It can be easy to forget yourself when you’re the big kahuna of the office, but no matter how big your paycheck is, you’ve got to set a good example for those who work for you to keep your business afloat.

Head honcho status aside, always remember that customer support begins with you, and your actions have the ability to make or break your team, which in turn can affect your business.

How to Provide Support

Dr. Scholl’s provides arch support.  Control top panty hose provide…well, “muffin” support.  Your friends and family provide moral support.  So how can you, as a business owner, provide your customer support team with the support they need to succeed?

Encourage Intradepartmental Interaction

Help forge positive working relationships between your customer support reps and other teams that assist them.  Introduce customer support to IT, for example, and HR to customer support.  This will help foster communication between the teams so that your customer support reps are not afraid to contact familiar associates with questions and requests, and they can get faster results to better assist your customers.

Get Up Close and Personal (but only as close as Human Resources will legally allow) 

Spend a few minutes each week to make small talk.  Ask individual customer support reps about their families and outside activities.  It may seem like a waste of time and productivity, but showing an interest in your customer support team will ease tension and let reps know they can come to you for additional support.  Listen with open ears a little each day and your work community will ultimately be a friendlier place with a significantly higher morale.

Look for Solutions Together

If you can’t answer one of your team members’ questions, a tall tale might make you look intelligent in the instant, but could make you look sheepish in the long run.  If a customer support rep questions a policy you have, for instance, and you don’t have a good reason for why it is in place, you could collaborate to find a better policy that ultimately improves your company.

Adopting this practice is a great way to model how reps should be treating your customers.  They may not always be able to come to a mutual conclusion, but they can work together to find another alternative that works.  Keep an open mind and show that you’re willing to take other ideas into consideration.  With good results, one of your employees could come up with a great new policy or method that supports the entire team!

Hold Regular Bi-Weekly or Monthly Customer Support Meetings

Ask your customer support reps about challenging cases that may have come up in online ticketing and discuss how to handle them.  Honor reps for their hard work and efforts.  And find out how YOU can help make their jobs easier.  Just ask!

Instill a Little Friendly Competition

If your company has more than one customer support rep, encourage a fun competition.  Avoid the go-to contest of how many customer support calls or emails each rep answers per day since that focuses on quantity over quality, but try some sort of sweepstakes to see how many thank yous each rep can get via email or how high their scores are when customers respond to customer support surveys.  Use your creativity to make the workplace more fun – and just like that, you’re providing your reps with invisible support.

Next week, try one of these simple suggestions to beef up your internal customer support, or heck, try’em all!  You’ve got nothing to lose and we guarantee you’ll see an improvement in employee morale!