How to Assemble a Customer Service Dream Team

Last Updated on August 31, 2023 by David

A fool proof formula for customer success.

The best customer service team is the one that has accompanied you during growth. Over the past several years we’ve assembled an arsenal of insights and ideas about how to assemble the perfect customer service team. It’s not for every business but it’s not a bad to start.

Don’t Hire (not yet)

The worst thing you can do for your customer service culture is by kicking it off with a round of new hires. In addition to being risky business, hiring new people means new personalities, new habits that need moulding, and new processes that need shaping. There’s no time for that. Customers are waiting. Questions need resolving and sales to be made. Skip this part and learn to grow your own leaders.

People that know the ins and outs of your business are best suited to become managerial liaisons between your customer service team and other teams. They’re proven and understand the requirements and stakes. Whatever habits they had/have already work the rest of your processes.

Our own customer service team is composed of CEOs, co-founders, CTOs, developers, and of course, customer experience gurus.

Focus on a Few Metrics. Ignore the Rest.

Less is more. Pick one or two metrics that you’d like the entire team to focus on enhancing. Optimize your tactics, protocols, and tools strictly on boosting, for example, appreciations per day, and other aspects of your service operation will follow suit. Things like response times or volume or agent-specific metrics won’t tell you much about the customers’ overall experience so it makes sense to ignore them for the time being. If you track your Net Promoter Score, a good target is to get into the 70s to low 80s.

Feel free to track other aspects of your customer service team performance for training and future optimizations but don’t feel you need to absolutely share them with everyone on your team.

Skip Formal Training. Trial by Fire.

Training is important (like everyone says) but results are only as good as your training regiment (most don’t tell you this). A good training program can only be drafted after many months and sometimes years of trial by fire. The great advantage of being human is our ability to self navigate, correct, and assemble.

Whether you’re promoting from within or encouraging everyone on your team to be customer service gurus, head straight for the deep end. Some might require a bit of assistance but trial by fire is the fastest way to get people up to speed in terms of understanding customers’ state of mind and how that’s connected with your product and business. Max is one of our newest rockstar developer and received his first appreciation on his first reply. Go figure.

Focus on Boosting Transparency and Accountability

Everyone improves when everyone is knowledgeable and aware of what is going around them. When someone makes a mistake, it is their ultimately their fault, but far more valuable than where to look when something goes awry is the ability for the collective to come together and solve a problem together. That can only happen if you’re set up to do so.

Give your team the ability to self regulate. You can have a single point of authority but not at the expense of a reduction in individual accountability.

Everyone is an Author

The best way to learn is to teach someone something. Get your team into the habit of jotting down useful knowledge to share with the community. Have everyone on your team create, manage, and maintain knowledge base articles on a daily basis. Adding knowledge sharing to your daily workflow will ensure a robust communications lifecycle.

CUSTOMER > SUPPORT > AGENT > CUSTOMER > KNOWLEDGE BASE >

Want more tips?!

Read our book about setting up a great customer service culture:

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You can also find our multi-brand, multi-channel customer service platform at https://www.reamaze.com. Follow @reamaze.