How to Successfully Onboard New Customer Service Team Members

Successfully onboarding new team members will ensure they learn the role faster and are more likely to stick out the job in your company. Research by Brandon Hall Group found that a strong onboarding process can improve new hire retention by 82 % and productivity by over 70 %.

For sure, it would be best if you had a strategy for onboarding and tracking the efficacy of the process over time. This post explains how to successfully onboard new customer service team members. 

Introduce your New Customer Service Recruits to Team Members

Introducing the starters to team members will help them feel welcomed, included, and more comfortable in the company of their co-workers, starting from their first day. Although they might not remember everyone's names straight away, they will likely recognize faces and feel more comfortable approaching these people with any questions they may have during the challenging first few weeks on the job. 

Those initial introductions will go a long way, fostering teambuilding and forming new relationships from the very start. Facilitating this will ensure that new starters settle in much quicker and be much more likely to stick around. 

Showcase Your Values and Company Culture 

Hopefully, you have hired people who are a good match for your company's values and culture. Showcasing your company values and culture should begin at the recruitment stage. Potential candidates should be able to access information about these elements of your company before they apply for the role. Ensure you have a careers' page packed with information about what it's like working for your company. Invest in a video to showcase your company culture and values. 

Once your new employees start in their role, an important part of onboarding is to showcase your values and culture during their induction, training and beyond. Company culture is an essential factor for 46% of jobseekers, and a massive 86% of jobseekers will avoid companies with a bad reputation. Therefore, creating an appealing company culture for jobseekers, new starters, and existing employees is vital, as this will help with recruitment and retention. 

Include company values as part of the training process. Feeling connected to your company values will encourage new employees to invest in the success of your business. 

Ensure that new starters feel a sense of belonging from day one by involving them in activities that foster team building and inclusion. Use social channels to help them connect with their team and the broader organization. 

Let them Get to Know Your Knowledge Base and Data

Provide new starters with master documents covering all the essential information they need to carry out their roles effectively. Of course, they will not be able to memorize all the information in this, but it will provide them with something they can refer to whenever a question arises. Also, it is worth having in mind that 83% of workers prefer a video to be shown what they need to do. 

It's helpful to create a knowledge base around everything related to working in the company. This may include information about payroll, holidays, company values and processes. In addition to this, create a knowledge base document that specifically relates to the role you have hired them for. This document may include answers to commonly asked questions and best practices, success metrics and example scenarios and how to deal with them. 

In addition, consider creating dummy accounts where new starters can get to know your systems and data without making any errors or changes to the live system. This will help them learn the role quickly and safely, in a stress-free way. 

Give them a Buddy 

Whether your new employees have experience in customer service roles or not, it will take them time to acclimate to the new environment and learn company specific systems and processes. Pairing new employees up with a buddy is an excellent way to make them feel comfortable and speed up the learning process. 

A buddy or mentor for new employees should be somebody who works in the same role and has been through the process themselves. Ideally, this would not be someone in a position of authority, such as a manager or team leader, as a new starter will feel more comfortable with an equal. This will enable them to ask any questions in a low-stress relationship. 

Select your buddies carefully, ensuring they are friendly and willing to provide hands-on support to new starters in the company. Ideally, this should be a voluntary role to ensure those selected are engaged in the process.

In addition to helping your new starters learn their roles, buddies can also help with informal aspects of acclimatization, such as spending lunch breaks with them and showing them around the workplace. This will help give a good impression of your company and ensure they feel welcome in the workplace from the very first shift. 

Make them Feel Comfortable Asking Questions 

Nobody is capable of learning everything to do their job effectively on day one. Once your customer service representatives actively engage with customers, answer questions, deal with complaints, and navigate the systems, there will inevitably be times when they need help or have questions. 

To ensure your new starters learn the ropes as quickly as possible, so you can maintain high levels of customer service, you should empower them to ask questions. Encourage new employees to ask questions during their initial training to get the most out of it. Create a company culture that is helpful and inclusive to new starters. Your new customer service employees should feel comfortable asking anyone in the team for help if they need it. This can be achieved by fostering a friendly and welcoming environment. 

Track their Onboarding Process 

Create a basic set of metrics that will allow you to track and measure the onboarding process. This will give you the insight you need to see whether your approach is working or where any improvements may be made. 

If you provide new employees with onboarding materials via email, track whether these are being opened and read. Perhaps set a series of induction tasks and create a tracking system to monitor whether these are being completed. 

Perhaps hold one-to-ones with new employees every week for the first few weeks. Use this time to ask them questions relating to the onboarding process, so you can assess how well they're settling in. 

Tips For Onboarding Remote Customer Service

Onboarding remote customer service employees will include many similarities with hiring office employees. However, teambuilding and onboarding can be trickier when done remotely. As such, this is something that should be carefully thought through. 

Also read: How 5CA streamlines the hiring of multilingual customer service agents, with Pipplet

For remote customer service employees, getting to grips with the tools and sales pitches, as well as increasing their skills in the company's products or services, requires management to provide close support for integration. This can be done through “double listening” sessions, for example, or through quizzes to measure the assimilation of knowledge by the new recruit.

And of course, all the tips for remote workers apply for remote Customer Service Representatives as well.  For example, you can create an onboarding timeline for remote employees so that you can track each element. Have a schedule for when materials will be sent out, when introductory team meetings will occur, and what will happen each day for the first few weeks. 

Ensure your training materials are highly engaging, as this will help to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interaction. Be sure to prioritize remote teambuilding activities and contact your new starters regularly. 

It would help if you had a strategy for onboarding, with tools and metrics for measuring its success with each new starter. This applies whether their role is remote or in-person. Research clearly shows that companies with a standardized onboarding process experience 50% greater productivity. 

_____ 

Use the tips in this article to help you create a successful onboarding process for new customer service representatives. To assist you, Pipplet provides a language assessment solution that helps recruiters evaluate and improve employee language and communication, both written and oral, while onboarding.

[Discover] Pipplet pre-hiring tests for Customer Service Representatives