Our customer service team recently opened a satellite office. A portion of our team is now 300 miles away from our company headquarters. No, it’s now outsourcing, it’s really just business redundancy and continuity. Having a team working at the same time, from a different location is peace of mind for a stormy day.
The problem is that home based customer service agents and agents in satellite offices even are much trickier to motivate and to help maintain high morale. It’s also a challenge to help these customer service professionals connect with the rest of the company and develop a consistent customer experience.
Here are my 2 cents on motivating customer service team members who may have alternate work arrangements or who may work from a different office than your regular staff. These suggestions help keep people connected with you and your customer experience mission.
- Management visits and works with the team. Not just a hello, but real, meaningful work.
- Periodically bring people in to work at the headquarters (1 time per month, as long as it doesn’t cause problems for the individual)
- Hold regular team activities (video conference with team and also live person events)
- Encourage more team personal communication by phone and live instant message. Anything to get people actually interacting with other human beings.
- Believe it or not, get to know you activities. Even though we may work next to another person, we may not know much about them as a person, these activities help to get people to know each other on a more personal level.
Customer service being done outside of your headquarters doesn’t mean bad customer experiences, there are just some of the simple things you can do to keep your customer service people connected and excited in delivering exceptional customer experiences.
Not everything may be possible, you may think of and add some of your own ideas that work especially well for your team or for your company. But recognizing the need for special attention and making the effort to motivate customer service team members gets your started.
Global Customer Service Mission
It will take some work, but you can connect your team members and unite them in your customer service and customer experience mission, no matter if they’re 30, 300, or 3000 miles away.
