How Team Collaboration Can Improve Customer Experience
“Appointing a team is frequently the only way to assemble the knowledge and breadth required to pull off many of the complex tasks businesses face today.”- Harvard Business Review
Behind every great leader is a supportive team. Even with the most determined leadership, goals can only be met if there is a strong team working together to achieve them. But great leadership doesn’t just help your business internally. Teamwork can also help your business deliver fantastic customer experience (CX).
What does your business gain with better teamwork?
Teamwork is essential for your business, but what exactly will your company gain from effective teamwork?
- Goal crushers. When working to achieve a goal, you need the right tools. There is no tool better than an effective team. Through a hardworking team, you can accomplish so much more than you ever could on your own. Empower each team member to work hard, and together you can crush your goals.
- Efficiency. When all of your teams collaborate with each other, they learn how to communicate more effectively. This helps your business run more efficiently and avoid breakdowns in communications. You can encourage your employees to opt for an MCM degree to advance their communication skills.
- Motivated employees and colleagues. To value teamwork means to value team members as well. Emphasize to your staff and colleagues that their voice matters. When they know that they are valued and important, your staff will be more motivated to go the extra mile.
How does Teamwork help you deliver better CX?
Increased teamwork helps your business deliver better customer experience in a myriad of ways.
Teamwork gives your business one unified voice
When your teams are communicating efficiently across all departments, there will be better QA (quality assurance) in your customer interactions. Employees can give each other advice and assess each group’s strengths and weaknesses. This helps your company have more consistent customer interactions and deliver fantastic CX, regardless of which department the customer is interacting with.
In addition to delivering quality customer communications, teamwork helps your business deliver a unified message. You want your company to have a clear idea of what its story is. When a customer is talking about your business, what are the three things you would want them to say? That needs to be the story you tell, and it must be ingrained in every department of your company. When all departments are telling the same story, it solidifies your brand and improves CX overall.
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How Can I Build a Collaborative Team?
Now that you know the value of an effective team, here are some important things to focus on when boosting collaboration.
Identify where the strengths lie
Take a look at your employees’ strengths and weaknesses. Who is a great logical thinker, but struggles to come up with new ideas? Do you have an employee who is creative, but struggles to complete tasks in an organized manner? Every team member brings something different to the table. Create balanced teams where each team member has strengths and weaknesses that another team member doesn’t have.
Create a great work environment
Promote a sense of community. A sense of community within a team brings a sense of belonging. Either as a team leader or a team member, emphasize the importance that you all want to reach a common goal together. This can look like a daily meeting to touch base, taking team members out to lunch to boost morale, or playing a few ice-breakers with new team members.
Encourage patience and listening
In order for collaboration to be successful, every team member must be patient with one another. As each person will have different strengths and weaknesses, everyone must listen closely as they learn new skills, and be patient with team members as they are being taught. If your team can practice this effectively, then soon, everyone will have new skills and their previous weaknesses will become areas of strength.
Learn from your teammates
A strong team will connect people of varying backgrounds. This means that each team member will have a unique perspective — use that to your advantage. Be open to suggestions and critiques from people that you may not have heard from before. They can have great suggestions on how CX can be improved and show you how your business can get there.
Create goals across departments
Once you and your colleagues are speaking the same language and learning from each other, it’s much easier to create overarching goals. Your marketing, content, design, and sales teams all need to understand your business’s CX message and learn how to deliver it. What are their responsibilities in creating better CX, and how can they work together to achieve it? Increased teamwork gives your company a better capability to successfully complete larger projects and build fantastic CX across all touchpoints.
Help Every Team Member Feel Comfortable Speaking Up
You cannot have successful collaboration if a team member does not feel comfortable sharing their thoughts and opinions. Encourage everyone to listen to each other and ensure that all team members are having their voices heard.
Get The Right Tools
It’s difficult to be a cohesive unit if you don’t have the proper tools to succeed. A team needs collaborative technology to work well together. This includes a way to share documents and files, like in a cloud-based platform like Dropbox, Google Drive, or Box. Your team will also need day to day project management to get tasks completed on time and share the status of different projects. Try apps like ProofHub, Asana or Jira. For team communications, it’s helpful to have a central hub to chat throughout the day. Google Hangouts, Slack, and Glip are all great examples of team chat platforms.
However, many businesses also need a wide reaching customer interaction platform to help them work effectively. Having one place to manage all customer interactions will help you deliver better CX. Teams are less likely to miss messages from customers because everything is in one place. A customer interaction platform helps you organize all of your customer communications, ensuring a smooth and seamless workflow. You’ll also want to find a customer interaction management platform that can be used on mobile, so that teams keep track of their work and manage their customer interactions even while on-the-go.
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Respect everybody’s time
Everyone’s time is valuable. Whether it’s your time, your staff and employees’ time, your customers’ time, or your prospective customers’ time. Nobody enjoys feeling as if their time is less important than someone else’s.
For your staff, this could mean being stuck doing repetitive tasks. If you are a business that gets 20 calls every day asking for your address, it’s a drain on your resources to have someone to just answer the phone. It’s also a waste of your staff and your customers’ time.
With the help of technology, this problem can be easily solved. First off, make sure that your listings are accurate, especially your Google My Business profile. This can be done easily using reputation management software. Secondly, install a customer interaction platform. Using this software you can have live chat installed on your website, which can help answer the customers’ questions in a timely manner. By freeing up your team’s time, you are also ensuring that they have the resources to focus on other tasks.
Teamwork makes the dream work
By boosting collaboration and creating strong teams, your business will be able to deliver better CX across all departments. Focus on building teams that are diverse, eager to learn, and equipped with the right tools. In this hyper competitive environment, it’s important to remember that if you don’t focus on building a fantastic CX, you could lose your customers to a competitor. With the help of Interactions, you can manage your customer interactions from a single dashboard. Communicate clearly with your team through internal notes, establish multiple channels of communication with your customers, and view it all from one unified Inbox. How far will your teams take you?
Author Bio: Ruchika is the Director of Product Marketing at BirdEye, an all-in-one customer experience platform. With her expertise in SEO and content marketing, Ruchika is responsible for creating and managing the BirdEye blog, webinars, case studies and sales enablement tools to take new products to market. Being a customer experience expert, she advises businesses on the best practices around managing customer experience for business growth.
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