladly’s Conversation Timeline: A dynamic, long-term conversation timeline replaces the typical platform’s ticketing system, adding greater depth to how an agent can connect with a customer and even easily refer back to previous points in the chat, no matter which channel the conversation started on.

With the tools to make agents feel more empowered than ever, higher morale will reduce attrition. As a result, lower churn will protect your business, as measurements show that disengaged employees cost U.S. companies upwards of $550 billion a year.

REPORT

2022 Customer Expectations Report

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