How support leaders can empower their teams to satisfy, delight, and retain customers

Human support is crucial for those tricky or sensitive issues that just can’t be solved with automation or bots, such as payment problems, difficult technical issues, or complex queries that need deeper context. Being able to route these problems to a real person is essential for maintaining customer happiness.

What’s more, these are also great opportunities to enhance loyalty and advocacy by building real long-term customer relationships through personalized, tailored problem-solving and genuine human connection at key moments of your customer’s journey.

• Map out career paths. Having clearly defined career paths gives people something to work towards. 
• Rethink your metrics to properly reflect the work. While it’s great that support reps can really get their teeth into complex problems and pull apart issues, it also means that the problems they’re working on can take longer and be more difficult to solve. 
• Treat humans like humans. This means that if things feel overwhelming, your support reps have time to step away from the inbox and go for a walk, and they’re not constantly in thrall to their numbers. As a manager, you also need to be deliberate about making your team’s escalation paths clear. It’s important for them to know that they don’t have to sit there and deal with something that’s not going anywhere.