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Unstuck: The Inspiration Playbook for Customer Service Teams

Building and running a customer support operation that consistently keeps customers happy is hard. With shifting customer expectations, an expanding suite of channels to juggle, (and the global fallout from COVID, which we’re not going to mention), feeling bogged down or not knowing where to focus your energy is completely normal. Unstuck is here to help.

From teamwork to tooling, Unstuck is an ever-growing database of little tips, sage advice and big ideas from CS professionals, that will help any customer service team switch things up and take their game to the next level.

We hope it unsticks something for you.

1. Hold regular team retrospectives

2. Create triggers for when a conversation has too many updates

4. Model future ticket demand based on seasonality and trends to anticipate resourcing needs

5. Close the loop on negative feedback

6. Monitor negative CSAT scores and follow up

7. Fine-tune your agents' schedules using data to make sure you're meeting demand

8. Build relationships with other teams

9. Create a series of onboarding emails for new users or those trialling your product

10. Expand your team's availability outside of local business hours

11. Optimize your CSAT survey for more responses

12. Invest in training

13. Compare your metric with industry benchmarks

14. Use customer journey mapping to see your customer's experience from their perspective

15. Regularly surface CS KPIs and emerging trends to the rest of the business

16. Catch and Congratulate!

19. Work with Engineering/IT to simplify or automate common tasks

20. Analyze help center searches

21. Create a WFM (Workforce management) strategy

22. Perform a workflow audit

23. Create a team dashboard

24. Create a separate Twitter account for customer service and outage communication

25. Reorganise your team, and ticket assignment, to increase domain knowledge

26. Follow up on customer feedback

27. Offer horizontal progression and opportunities outside the support team

28. User test your help center documentation to check it's easy to understand

29. Help agents prioritize workloads by giving tickets a priority score

30. Set up basic chatbots

31. Review your tagging process and build a taxonomy to ensure accuracy

32. Organise customer feedback to identify trends and recurring issues

33. Use screensharing and co-browsing to see what your customer sees

34. Spend time learning how to communicate more clearly over email

35. Implement a status page

37. Track Customer Effort Score

38. Double-check how your CSAT is calculated

40. Reward your CS team members

41. Celebrate those little wins to keep the team motivated

42. Understand the process behind solving customer issues

43. Regularly track customer experience (CX) metrics

44. Use 5 Whys Analysis to find the root cause of problems

45. Implement a ticketing system

46. Prepare for new releases

47. Improve in-situ / in-product help and error messages

48. Encourage the leap from CX to Product

49. Set up recurring catchups with high-value customers

50. Set up policies for security reports and bug bounties

51. Apply the Business Model Canvas

52. Use outsource partners to help during busy periods

53. A summary per mail keeps misunderstandings at bay

54. Run a 'Start Stop Continue' exercise with your team

55. Review your most used macros and canned responses

57. Implement callback systems

58. Use BrowserStack to replicate customer issues

59. Foster communication in and out

60. Add footers to replies and signatures

61. Invest in your team's internal documentation

62. Encourage friendly competition between agents and teams

63. Try team pairing to solve difficult problems

65. Offer work shadowing with other departments

66. Monitor social media for unhappy customers

67. Put simpler tickets in a different queue

68. Create reply templates for common queries

69. Implement an emergency management process

70. Offer structured time outside the queues

71. Connect your support apps through Zapier

72. Regularly review customer interactions

73. Uncover the world of CX possibilities

74. Schedule regular knowledge base audits

75. Don't overpromise to your customers

76. Offer more support contact channels

77. Create a basic system for tagging tickets

78. Improve search in your help center

79. QA score in agent incentive scheme

81. Invest in debugging applications

82. Have customers use What Browser

83. Avoid support tags spiralling out of control

84. Find and fight friction to create content customers

85. Link up with your sales team for smooth onboarding

86. Identify repeatable tasks and automate them ASAP