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Six Trends That Will Shape Customer Service In 2018 (For Better Or Worse)

You may still be writing “2017” on forms, but no one can deny that 2018 is in full swing. So what does the year hold for customer service? As always, companies who provide great customer service have a huge advantage over companies that don’t. Here are the six customer service trends we expect to see in 2018 and, more importantly, our advice on how to manage them. Chat Support Will Increase In Importance Chat support offers huge benefits when it’s done well. Customers get answers immediately, rather than having to wait 24 hours or more (the typical response time for email support). Furthermore, chat enables customers to ask follow-up questions in real time. An email conversation that could take days is condensed into five minutes. Chat support also presents a great opportunity to close sales. At one of our company’s e-commerce clients, 13% of website visitors engaged with us when we reached out proactively via chat. Of those, more than half went on to make a purchase. This compares with typical conversion rates of less than 3%.  Many companies, however, have done a terrible job with chat support. Some offer mediocre chatbots that can’t answer most customer questions. While these […]

Six (Proven!) Secrets For Managing a Remote Workforce

IBM recently made headlines for dismantling its policy that allowed remote work. But we believe remote work is here to stay. It allows us to hire and work with some of the smartest people around the world, whether they sit in an office or not. Some of the best workers are increasingly demanding flexible schedules. Employees who work from home are more productive and less likely to quit, according to a study by Stanford University Professor Nicholas Bloom. So why do so many companies fail when they try to enable employees to work remotely? Typically, they force remote workers to adapt to a culture and processes that were built for in-office work. If you want remote workers to succeed, you have to rethink your communication and collaboration culture from the ground up and make sure all employees — including those in the office — work in similar ways. Here are six strategies that work for us. 1. Get everyone to use the same tools It’s essential to get everyone on your team — remote and office-based workers — set up with the necessary technological infrastructure, including software for remote meetings and videos. This sounds simple, but it’s often where the process breaks down. If your remote […]

Our Leadership Training Program for Managers – A Complete Curriculum

Last year, we organized our first annual Peak Support Summit. We brought most of our team members together for a weekend which included trainings, a discussion of core values, and a lot of fun. At lunch one day, I sat with Ivy, one of our team leads, and asked her for feedback. “I want more training,” she said. “We get plenty of trainings related to the specific tasks our teams need to accomplish. But I want a Leadership Training Program for Managers.” Of course.   It was a classic “duh” moment for me. No one is born a leader. We all learn from experience, and, yes, from formal training. We had a fantastic group of team leads. But we weren’t offering them any training to help them make the transition from team member to manager. And so the Emerging Leaders Program was born. We think of it as a mini-MBA. Indeed, it covers a lot of the same topics as MBA programs, but in about 12 weeks instead of two years. We even took a lot of the readings from Harvard Business Review and other classic B-school resources. We designed it in the spring and launched it with Peak Support’s […]

Leadership