Consistency is Key
One of the most challenging aspects of being a team lead or manager is ensuring that your reports are able to deliver on their goals consistently. For customer facing teams like sales, customer success, operations, and support, this means ensuring that each team member can interact with customers in a friendly, helpful, and efficient way. Every interaction should be characterized by a level of expertise that the team member demonstrates to the customer, which is no small feat to accomplish at scale. The best way to ensure uniformity across the team is with a CXM-focused approach.
The Right Tools for the Job
The issues that customers come to internal teams with are varied and complex. They can range from software troubleshooting, to re-booting hardware, to more complex interactions that require a third party to be looped in like credit approvals. This can present a challenge to those team members who are less experienced, who might not know what to immediately do in a given situation. They know that they need to consistently deliver excellent experiences no matter the challenge - knowing how is another story. Managers can ensure that these team members are well trained and equipped for the job by training them on Customer Experience Management software (such as CXMEngine).
Customer Experience Management means ownership of the entire customer journey, from initial engagement to ongoing support. The only category of software that can allow teams to ramp and scale quickly to achieve that level of ownership is CXM software. It does this by ensuring that correct, contextually informed knowledge is routed to the right person at the right time. It eliminates searching around for information (which can lead to delays), and it makes team members more efficient (and less stressed) in their professions. It obviates the need for those team members to go through intensely complicated onboarding processes by virtue of its simplicity and ease of use. Plus, the right CXM system will use AI to coach new team members to accelerate their learning and proficiency.
Measurement and Control
Managers benefit from using CXM software by maintaining a bird’s eye view of how their team members are performing relative to one another. This benchmarking is key in maintaining the consistency we discussed earlier - it provides an opportunity to provide further teaching and training if necessary, so that optimum outcomes can be achieved across the board.
Manager-level views and controls also allow a manager to assume ownership of any situation that might be getting out of hand (should a team member require some additional help). This ability to step into a situation ensures that customers will be well taken care of, and have excellent experiences. Every moment wasted degrades the customer experience, which support and success managers know very well. When they (and their teams) are well equipped to handle any situation that’s thrown at them, it ensures that will never happen.
