8 Ways To Improve The Effectiveness Of Customer Service Department In A Web Hosting Provider

There are many guidelines found online on how keep customer support staff in a good mood and stay productive. But web hosting is a highly specific industry and customer support staff in this field often needs to work in a slightly different way.

Supervisors in customer service department should do the following:

1. Encourage customer service staff to escalate to their supervisors: Every now and then, some customers would stump customer service staff with questions and requests for assistance outside their abilities and expertise. Customers will be able to quickly tell if your staff doesn’t have a clue, so it is necessary to encourage them to quickly escalate the issue to more experienced employees.

2. Instruct customer service staff to be exact with personal account information. Customers in web hosting industry are involved with date-correct contact information, case-sensitive passwords and short-hand domains. This can mean numerous confusions for consumers and inexperienced staff, so make sure they are always very exact.

3. Remind customer service staff to keep track of all clients: When customer support staff is on the phone and talking with many customers in a short period of time, it is easy for things to eventually fall through the crack. Perhaps, a customer the staff talked to a few hours ago is still waiting restlessly by the fax machine for the promised invoice.

4. Instruct customer service staff to not keep customers on hold for too long: It goes without saying that customers support frequently put people on hold. During busy hours, this is unavoidable but the staff should keep it under five minutes and get back on the line to notify the customer if it really needs to be longer.

5. Instruct customer service staff to be fully knowledgeable on company policies: There’s nothing worse than having customers demanding some details on billing policies when customer support staff don’t know anything about it.

6. Instruct customer service staff to reply properly: “Uh huh” is not a verbal proper response to customers. Email and phone etiquette is critical in any customer support department. Customers should get full attention and the staff should always ask themselves how they would like to be treated when they are at the opposite end of the line. Being courteous and polite should be very simple, especially when the staff only needs to talk on the phone.

7. Encourage customer support staff to research regularly. More knowledgeable staff can assist customers better. This avoids having awkward silences while the staff is looking up for relevant information.

8. Instruct customer support to be upfront: Almost nothing is free today and the staff needs to let consumers know when something is going to be billed, such as charges associated with cancellation policies. During a cancellation, the staff needs to tell the customer if there’s still some money owed on the account and if they don’t cancel by a specified date, they’ll be charged for another month. Not informing customers on these details could cause troubles in the end and it is quite likely they’ll refuse to pay anything.

The web hosting industry can be a little intimidating for customer support staff transitioning from other fields. It’s evolving every day and can be quite complex. A good way to assist customers is to be willing to learn anything new.

[box]Raja is a writer for TopDollarMobile.co.uk an innovative company which people are using to Recycle Mobile Phones.[/box]