Teams | Collaboration | Customer Service | Project Management

Customer expectations are higher than ever before, and your customers are scrutinizing your business more intensely than ever. They’re comparing their experience with your brand to the easy, fast, and personalized experiences they’re having with the best of the best. And it’s these customer-focused businesses that get to reap the benefits of renewed loyalty and competitive advantage.

Not long ago, handle time was the chief measure of customer support agent productivity. Managers optimized everything they could to lower costs (that is, time spent) by speeding up their teams’ calls. This, according to management consultants at Bain & Company, is what leaders do to make teams more efficient. Efficiency is producing the same with less. Productivity, by contrast, is producing more with the same.

In most organizations, the highest-performing sales reps are eventually promoted to management. But being a manager is a much different job than being a rep. You can be at the very top of your trade, but that doesn’t necessarily make you a good leader. I experienced this firsthand when I moved into management. I was good at sales, but I wasn’t really good at leading. You’re not taught that it’s a completely different job that operates in a gray area every single day.

Growing awareness of attraction centers around the world, faster and more reliable transport systems, and internet booking are some of the reasons for the booming Travel and Leisure Industry. Over the years, tour operators and travel companies have improved touring experiences for leisure tourists by breaking barriers of language, currency, and costs of tours.

Everyone in the business world has had an experience where it didn’t feel like they mattered to a vendor or business. It’s a difficult feeling knowing your voice isn’t being heard, or even worse ignored by someone you’re trusting to meet your business needs. However, these situations can be avoided with your own customers by hiring support team members who legitimately care about them AND know how to properly display this care in conversations.

A business can’t thrive without lead generation, however, the more leads you generate, the more selective you have to be in your pursuits. Sales rep don’t want to waste time chasing a large list of dead-end leads. That time could be spent nurturing more promising leads. Yet, when it comes to valuing leads, how do you separate the wheat from the chaff? Experience and gut instinct goes a long way, but they aren’t enough.

With the new year setting in, you might have already identified new leaves to turn, and set your customer service objectives accordingly. Along with the goals that you have already framed, here are five questions that can help you reflect on your current support setup, ensure that you are on the right track, and fine-tune your objectives for the year.

For project management, there are tons of software options available, some of which are too heavy-weight for teams tackling smaller, well-defined projects. When picking the right software for your team, one of the biggest challenges is striking the right balance in terms of the benefits versus the time spent setting it up and managing the tool.

Customers may not be interested in your customer experience software – but your company absolutely should be. When done right, a simple and sophisticated customer experience platform is a key tool for creating loyalty. For companies, it means being able to seamlessly communicate with customers across the channels they want – including email, chat, text, phone and social media. For customers, it fosters a sense of trust that they can reach you the way they want.