WordPress Event Ticketing

Running a WordPress business is hard work. Keeping your support team motivated is an entirely different prospect. Support at times can be soul destroying when you are trying to do the best you can for your customers, but they keep coming back aggressively and threats of chargebacks and bad reviews. In time likes these it can be difficult keeping your support team motivated, but here are some things you can try.

The Customer Isn't Always Right

It's a popular motto "The customer is always right" though, that's entirely untrue. While you and your support team should never be rude to a customer, you can point things out in a polite manner that make it easier on you and your team. If a customer is coming back time and time again with what they call a bug, but your team found to be a conflict with a third party plugin or something very specific to that customer's setup, tell them politely. If the customer threatens a chargeback and a bad review, be upfront, point them to your support policy and refund policy. In some cases, you may prefer to just grant the refund and move on and let the customer know. Don't let one bad customer bring down your whole support teams morale.

Policies

Policies are important. You should always have a well-written support policy and refund policy. This gives your support team something to refer to and helps them in their jobs. They'll be much calmer in dealing with difficult customers if they can refer them to aspects of support and refund policies. Rather than having to try and explain away why you don't have these common policies.

Training

You may be thinking how training can help keep your support team motivated. Simply through confidence and reassurance. If your support team receive constant training and support in best practices your products and are given time to learn new features, they'll have more confidence in dealing with customer requests and in turn, will feel happier with the day to day workload.

The training should always be well structured and with a clear purpose to educate them. If you know there is a weakness in one area with a few of the support team members, educate them and help. Give them help and support where needed.

Part Of The Team

Shape support team members as you want them for your team. Reward attitude, willingness and learning from mistakes.

Support can often feel like second-class citizens, snapped at by developers, berated by customers and always dealing with the difficult issues. Make sure your support team knows how valued they are and integrate them as part of the team as they are part of the whole company. Making them know they're valued doesn't have to come in the form of monetary rewards. Give them positive feedback, tell them when they've done well and reinforced they're doing a good job. Though it never hurts to have a support member of the month with a small prize. If you do though, don't make it about ticket count. Make it about the quality of the answers; someone shouldn't just win as they handled 10% more tickets than someone else.

Freedom

While you need policies and rules, try and give your support team leverage on how they deal with customers. If you get a couple of refund requests in, give your support team the go ahead to just deal with them as they see fit. Not only will they feel like you value their opinion, but it'll also allow you to take a step back and not need to get involved in every part of the process.

Time Off

Looking at a computer day in day out with no breaks will eventually cause burnout.

It's important you give your support team the time off they need to take a break, do something else they love and come back feeling refreshed. Some companies have open vacation policies; others have fixed vacation policies with a set number of days each year. While open vacation policies are all the rage, make sure your support team and the rest of the team do take some time off and don't feel that because no amount of days are set in stone that they can take a vacation or time off as needed.

If you have an open vacation policy don't forget your planning! If half your team takes leave at the same time, it'll leave you shorthanded on support and potentially cause angry customers as requests won't be dealt with as quickly.

Loyalty

Has a support member been part of your team for a year, two years, maybe five years? A structured loyalty program is one of the best ways to make your team feel valued. Companies like Automattic give away a WordPress branded laptop at the five year anniversary for support staff, and many other companies have loyalty programs for staff. Keeping any member of your team in a remote company can be challenging, making sure you value their loyalty to you, and the company is vital.

Don't make it all about work

While work is, of course, the most important part of the day, let your team chat amongst themselves, being up team spirit and try and engage conversations about hobbies and family, sharing in family events, special occasions and other aspects of their life they'd like to share. Making it all too serious can get dull pretty quickly and make your team feel like robots, and no one wants that.

Stay Connected

Staying connected is important for all members of your team but especially your support team. Using apps like Slack, Skype and Google Hangouts your team can stay connected, chat, share solutions to problems, ask for help with problems and in general feel more integrated as part of the team.

Conclusion

All in all, being there for your support team, helping them, giving them the training needed along with being there for them for non-work things as well will help keep your support team motivated. It isn't all about the money and never should be. Do you run a WordPress company? Maybe you've run a support team before? Let us know your thoughts and experiences in the comments below.