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Stop Being a Customer Support Dictator

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Vaishali Gopi

The sure way companies can destroy their company culture as well as their business is by acting like a dictator. This holds true for all departments of the company including customer support. Ruling your support team using an iron fist is no way to guarantee that your customers will be provided quality support.

But what is the difference between a dictator and a leader. A leader is one who thinks about his followers and occasionally looks behind to make sure that they are still standing. On the other hand a dictator thinks only of his personal agenda and does not care if his followers are still standing. The same applies to companies. Companies that show leadership qualities (leadership companies) tend to be genuinely concerned about their employees while companies that show dictatorship qualities (dictatorship companies) tend to concern only about profits and not the welfare of their employees. Leadership companies are more concerned with doing things the right way rather than in their way. However, when it comes to dictatorship companies, things have to do their way or they get angry.

In today's world it has been found that leading companies are successful while dictatorship companies tend to be not successful or at best less successful.

Do companies want to wow their customers?

Many companies are willing to talk about how they want to wow their customers, but when it comes to the supplementation part not many are willing to talk about it.

Companies must resist the desire to micromanage their support departments. That is they should not constantly expect people to do things their way. Instead it is in their best interests to give their teams the proper tools so that they do their part properly and successfully.

Importance of being united

Companies must understand that they cannot and should not micromanage things. As the company grows and more departments are added, more leaders are needed. And when that happens companies should expect that disagreements would pop up. You must remember that having disagreements can sometimes be a good thing.

Having people with opposite views can be a blessing as it can help you question your own views and discard the irrelevant or irrational ones. Many good plans have failed because those implementing them did not notice the flaws and refused to correct them.

There are, however, two downsides to this. First is that sometime in the name of unity people make compromises that should never be made. Second is that when you finally decide that you have to make a call on the issue, you will seriously test the unity of your team.

What companies aim for with the support they provide to their customers?

The main thing that companies aim for when they provide support to their customers is to ensure customer base is both happy and growing while the expenses are low.

How can companies achieve their goals?

There are many steps companies can take to ensure that their customers are getting proper support while their expenses are relatively low.

Choose the channel that can be both easily used and scaled

The first thing companies must do is decide which communication channels they want to use based on both accessibility and scalability. Once they have done that, they should discard the ones that are not both accessible and scalable.

Exploit content as a means of providing support

Companies can use content as a means of providing free customer support to their customers. This kind of support can come in beginner questions and frequently asked questions. Both of these can be used to handle simple issues that your customer might have. That will give your company agents time to deal with the difficult issues. There is another advantage of using content to provide support. It increases the level of engagement between you and your customers. When the level of engagement increases, the number of loyal customers you also have increased.

A customer is happy when he can solve his problems without having to contact your support team. Not only that many customers can get to know about new products by going through the content on your website.

Take the example of StudioPress. The company is providing frameworks themes in WordPress along with child themes. Both of which can be customized by the customer. The main problem is that many of their customers may not be able to do the customization by themselves. To solve this problem, the company has many resources besides the standard FAQ that appears on other websites. These resources deal with some of the common most tweaks and customizations people can do with their product. The resources include code snippets that customers can use or modify to suit their purposes.

By providing these resources, the company has managed to reduce the number calls about customizing down to a minimum.

Afterthoughts

Ruling your support team with an iron fist can seem easy for you as you know what is going on, but it counterproductive in the long run. This is because dictatorship in a company has the ability to root out creativity, stop the company from growing and keep the company size the same.

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Vaishali Gopi
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