We live in a culture where everybody expected to know everything, our communication skills have died.
It doesn't matter how great your hero agent is, no matter how skilled they are. They cannot read minds.
We have to tell our agents what we are thinking or we will not have amazing customer service.
So what does it look like to set your agents up for success?
The following will be about a few things that we do. Without them, most will not succeed.
We set all expectations
We want all of our agents knowing what is expected from them and what they can expect from us.
The more open and vulnerable we are, the longer they last with us.
Expectations on how long calls should be, how quickly emails get answered, and any other jobs that are expected from our agents.
From us it's about pay, support, and resources.
From there, we don't generally change our expectations without first speaking with our agents.
When I first started, Janine asked me to simply listen to phone calls for the first 2 days I worked with her.
She thought that would scare me off.
It didn't.
This was her way of not hiding anything. If the agent didn't want to do the company work that was necessary, they wouldn't come back for day #3.
At the end of two days for me, I was recommending small adjustments to save the company money. Some recommendations worked, some not so much.
Retention in the customer service field is hard. When you don't set proper expectations, it's much harder.
We are always setting expectations, whether they are proper expectations or not is another story.
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