Guide to Customer Support Manager Skills / Customer Service Manager Skills to Ensure Top-tier Customer Service
Recently, Callnovo Contact Center wrote a niche article on help desk best practices, highlighting the importance of top-tier customer service (CS) that rises above customers’ expectations, leading to long-term brand ambassadorship, mentioning:
“CS that goes beyond customer expectations is crucial to customer retention improvement, leading to a stronger brand reputation & securing global sales success.”
Global businesses — such as your own — must go beyond customers’ high service expectations, ensuring service that fosters rapport/trust, motivating customers to fully-devote themselves to your brand’s products/services — influencing long-term sales permanence/growth while ensuring strong brand ambassadorship, leading to a strong competitive drive in global markets and a heavily-increasing brand reputation.
Consideringly, ensuring your global corporation’s CS support team is fully-equipped to smoothly-handle high consumer expectations is vital to strong, global brand success. One surefire way to ensure your CS teams efficiently-handle operations, proportioning top-tier customer care that successfully motivates customers to long-term loyalty/brand ambassadorship, is via a strong customer support manager/customer service manager leadership team that heads operations, ensuring your customer service representatives (CSRs) afford stellar customer engagement.
Let’s go through a non-exhaustive list of key customer support manager skills/customer service manager skills needed to ensure top-tier consumer support that enhances customer experiences (CX), leading to long-term brand ambassadorship/global sales market success; we’ll touch on:
- what customer support managers are and do,
- what customer service managers’ responsibilities are, and
- 7 key customer service manager skills/customer support manager skills crucial to operations so you can foster top-tier CS.
Customer Service & Support Managers
Your CS teams are the face of your business — on the front lines; according to an article on exceptional multilingual customer support & how to ensure business success:
“Exemplary CS is key to customer retention/loyalty since CSRs are the first-to-last interaction consumers have with your business — vitally-responsible for ensuring consumers receive an excellent brand impression.”
As such, a strong customer service strategy is crucial to high-quality customer engagement and pre-sales/post-sales product/service requests resolution so you can create persistent, global brand loyalty/reputation — operations playing a major part and vital to ensuring your CS teams handle the high customer expectations, service volume, and complex service needs, offering top CX that creates long-term brand success. Hence, expert customer service managers/customer support managers that successfully-manage operations are highly-important.
What are CS Managers and their Responsibilities?
Consideringly, customer service & support managers play a vital role in operations:
“CS managers foster productive CS environments, overseeing their teams’ performance to ensure CSRs keep pace with high service demands.”
While straightforward, the role CS managers play can be complicated. Customer service & support managers must have complete understanding of customer/business needs, resolving complex issues between both parties, offering solutions that appease both. Though the above description covers basic customer service managers’ functions, it doesn’t address the key business value the position provides your company.
Customer support managers must be able to deliver high-quality CX — fulfilling such vital responsibilities as:
- hiring/training your CS team — overseeing the hiring process and ongoing training for/of new CS employees, sustaining performance/operations quality throughout service,
- representing the customer voice — actively listening to customers, receiving constructive feedback, and uncovering unresolved problems/complaints to close the gap between you and consumers, providing better CX, allowing your business room to grow,
- dealing with customer issues and their consequences — including remaining calm, introducing actionable plans to set proper expectations, evade miscommunication, ensure your CS teams are properly-prepared to resolve issues in an efficient, effective manner, and then influence affected customers’ long-term loyalty, and (amongst others)
- set the tone for a customer-centric, customer-focused, thoughtful CS environment — bringing in a culture that motivates CSRs’ success even while handling heavy workloads.
What Customer Service & Support Manager Skills are Vital?
To ensure your corporation is ready to handle the above-mentioned complex, dynamic responsibilities — and, so to bring onboard professionally-ready CS managers — let’s go through highly-critical customer service manager skills / customer support manager skills for ensuring top-tier CS.
Vision
Vision is critical to successful leadership — as rallying troops during difficult situations, keeping them focused on the bigger picture, and having an idea of what business goals your CS managers are leading your team to achieve is what keeps operations smooth & continually-effective. This is why building communication skills as a manager is vital — so CS teams can remain inspired throughout each and every shift.
To build this skill: Have CS managers ask admired others about the visions they’re currently working to achieve, contemplating on/writing down what also inspires them personally. Those learnings will build their own team goals while they share them with teams via direct reports — for feedback.
Communication
Communication skills are equally vital for managers to have/practice; however, they’re more vital for CS managers due to teams’ crucial roles in maintaining/improving brand reputation. Communication serves in that:
- CS managers should coach/teach their CSRs to properly-handle complex service requests/draining workloads,
- support managers should effectively-communicate with consumers when/if issues get escalated,
- service managers should effectively-communicate to advocate for their service personnel to other business leaders, and
- CS managers must communicate with different groups of people for different purposes.
To build this: have your CS managers practice written & interpersonal communication skills by:
- communicating in the form of customer interactions and/or blog articles through/for your company website, Medium, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc., and
- speaking regularly at team meetings, lunch and learns, etc.
Diplomacy
Customer service & support managers should diplomatically/tactfully handle internal/customer conversations when difficult — as there’ll be conversations where constructive feedback/bad news needs to be voiced — whether it’s to their own team or customers. Diplomacy helps when it comes to phrasing, word choice, tone, and the current setting so the receiver of such feedback/news can understand your managers’ reasoning while feeling valued.
To build this: Have your managers learn diplomacy by watching diplomats; have them study political & governmental debates/speeches from those they trust to see how they choose phrasing that includes viewers. Many times, CS managers will find that their trusted political & governmental officials’ phrasing/tone focuses on delivering the correct message instead of skewing it by ill emotions.
Emotional Intelligence
Like empathy, emotional intelligence — the ability to correctly interpret/respond to emotions — is a vital skill. As people managers, it’s likely that CSRs will have problems they need support with; service managers must analyze CS professionals’ emotions in the moment, responding appropriately. How well your managers identify/react to their colleagues’ emotions will influence their ability to retain them. Likewise, customers also escalate issues, expecting efficient, effective solutions — which calls for strong emotional intelligence your managers’ side — useful for preventing potential customer churn.
To build this: have managers practice active listening, focusing on what others have to say rather than contemplating their own responses — needed for getting more info. from the other party so they can better understand their needs.
Problem Solving
Problem-solving is integral to fostering productive CS environments, overseeing teams’ performance to ensure CSRs keep pace with high customer expectations; as such, your CS managers should help CSRs solve problems in their customer careers and professional development, as well as problems that come with their own leadership/management — including determining budget priorities, proving return-on-investment (ROI), changing unsatisfactory processes, and proportioning internal company advocacy.
To build this: CS managers should practice problem solving by asking team members, colleagues, and other managers what challenges/obstacles they face. Additionally, rooting out issues not under their own charge — via collaboration — provides inspiration, giving them strategies to use on a typical workday.
Patience
Patience is crucial to success — especially in reference to CS/operations; the same goes for CS managers since they belong to a special group of coaches/teachers. Managers should exercise patience when: (1) teaching new CSRs customer support basics, (2) coaching reps to handle tough situations/low performance, and (3) tackling angry, rude, and/or impolite customers’ complex issues.
To build this: when your managers’ initial reactions are from impatience/frustration, have them consciously-practice thinking about the reason why the other said what they did before reacting; this builds empathy, forcing managers to put themselves in other people’s shoes before reacting with an impatient reaction that could shut the other down. It’s your CS managers’ responsibility to create an environment where honesty/openness is encouraged, so they should practice this with everyone they communicate with.
Trust
Being an effective manager means training, coaching — and, especially trusting — CS teams to do what they’ve been to; constructive feedback is good when CSRs aren’t meeting your business’ set standard — however, delegation (and letting go) is recommended to build confidence and give them freedom to focus on their responsibilities so they can make practical mistakes and effectively-learn from them. To build this: Delegate daily/weekly tasks; have your managers practice growing their trust by showing them how delegation works, letting them do it themselves. Though CSRs may make mistakes, ensure your managers check-in after mistakes occur instead of stepping in fix them.
Callnovo’s Viable Outsourcing Solutions for Top-tier CX
Considering the grand importance of ensuring customer service & support managers are ready to lead their teams to high-quality CS, Callnovo Contact Center can enhance your teams with excellent CS/operations outsourcing solutions that ensure top-tier customer engagement/positive CX.
Some advantages are:
- High-quality Expertise — quality service with the utmost success via personnel skilled in such areas as:
acute management/operations skills,
strong interpersonal communication soft-skills,
customer-centric enthusiasm/service attitude,
intuitive logical thinking skills, and
complex product/troubleshooting service experience. - Omnichannel Support — accessible, rapid contact solutions through all comm. channels — guaranteeing always-ready support, leading to enhanced CX, influencing long-term customer brand ambassadorship/customer loyalty.
- Native Language Support — to meet customers’ needs efficiently, conforming to cultural expectations, improving customer loyalty.
- Always-available Service — to maximize customer satisfaction/CX by continually meeting customers’ needs without limits.
Conclusion
As seen, a strong customer service strategy that incorporates professionally-ready CS managers is crucial to high-quality customer engagement and pre-sales/post-sales product/service requests resolution; to ensure your support managers enhance their CSRs’ provided CS and build long-term customer retention/brand loyalty, have them practice the before-mentioned key customer service manager skills/customer support manager skills to ensure great operations/leadership. To support you, Callnovo offers a comprehensive multilingual, omnichannel CS & operations management outsourcing solution so you can meet customer expectations, improving customer retention, augmenting brand reputation, and securing global sales success.
