3 burdens holding your customer service team back

“Some of them have great potential, yet they aren’t growing”. If you are a seasoned customer service manager, it is quite likely that you have thought it at least once throughout your carrier. Actually, I did when I used to be a manager and today after years of consulting many client companies, I still hear them complaining about it. So why some people of your team are not expressing their full potential? What burdens holding them back?

Are you familiar with one of these?

Below I describe three sticky situations that, if not properly ‘cured’, become burdens holding your team’s potential back.

Poor motivation → of a customer service agent, supervisor or even a manager. I’ve observed cases where some persons have gradually lost their motivation towards their role and the signals where unmistakable: they started ‘executing tasks’ coldly just like chat bots, leaving out any hints passion or human empathy with customers (external end internal one). As you may guess, since we’re talking about people having loads of conversations with customers, that negatively affected customer experience. Well set up KPIs just don’t lie!
Lack of initiative → it happen when a person is not used to be proactive. Accordingly, they’re keen to share issues and potential risks, but they don’t propose solutions to enhance their business area (neither in terms of team’s effectiveness, nor customer experience-wise).
Fear of manager’s reaction → another reason that lead some team members to keep silent is fear. In fact, if they don’t feel ‘safe’ to express their ideas, they don’t make proposals because they’re afraid of how their manager may react. Therefore they prefer keeping their mouth shut. In similar situations the environment needs to be changed, otherwise it’s very hard to convince any team member to go the extra mile. And by the way, how can you blame them?