Top 15 Tools to Overcome Productivity Killers for Your Customer Support Team
Measuring the productivity of the customer support team in terms of the overall company profits might seem like mission impossible. But it isn’t. In the long run, your customer support team makes a huge impact on marketing your products. You cannot deny that customers return only to those brands or companies that solve their issues faster
Your company will generate money only if there are happy aka “efficiently supported” customers. #customerservice Click To Tweet
You may ask what is this fuss all about? After all, the customer support team is not selling anything. Well, it is a misplaced notion of how we perceive customer support. Even though your customer support agents are not officially a part of your sales department, their efficiency will surely contribute to hitting the huge sales targets you have set for the year. Therefore, optimizing the work of the support team will be a guarantee of increasing the number of customers.
The easiest way to solve the problem is not to create one in the first place. #problemsolving #customerservicetips Click To Tweet
Eliminating the problem of low performance means identifying productivity killers and applying the best working tools to overcome them. Here’s what you and your team must know about the biggest “enemies” of productivity.
1. Believing that Productivity Has a Limit is a Wrong
“If perfection is unattainable, surely near perfection must be the next best thing”.
Paraphrasing these brilliant words in the context of customer support team performance, setting the minimal bar of expectations for your employees will certainly make your team less productive. Proper time management is the first and most important step in creating “sky-is-the-limit” mentality.
2. Decision Fatigue is Destructive
Our mind can effectively focus on one task at a time so it is highly recommended that customer support engineers are instructed about the expected time of response as well as the span of discovering the best solution for the problem the customer asks about.
In case your customer support team does not have the clearly outlined algorithm of addressing the problem, they might deal with it in a not so effective way. This might result in not losing the customer but also projecting a bad image of the company.
3. Micromanagement Creates Unnecessary Pressure
Implementing a direct demonstrative control is the least effective mechanism for managing people, and when there is one person trying to take charge of the whole team performance it is inevitable that productivity will be on halt.
Now that you know about the productivity killers, what are the best solutions to break the barriers of faulty mentality, slow decision-making and micromanagement routine nightmare? Here you will find top 15 tools to hack any of these productivity issues!
1. TMetric is a time tracking tool that enables precision and prevents micromanagement. It lets you be your own boss and has everything you need.
If you have a remotely working team of support engineers, this is a great tool to measure their productivity. It can be easily connected with support platform like Freshdesk to track time on a larger scale and makes micromanagement unnecessary. Sounds fantastic, right? Some of the things you can do by integrating TMetric with Freshdesk are:
– You can view the exact time your agents spend on resolving each ticket
– The billable function lets you pay your agents based on their resolution time. Reports help you analyze the productivity level of your agents and understand if your business generates profits
– TMetric is one of the most affordable time-tracking solutions you can find on the market
Conclusion: The app’s ongoing data analysis gives spotlight on your activity throughout the day/week/month/year and helps you score your team’s productivity at a glance.
2. Slack is similar to a Swiss army knife and can be used for effective communication within customer support teams. It can also be integrated with Freshdesk and provides:
– Lots of chat options that guarantee effortless and effective team management
– Free plan and additional price plans
– Both mobile and desktop versions
Conclusion: Highly recommended by lots of users as one of the best team communication management tools.
3. Asana is another communication platform but unlike Slack it focuses more on task management options. It is greatly appreciated by users because of task assignment and to-do list functions but has only standard and premium plans. Among the cons are overly simple UI and somewhat stiff structure of the system (basically, you have only the task manager).
Conclusion: Great option if you want a task-oriented communication platform for your team.
4. Freshconnect is a collaboration tool that’s tightly integrated with Freshdesk and Freshsales. Using Freshconnect, you can start discussions with anyone you work with inside the relevant ticket and deal.
– Discussions are tied to the ticket so they’re easily accessible
– No more copy-pasting to bring someone up to speed. They can access all the messages and the associated context
– Reduces collaboration complexity and effort”
Conclusion: An ideal collaboration tool for support teams
5. Teamviewer provides you with instant remote access to other devices. Being a powerful integration, its distinguished features won over many hearts.
– Easy to use
– Instant audio/ video connection
– Allows file transfer
– Can be integrated with Freshdesk
– Mobile and desktop versions
Conclusion: If you want to manage a big team remotely, don’t hesitate to get a commercial license as Teamviewer has a long-standing reputation for boosting productivity. All you need is a fast internet connection and your team is ready to go.
6. Rescue Time is a tool that time-tracks your team and boosts their productivity by collecting data from the sites they use and the queries they make.
Pros:
– Gives a real picture of what the employees are dealing with throughout the day
– User-friendly interface
Cons:
– Despite claimed to have a good ROI, many users point out that the tool is more into highlighting their habits rather than setting and achieving specific goals
– Lots of setting up required to labels activities the way the user requires
– Absence of project tracking by websites and keywords
Conclusion: It’s a noiseless data collector that deep dives into the difficulties faced by your support team.
7. Boomerang is a must-have tool for your customer support team as it facilitates the email sending options from somewhat tedious into a smooth-and-easy affair. After all, managing emails is traditionally one of the biggest distractions for every support team.
– Serves as a reminder tool.
– Schedules your email sending and retrieves your letters in the variety of ways.
– Reduces the emailing time.
Conclusion: The perfect email management tool not only for tech savvies but for regular users as well.
8. Feedier presents itself as the “next generation feedback platform”, and they are as good as their word. It is a great productivity tool that provides you with
– powerful analytic reports based on customer reviews (and they sure know how to make surveys attractive and worth investing your time)
– high customer engagement rate for getting the global satisfaction score that is instantly calculated in-depth reports that are generated upon processing the customer reviews
Conclusion: Great tool to collect your customer reviews and see the bigger picture in terms of your service feedback.
9. Typinator prompts the commonly used phrases, terms, and helps insert images faster. It helps you type less but it is an app for Mac users to enjoy. Some of the other advantages are:
– quick to set up
– compatible with various software
– works smoothly over the repeated texts
– stable and user-friendly
– frequent application updates
Conclusion: A great tool that boosts productivity by reducing time on typing and creating a good workflow.
10. Bitrix24 CRM tool is one among the top recommendations for your customer support team as it has lots of useful features and meets the requirements of the users. Though it has no free trial, it is highly estimated by small business owners and has got great feedback. The features that are certainly beneficial are:
– processing the prospect contact information
– storing customer information
– arranging accounts, leads, and sales opportunities in one central location
– accessibility of information by participants in real time
Conclusion: An effective customer relationship management platform that speeds up your team performance.
11. Hubspot is the best CRM solution to increase your team productivity. When Hubspot integrates with Freshdesk, it provides agents with access to Hubspot CRM contacts, companies and deals. It has other features that
– manage your leads and customers
– create a new deal from a ticket
– estimate opportunities associated with a contact
Conclusion: Despite being costly, it is reliable and named as one of the best integrated inbound marketing tools.
12. Dameware Remote is one of the best remote service offering administration software. It gives the perfect solution to troubleshoot the user problems and the best part is you can do it without leaving your desk. Further, this productivity tool
– provides multi-platform support
– has all the necessary features for remote sessions
– lets the distant troubleshooter use the software without locking-out the local user
Conclusion: Implementing this productivity control platform will save your time and, eventually, help you generate more money because being faster than your competitors is always rewarding.
13. VoiceXML This tool is the best replacement for IVR system as it deploys innovative voice apps and provides a customer-friendly service.
– Fully integrated with automatic speech recognition (ASR) as well as text-to-speech (TTS) software with access to advanced interactive services.
– Available for both common hardware and Cloud VM servers.
Conclusion: Interaction between a customer and a computer via phone with Voice XML is quick and void of any complications.
14. CallHippo is the virtual phone system for customer support teams at affordable prices. It is an intuitive IVR service that can be recommended to any team regardless of its size or location. Some of its advantages are:
– You can assign numbers to your team members in more than 50 countries.
– It facilitates the growth of your business globally due to Intelligent Call Distribution System.
– It is highly beneficial for businesses in case they need to tackle multiple calls at the same time.
– Freshdesk integration completely eliminates the complexity of setting up a support center.
Conclusion: The best budget virtual phone system for your customer support team.
15. Hemingway is another must-have tool for managing your customer support team. It is the desktop editor that has a variety of options.
– Checks the readability of any text you input.
– Suggests improvements to your grammar, spelling, and style.
– Instant formatting (for example, design your text as a quote).
Conclusion: The best editor tool that takes your team communication to a whole new level that can be surely labeled as impeccable.
16. NewBridge is a fascinating alternative for those who enjoyed Sqwiggle. This tool lets you take and send screenshots throughout the working sessions, thus, giving your team a great visual experience.
– free usage
– video and conference call options;
– create a new group or manage the membership of an existing group in one click.
Conclusion: With NewBridge, the distance between the team members will not feel like an obstacle.
Last but not the least
Time tracking is the best way to improve your team productivity. Using the time management tools will let your service agents have a clear view of their priorities, and in the long run, decrease ticket resolution time and resolve more problems.
These productivity apps offer a lot to your customer support team without taking up too much of your budget. Investing in these time tracking software help boost the overall team performance without consuming any time.
You can simplify the procedure of control by incorporating the time tracker into the daily working routine, and without a doubt, it will enhance transparency, clarity, and efficiency of your team performance.
