How Leaders Can Combat Customer Support Team Churn

Leaders play a critical role in ensuring that their workforce is motivated and engaged. Driving results through your team members will help you accomplish your company objectives and stay ahead of the competition. However, do you know why some of your employees are disengaged or unhappy? It might have to do with how they are managed or because they’re not happy about what’s expected from them at work.

In the previous blog, we touched base on a very underestimated subject as burnout specifically in customer support teams. Companies understand that customer experience is a competitive edge but very often underestimate the power of customer support teams.

In fact, organizations with good customer service enjoy up to 20% higher profits.

Customers who have a bad experience when they contact support are known to reduce their spending by 75%. They also tell around 9 to 15 people about it on social media or other review websites. In addition, 56% of unhappy customers will never buy from you again and 66% will stop repurchasing the same product category.

That’s why we see more and more companies using the right tools, processes, and leadership for providing great support and rapid feedback loops to improve collaboration and alignment between marketing, development, and support. But what if all these efforts aren’t enough? What can leaders do before losing talented people?

In this article, we’ll explore some ways to stop attrition rates among customer support teams by focusing leadership on internal vs external factors which affect job satisfaction for this type of workforce.

We believe the first step might be understanding why customer support teams and specifically yours experiencing high churn rates.

As mentioned previously, customer support is a very demanding job. It requires constant shifts between different types of work (tickets, chat, emails, etc), uncertain compensation (depending on company structure and location), strong emotional involvement (with customers or between team members), lack of transparency into the bigger picture, and little recognition for what’s done well.

While there are many things that could contribute to high attrition rates in this field, we can distinguish two broad categories: the internal factors (behaviors of managers/leaders) and external factors (behaviors of upper management toward employees).

Internal Factors

This includes various issues managers might face when leading customer support teams. Let’s break them down!

Poor work-life balance

Support team members live to serve their users 24/7. While it sounds like a noble goal that should be rewarded rather than criticized, in practice, it’s inefficient for your business.

Frequent shifts make it difficult to build a work-life balance outside of their working hours. People who are used to working long hours might be inclined to stay longer once they’re there. In the end, this has a negative impact on productivity. It also impacts personal life as it triggers feelings of guilt from not being present at home or with friends and family.

In addition, few companies allow remote work or flexible schedules that bring additional challenges for team members trying to find a good balance between their professional and private lives.

For example, some teams don’t have email access after a certain time which makes it hard to communicate last-minute urgent matters or requests from users (especially when an issue is occurring).

Low transparency

This issue comes from a lack of communication and understanding of the bigger picture. For example, support staff doesn’t have access to real-time information such as sales numbers, user growth, product usage metrics, etc. This makes it difficult for them to understand what’s expected of their performance and how they contribute to the organization’s success.

When that happens, team members feel like just another cog in the machine with no direct impact on the company’s overall well-doing. They also start feeling less committed and willing to go the extra mile for your customers because they don’t see its value or purpose.

Poor remuneration policy

Your employees might not be able to afford to live in an expensive city where your company is located. This issue has a direct impact on the happiness, dedication, and retention rates of your team members outside of work.

External Factors

On the other hand, there are factors that leaders don’t have any control over but might still contribute to high attrition rates in customer support teams. These include poor company culture, unfair wage differences between departments/positions, micromanagement practices, lack of career advancement opportunities for technical-oriented employees, etc.

To better understand why your people become unhappy or disengaged at work you need to ask them about their concerns and find out what they expect from their leader or manager during their next performance review. That way you can try to address these issues before it’s too late!

If not, you might face the unpleasant scenario of having to go through a round of layoffs in order to restructure your team.

To prevent high attrition rates in customer support teams start by focusing on the internal factors first. The external ones are much harder for you to have an impact on since they depend largely on company leadership’s vision and practices. For that reason, it’s important how managers communicate with their team members about their performance. They should also work actively to build trust-based relationships among employees so that people feel comfortable voicing concerns without being labeled as “complainers”.

Tips for leaders that are easy to begin with, but will have a huge impact:

Offer more transparency:

Open and frequent communication is key to improvement. Make sure your leaders and managers share crucial information with your customer support team members (sales figures, product usage metrics, etc) so that they can understand how what they do contributes to the company’s overall well-being.

Provide career advancement opportunities: show your support staff other paths within the organization for them to explore instead of putting all their eggs in one basket by staying in a role where they don’t have any room for growth or exploration.

Avoid micromanagement practices:

Trust should be at the core of every team member’s experience while working for you. If there are constant requests coming from the top it makes people like they lack autonomy and control over their tasks. That’s a deal-breaker!

Introduce a fair compensation policy:

What you pay for is what you get. And more often than not, people don’t leave jobs because of the salary, but more because they feel undervalued and think it’s time to move on from their current position to something better suited for them.

Don’t expect them to act like robots:

The customer success team represents your business in front of people who require help, but they’re also people with feelings and emotions. If you keep treating them like numbers because it’s easier that way, then you could face major issues down the road.

Treat your staff as individuals instead of generic resources and you’ll be much more successful at retaining them for longer!

As a leader, it’s critical to be aware of internal and external factors that might affect the retention rate of your customer support team. Once you come up with an action plan that addresses these concerns it will be much easier to focus on what really counts: bringing home more customers!

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