How to Increase Motivation in Customer Service: A Guide For Leaders

Customer service reps rate their happiness at just 2.3 out of 5 stars, putting customer support work in the bottom 2% of all careers*.

These low happiness scores can be associated with increased agent burnout, reduced agent productivity, high turnover rates, and poor customer experiences.

Fortunately, the right strategies and tools can help you increase your team’s motivation and engagement. In this article, we’ll discuss how to drive measurable boosts in motivation for your customer service team. 

Key takeaways: 

• Root causes of demotivated agents may include lack of resources, burnout, and the stress of handling customer issues.
  
• Strategies that support employees through training, resources, and listening to team feedback can improve your team’s motivation.
  
• CloudTalk features like Call Recording, Call Transcription, and real-time Analytics help managers identify training opportunities to keep employees engaged. 

Root Causes of Low Motivation for Call Center Agents 

Customer service reps often face relentless pressure, navigating tough conversations with frustrated customers who may lash out. This can happen even when agents go above and beyond to resolve issues proactively.

Working on the frontline of customer support may involve the following challenges: 

• Emotional fatigue: Dealing with difficult, upset customers is no easy task. Angry customers can be aggressive with reps, which can cause stress and lower job satisfaction. 
• Overwork and burnout: Some call centers struggle to maintain adequate staffing, resulting in overworked agents that are prone to burnout. 
• Unrealistic goals: In hopes of increasing operational efficiency, call centers may inadvertently create unrealistic performance standards. This can increase agent stress and demotivate them. 
• Lack of resources: Unsupported teams may not have the training, tools, or knowledge needed to excel in their jobs. This can be discouraging for team members who feel set up to fail. 

As agents consistently tackle high-stress conversations and unrealistic goals with a lack of support or resources, their motivation can flatline. This may cause decreased agent productivity, higher workforce turnover, and poorer customer interactions. All of these results can reduce operational efficiency and performance quickly. 

How to Boost Motivation for Customer-Facing Teams

Building an engaged workforce often starts with finding the right motivation for your team. Successfully engaging your support team will involve understanding their needs, providing key support tools and resources, and considering their feedback. 

Let’s review eight strategies to motivate your customer service teams: 

1. Understand What Makes Your Agents Tick 

Customer support managers should make an effort to understand what motivates (and demotivates) their reps. 

Collect direct feedback by conducting regular employee surveys and checking in with your reps one-on-one and in team meetings. You can learn:

• What challenges are stopping them from hitting their performance goals
• What support and resources could help them meet their goals 
• If they feel overwhelmed with their current workload 
• What incentives might motivate them

For example, you may have a full knowledge base designed to help agents answer customers’ detailed product questions. If agents don’t know how to use the knowledge base software, however, it won’t be much help to them. 

Improving customer service with feedback loops can identify hidden challenges and increase engagement when employees feel heard and respected. 

2. Provide the Right Customer Support Tools

Consumers’ expectations of customer support are always evolving. Recent research indicates that 71% of customers expect personalization throughout their buying journey, including in support interactions. 

As a result, your team needs to have up-to-date software, training, and resources to help them meet those expectations. 

Call center software that integrates with the company’s CRM, for example, helps reps offer personalized suggestions to each customer. Similarly, training your team how to offer empathetic and custom solutions based on customer data is essential to getting the end results you want. 

Customer support tools may include:

• Call center software like CloudTalk
• Advanced CRMs like HubSpot or Salesforce
• Ticketing systems like Zendesk to follow up on support interactions 
• Live chat solutions like Twilio 

3. Offer Growth and Development Opportunities

Ongoing training can offer skill and career development opportunities that keep agents engaged and improve their job performance. As agents deliver better customer experiences and hit performance goals, they may become more motivated.

Growth opportunities may include supporting hard and soft skill development, including: 

• Empathy training for call center agents 
• Active listening training for reps 
• Problem-solving practice, which may include role-play 

CloudTalk offers multiple features that can support ongoing skill development, including:

• Call Recording, Call Monitoring, and Call Transcription to assess individual agent performance and identify training needs
• Wallboards that leverage real-time dashboards to track key performance metrics 
• Topics Extraction to track conversation topics during calls

Remind employees that gaining new skills will improve their day-to-day performance and that high-performing team members may be eligible for raises or promotions. Opportunities for career advancement can keep motivation high. 

4. Train Agents with Detailed Product Knowledge 

Customer service training should include detailed product knowledge. Customers call to ask about everything from warranties to care instructions to raw materials, and your support agents need the answers. 

When agents have the information they need, they feel confident creating better experiences for customers. That can motivate reps who have a strong intrinsic work value, preventing them from feeling unhelpful or frustrated. 

• Ideally, product knowledge training should include:
• Ongoing training when products change or new products launch
• Access to detailed and searchable knowledge bases 
• Group training using product demos 
• Strong internal documentation, especially for reps offering technical support 

5. Act on Agent Feedback 

Collecting agent feedback to learn what makes them tick is an important first step, but you also need to act on that feedback. 

If your agents consistently provide feedback that they feel overworked or underappreciated, for example, you need to act before turnover happens. You can:

• Make scheduling changes to increase the number of staff on hand
• Hire new team members to prevent team members from being overworked 
• Implement formal recognition programs that include incentives and public acknowledgment for a job well done 

When you act on feedback from your support team, you can create a positive work environment. You can also empower agents to make a difference in their workplace, which can increase motivation and retention significantly.

6. Set Realistic Goals 

While setting performance goals is an important part of setting clear expectations and assessing your team members’ productivity, it’s important to focus on achievable goals. 

Unrealistic goals will squash motivation quickly. No one wants to feel like nothing will ever be good enough. 

Popular KPIs may include customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores, net promoter scores, and average call handling time. You can track these metrics with tools like CloudTalk’s call center Analytics software. Assess current team performance, and create standards based on your business objective.

Remember, however, to focus on the big picture of creating great customer service. If you push employees to decrease their average handling time, they may rush through calls and actually worsen the customer experience. You can look for ways to improve efficiency, but make sure it doesn’t come at the expense of support quality. 

7. Share Customer Appreciation Feedback

When customers feel valued, they’re motivated to keep working hard. They want to hear this from their managers, but they also benefit from getting customer appreciation feedback, too.

Make sure to share feedback from happy customers to keep morale high. You can do this publicly and privately, but make sure you provide customer service team members with plenty of praise for a job well done. 

8. Create Healthy Competition Between Agents

A little healthy competition can motivate team members to increase their productivity and deliver outstanding support experiences. 

Gamification techniques can make everyday tasks more engaging and rewarding — especially if potential incentives are involved. They may also provide valuable team-building opportunities, which can increase overall motivation. 

Examples of gamification techniques to create competition include: 

• Awarding an agent with the highest weekly CSAT scores with a reward like a bonus or a day off
• Seeing which teams handle the highest volume of calls in a set time period 
• Encouraging team members to use peer-to-peer recognition systems to give awards 

80% of Organizations Expect to Compete Over Customer Experience*

This means, to stay competitive, you’ll need a highly motivated team. And while customer service work can be challenging, the right strategies can help you keep your team productive. Implementing team feedback, leveraging incentives, and offering growth opportunities are all reliable strategies, but don’t forget to create and communicate realistic goals. 

A recent McKinsey study found that 72% of respondents felt that tracking  measurable goals linked to company priorities was highly motivating. When employees saw how their work was impacting the business’s bottom line, motivation followed suit. 

With goal tracking and growth opportunities being key to motivating your team, tools like CloudTalk can help. Use our advanced Analytics to monitor team performance, assess how new training initiatives impact key metrics, and provide group and one-on-one feedback to keep your team engaged. 

Sources:

*Career Explorer, 2024

*Zendesk, Customer Service Statistics. 2024