What if you could provide call center directors with one billion assistants at their fingertips? Real-time automation does just that. It’s a mission critical technology that yields massive productivity improvements and cost savings.

As a senior leader of a support team, it’s vital that I guide my team on the best ways to resolve issues while meeting customer expectations. It’s in our hands to ensure that our product runs smoothly and that if any issues arise, all are handled quickly and tactfully. Due to my 15 years of experience, I’ve put together five proven tactics for delivering superior tech support:

1. Be Proactive: As each case comes through, determine the level of urgency and prioritize. I ask that my team focus on understanding the issue and to take action. Always be proactive when an urgent case comes through, rather than waiting until there’s a fire to fight. When customers have issues, start with a warm introduction, really listen to the customer to understand the problem, resolve and own the issue, and finally close out strong. Settle the fire before it spreads.
2. Reduce Customer Effort: Less customer effort = better customer experience. That means shrink the resolution time by eliminating confusion and miscommunication with a focus on continuous improvements. One way to accomplish this is to align specific support team members to specific complex environments.
3. Make Soft Skills Key: Soft skills are essential for your support team. These skills ensure that your customer feels heard, understood and supported. Unfortunately, not everyone has a true desire to help people. Give me a choice between a person with strong soft skills and not so strong technical skills and a person with strong technical skills and not so strong soft skills, I’ll always choose the former. Often times, it’s much easier to teach technical skills than soft skills.
4. Empower Your Team: It’s important to empower your team to take action and trust that they will make the best decisions. When solving a problem, enable your team to use their best judgement. If they think it’s the right thing to do, then it’s the right thing to do. A team with good intentions should feel empowered and inspired.
5. Celebrate the Positive: A constant focus on solving problems can cause one to lose sight of celebratory moments. Find fun ways to celebrate the positives. It can be as simple as bringing donuts for the team or perhaps share positive customer stories with your staff. Those success stories are not always readily known by your team. The goal is to boost morale and maintain solid momentum.

Finally, the importance to lead by example and guide your staff on the best way to resolve issues and meet demands should not be underestimated. Leveraging these five tactics sets a solid foundation for continuous improvements for my team and leads to better outcomes for customers.