How to proactively work with your clients to steer them towards success

Contributed by John Maxwell,
SnapEngage Client Success Manager

While Client Success is all the rage in the SaaS industry these days, establishing a position in your company in charge of ensuring that your customers are happy and successful with your product can be applied to any business. The client success role fits nicely in between your sales, support, development, and even marketing teams. To put it simply: we are advocates for the customer.

“Hold on there…” you might be thinking. “I have a customer support team on phones, ticketing systems, live chat. I even send surveys to my customers all the time to get feedback on our product or service.”

Awesome. Perhaps you even use your sales team to communicate with prospective clients to relay the latest product demand from the front lines. All of this is a great start! But when you toss Client Success Managers into the mix, you supercharge your communication flow between your customer base and product team for the better. Why?

It’s all about the dedicated account review.

Continue reading “Why Account Reviews Matter” →

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to be on the front lines of chat support?

Contributed by Dan Mowinski, SnapEngage Sales Team

Who am I talking to in those funny chat boxes anyway? Who are these humans at SnapEngage that are answering my questions? We’d like to introduce you to our support team, and let you know a bit about who they are and what they think about life at SnapEngage.

I’ve interviewed the entire support team to learn more about them. After all, couldn’t we use a little more humanity in the world of online client support?

Even though our support team might not always have the answers you want to hear, or may need to follow up later on complex issues, one thing remains clear. Our team is dedicated to giving our clients the best customer service experience possible, with high emphasis placed upon an efficient, friendly, helpful, and human chat experience. This is what a good chat experience is all about!

I asked them questions to learn about their passions outside of work, why they think SnapEngage is awesome, and what makes a successful support agent. These insights into our team will hopefully make you as enamored with them as we are and open the door for better communication along the way. Let’s learn more about the SnapEngage Support team!

Continue reading “An Interview with the SnapEngage Support Team” →

A little trust can go a long way

Managing teams is often based on authority where team members are taking orders and following instructions. This more traditional style of management works quite well for factory work, but is usually unfavorable in today’s workplaces where innovation, creativity, and service play a crucial role. As best-selling author Daniel H. Pink puts it: “Control leads to compliance; autonomy leads to engagement.” Autonomy can take many different forms. No matter how you define autonomy, when your team feels they have freedom of action, the results are stunning! Potential benefits include greater employee commitment, better performance, improved productivity, and lower turnover.

Our clients that are new to live chat are often unsure about the right settings for their team. In particular, the question of whether it is better to give agents the autonomy to decide which chat requests to answer, when to answer them and how many requests to handle at once arises. In addition, should these chats be automatically assigned to specific agents to avoid any possibility of agents slacking or choosing chats that are easier to resolve?

Although the answers to those questions depend on the structure of your team, the seniority level of your agents and other factors, we encourage our clients to offer at least some autonomy to their agents. Place trust in the people you hired and they will respond positively!

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider how you manage your team.

Allowing your employees to work at a comfortable pace while monitoring their productivity levels can benefit both their mental well-being and your company efficiency. Stop micromanaging and boost your team’s commitment, performance and productivity with some small enhancements. Don’t be afraid – it’s well worth it. Here are a few things to keep in mind.

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Continue reading “6 Reasons Agent Autonomy is a Game Changer” →