My Customer Service team's profiles

How important is your customer service team to the company?

We all know that no matter how smart your software or machine is, the right touch of "human" can increase significantly the return rate of a new customer or the loyalty of an existing one. As Customer Service (CS) seems to be the easiest career to start with, a lot of companies think it's simple to build a CS team. Right but very wrong :-) Customer Service is a very special career, where you do not only need the right skill-sets but also the right mindset. Therefore, it's easy to build a team, but it's not easy to build a good team and maintain good performance. The following profiles of employees are needed in a CS team within any company.

1/ The customer champion:

Customers contact you as they have problems, they need instructions or they need clarifications. Your customer champion will be the one who always listens, shows the customers you all care about their requests, and solving them is your top priority.

2/ The field expert:

Your customer champion has empathy, patience, and the ability to state the problems of the customers. However, they might not be the one who understands clearly the problem; the field expert is. They will be able to tell why the customers have this problem, and if this is the trend. They might not be so empathized with the customers or patience to listen to a long complaint; they just know how to end that pain.

3/ The team operationalist

CS team, it's all about people, process, and how to handle people and process correctly. The more people, the more process, the more possibility that everything can go wrong. The team operationalist can help to organize your team, fix problems that relate to operations, and makes the team whole "again".

4/ The team quality-controller:

This is the most straightforward profile. We want our CS to answer correctly. We want to make sure our customers receive full support. Therefore, we need somebody to maintain, review the performance of our team.

5/ The strategist

The top priority of CS team is supporting customers. And sometimes this task takes too much time for all of the members to really think if we do it efficiently and correctly. However, in this competitive life, whatever we do we have to make sure it's efficient and sustainable. The strategist will be the one who steps back, looks at the team's full picture, and never hesitates to suggest new ideas to improve the team. This can be considered as the manager profile.

6/ The analyst

Data never lies to you if you know how to read it correctly. The analyst helps to uplift the efficiency of your team and bring up the hidden problems.

As one staff might be able to act in 2 profiles, a small CS team can have 1 CS agent, who is both Customer Champion and Field Expert or a team leader who is both the Quality Controller and Operationalist. However, it's important to know when it is a good time to have one person act only one profile to bring the best result to the CS team, as well as the company.