Remote Customer Service Made Simple

It’s especially important for customer service teams who require up-to-the-minute information and often need to communicate directly with several different departments and partners.

With most of us all-too-aware of the benefits to employees, it’s heartening to hear that employers also see the positives of a work life that doesn’t revolve around an office cubicle. In its 2022 Effective Communications report, Expert Market revealed that 92% of CEOs have seen positive benefits from remote working.

There’s little doubt that effective communication is the key to remote working success. Companies that haven’t already embraced internal communication tools find that, with a raft of emails flying back and forth, it can be impossible to achieve the holy grail of mail management: Inbox Zero. With the right tools, however, improved internal communication can improve organisational productivity by as much as 25% and allow your teams to enjoy the benefits of working remotely without the productivity decline that poor internal communication can bring about. 

Share The Knowledge

One of the big challenges of working away from the office is how to manage new starters. So how do you onboard new employees when they (and you) are away from the office?

Internal knowledge base chatbots can help here. With an encyclopaedic knowledge of processes and a vast library of information, onboarding remote workers needn’t be challenging. From learning about their new workplace to confidently dealing with customer service issues, the right information can be at their fingertips in seconds, reducing the need to pass queries up the chain of command and freeing up line managers’ time for more pressing issues. 

The key here is to ensure that the ‘knowledge’ comes directly from the team working on the frontline rather than management. It’s easy to think big picture and lose the detail when overseeing rather than dealing with day-to-day customer contact. 

Keep It Simple

The basis of effective communication is to keep things simple. Technology can help simplify work conversations, but even the most effective system is only as good as its user interface. With 37% of employees working remotely, either full-time or part-time, as of May 2021, a solution to good communication is an essential part of many businesses’ wish lists.

An Agent Inbox is a perfect tool to keep customer service teams up-to-speed and able to quickly and efficiently communicate with internal and partner teams. It also allows junior or newer team members to seek and receive advice quickly, when and where they need it.  

The Benefits Of An Agent Inbox

• Keeps workflows manageable with intelligent inbox control
• A conversation view means customers and internal teams are no longer numbers or tickets 
• Skills-based routing gets your message to the right team members quickly
• Customer profiles make it easy for other agents to pick up a query fast
• Easy collaboration with the ability to add external partners

A Remote Future

It’s clear that since COVID-19, many more customer service agents are working from home or have implemented a hybrid working model. The increased flexibility is a significant plus for team members and offers management increased productivity and, in some instances, the ability to downsize the workplace. With other flexible working arrangements being explored – the world’s biggest ever four-day week trial, for example – it’s clear that flexible working and working from home are here to stay, so effective communication methods are vital in keeping workflows on track. 

If you’d like to know more about how we can help you manage a remote workforce, get in touch with one of our experts and let us guide you through some of the products within our Mobile Service Cloud solution. With a host of tools to keep your customer service teams on track, we’ll help you put communication front and centre when your people are away from the office.