Supporting Clients Whilst Working Remotely: Our Top Tips

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Improving remote support to clients is not an easy job, as anyone familiar with the industry already knows.

Clients are usually in a hurry and that often makes it difficult to solve the problem they have, while others might simply be unable to properly explain what problems they are facing due to a lack of technical expertise. To counter such issues and multiple others that pop up in remote client support, the following tips should prove to be particularly useful.

Make Processes Leaner

The leaner your processes are in the remote support sector, the better. What it means is that a remote support team should be specifically trimmed down, as well as specialised in the kind of support that your clientele needs. In order to do that, of course, a few basics, as listed below, will need to be jotted down first.

• The needs of the client in no uncertain terms should be clear, evident, and verified
• Are there paid resources and tools that are not relevant to the clientele?
• Are the remote support team and the client on the same page regarding what they expect from the service?

Information such as this is key to streamlining the services provided. It will help to track down and save unnecessary expenses, improve customer-client relationships, and provide a more relevant, specific remote service. Your remote service team should also have everything they need in order to provide the required services to customers with pinpoint accuracy.

Ensure Data Security

Given that almost all important and confidential communications are going to be digital in nature, data security is a crucial IT service that is growing ever more important with each passing day. Hackers can not only hack a system for gaining access to confidential and sensitive data, but they can also intercept communications data while it is in transit.

Impreza IT Is a prominent name in IT Support Kent, and they have achieved that status by ensuring the highest grade of data safety for their clients. Through methodically and specifically providing IT support companies need to ensure data safety, Impreza makes sure that their clients’ data remains private, uncompromised, and encrypted in storage, as well as in transition. Data safety concerns all remote service-based companies while outsourcing their own customer management needs, therefore, how the IT team handles its data safety at their end should be a crucial deciding factor while choosing a company to work with.

Taking Charge Politely

Rude, impatient, and angry customers come as part of the job description, so a customer service team cannot let it affect them personally. Being polite is not optional, so every member of the remote service team must be trained to stay polite through it all. However, there is another aspect that must also be implemented in every case - the support team member will have to assume charge of the situation.

It would be impossible to provide remote support to any customer if the team member providing the support does not take charge of the situation by politely persuading the customer to share all information necessary for them to solve the issue effectively. It takes practice, training, and experience to do that, all of which should be present in the workforce.

Inspire Confidence in the Customer

The customer has to feel confident that the team member in charge of the ticket can handle the situation, and if they cannot handle it, someone more knowledgeable in handling that specific problem will be taking over and solving it for them. In the absence of that confidence, customers are likely to grow angrier and more panicked, which will reflect poorly on the team member and the whole team. A few pointers, as mentioned next, should help in both achieving that control and avoiding an undesirable loss of confidence.

• Team members should be articulate and have a poker voice; a voice that doesn’t betray emotions
• The expression of emotions such as surprise, panic, fear, confusion, and anger should be habitually absent during the session
• An explanation of the issue often helps customers calm down, and makes them feel that the CS executive knows what he/she is doing

Recording of all Interactions Should be Automatic and Constant

Whether it’s a support session via chat or call, each and every interaction should be recorded for improving the support system, through tracing down faults in customer service, if and where they exist. The records are also going to be key in finding solutions to complex problems, without an immediate solution at hand. Finally, a detailed record-keeping process can aid your company if one of the interactions leads to a lawsuit, which is rare in the remote service industry, but not entirely impossible or unprecedented at all.

New issues will always come up, and clients can and often will change with time. To keep your remote services in line with that, the company should also be prepared to make dynamic changes to their operations, as and when required.