3 Ways to Empower Your Mobile Customer Service Team

For more and more retailers, deploying remote representatives through mobile devices connected to the cloud is proving to be the most efficient solution for providing customer service support. Between 2012 and 2016, the number of American workers who worked from home at least some of the time rose from 39 percent to 43 percent, a Gallup poll found. The amount of time employees worked from home also rose during this period, with the number of workers who spent at least 80 percent of their time working from home increasing from 24 percent to 31 percent. The retail industry is one of the economic sectors seeing the greatest growth in remote workers, Gallup’s research determined.

If you’re an independent retailer, using a remote service force can enhance your agility, cut your company’s labor costs, improve your efficiency and boost your customer satisfaction.

Here are three ways you can empower your customer care team with today’s mobile cloud-based tools.

Increase Agility and Efficiency by Adopting a Cloud Contact Center

The heart of an effective remote, mobile-based service team is a cloud contact center. A cloud-based contact center provides a virtual platform you can use to deploy team members who are located anywhere, making you more mobile and agile. This avoids the cost of having your support team located in-house, while also allowing you to deploy your team on a flexible schedule instead of regular full-time hours, reducing your labor costs.

Cloud contact centers also improve your efficiency by making it easier for you to integrate your various service channels into a single platform so you can deliver more effective omnichannel service. Web-based service, chat, email, phone and other support channels can all be handled from one interface. This allows your team members to see ticket information from previous customer interactions even if a ticket originated on another channel, providing customers with a smoother service flow and avoiding the frustration of having to repeat information previously given.

Boost Your Productivity With Mobile Communication Tools

Another key to empowering your mobile customer service team is using communication tools designed to streamline conversations on mobile devices. Traditional communication tools such as email aren’t designed for team management on mobile devices, and have limitations in a remote workplace environment. Email conversations between multiple parties require you to reference previous emails, which can cause conversation partners to get lost if they join the discussion later. Email also doesn’t keep files automatically synced to the latest version, making exchanging files potentially problematic.

Cloud-based communication tools overcome these limitations by replacing the email paradigm with a communications paradigm modeled on texting and social media. Conversation partners can see the entire conversation in one place, while files are automatically synced so everyone has the same version. This makes your communication more efficient, allowing your team to spend less time answering emails and more time helping customers who need it.

Improve Your Performance With Analytics Tracking

To get optimum results from your remote team, a best practice is to track your key customer service stats with business intelligence (BI) analytics tools. BI tools allow you to display customized views of key performance indicators (KPIs) so you can track how well your customer service is doing and make adjustments to boost your customer satisfaction rate. Some cloud-based contact centers also include built-in analytics capabilities.

Customer service KPIs you might consider tracking include average number of tickets handled per day, number of issues resolved, average response time and average resolution time, for example. After establishing your current performance levels, you can set goals and make adjustments to achieve those goals. For instance, you might aim to reduce your average response time by making better use of automated response tools such as chatbots.

If you integrate your customer service analytics with your customer relationship management (CRM) data, you can also use that data to improve your sales performance. For instance, your customer service reps can see information about customers’ purchase history and suggest upsells that would appeal to their buyer profile.

Adopting a cloud contact center, using mobile communication tools and applying analytics are three ways you can empower your remote customer service team. Deploying these strategies can help make your contact center more mobile, make your team more efficient and leave your customers more satisfied.