Want your customers to trust your company? Start by trusting your customer care team.

‍Do you trust your customer service team to do their job? Empowering your agents to help customers begins by trusting them to solve problems. Here are 6 ways to build trust with your team. ‍

Chances are, your company’s relationship with its customers requires some degree of trust. Customers trust that products work like they should. They trust their bank to keep its fiduciary duties. Policyholders trust their insurance provider to provide agreed benefits. 

The first time they experience a problem, they’ll contact you. When they do, you need your customer care team to respond the right way or that relationship -and the trust- can erode.

If keeping customers is a battle, your agents fight on the front lines. For customers to trust them, your agents need to feel empowered to fix their issues - something that develops when they have the respect and trust of your whole company. 

Six steps to building trust with your customer care team

1. Give them the training they need.

An agent who isn’t sure how to solve problems can’t help customers. Make sure to provide adequate training on all aspects of their job, including how to solve common issues and more complicated problems. 

2. Give them autonomy

As a customer, you can imagine how irritating it is for a small request to go through an approval process. No one wants to be transferred from one agent to another.

Likewise, your agents need the power and authority to do their jobs without supervisor approvals on standard items. For example, if your policies require approval before agents delve out commonly issued discounts or refunds, reconsider. Instead, provide a set of guidelines and conduct audits to make sure they’re following policy. 

3. Give them the right tools

Agents need more than a headset and a keyboard to do their job. Provide them with analytical tools so they understand the customers’ journey, a detailed CRM system that gives them context on the customer experience, and data they can access to understand trends and problem areas. 

4. Give them space 

No one wants a micromanager. Everyone needs some space to do their best work. This goes along with the goal of providing autonomy, agents also need you to trust them to use their judgment. Some conversations may take longer. Trust your team to navigate each customer interaction with their own expertise. 

5. Give them goals 

If you change rules or shift priorities with little notice or explanations, your agents could feel confused and overwhelmed. Likewise, if your team isn’t sure what they’re working toward, or how they’ll be measured, it can hurt motivation. Instead, provide clear goals they can work toward. If they know what you measure and how they perform, they know what to expect and where to focus. 

6. Give them feedback

Building a healthy relationship with your team members also means giving them regular feedback on if they’re meeting your expectations. If you trust them to do their job, but your audits find that they’re faltering, tell them and give them a chance to correct it. 

How conversation intelligence platforms can help build agent trust

Help your agents do their best job by measuring their performance at scale. When you use a conversational intelligence platform, you can automatically audit 100% of their calls, instead of the standard QA checks that base conclusions on just a few conversations. 

This software can also help you pinpoint which problems your agents don’t have the authority to solve, and which they don’t know how to solve - giving you opportunities for training and policy changes.

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Want to learn more? Contact our team for a product tour.

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