How We Onboard Our Consultants to Be Your Best Customer Support (remotely)

It is true, the entire world’s workflow is disrupted at the moment. But we at SupportYourApp are not letting the pandemic tear our processes down.

Even in the present situation, we continue to onboard the best customer support teams for our clients. Remotely, of course. And we have a set of tools and skills to make sure that our customer support services are provided by the best-matching consultants.

What are we looking for?

Right off the bat we would like to say that we always look for the people with the skills requested by our clients. And we never allocate new consultants without client’s approval. But, in order to make sure that the new consultant will be the best fit for SupportYourApp as well, we are looking for:

• Honesty;
• Openness;
• Adaptability;
• Willingness to work with other people within customer centric culture;
• Corporate culture and values fit.
• Basic hard skills;

These are the main traits among dozens of other that we think are the most important when choosing the right person for the right job. After all, that’s what it is all about. 

On- and off-site onboarding. Is there a difference?

Onboarding is a perfect opportunity for the company to introduce itself and its values through a dedicated Onboarding Department. There is no scenario where it can be skipped or done badly. We prefer to look at onboarding as at a perfect opportunity to set an example — we care and so should you. 

And surely, there are certain advantages to conducting it in the office, where the onboarding manager can see personal traits of the new consultant and evaluate them instantly, deliver the sense of overall customer centricity of the company and help the newcomers with all the questions and the problems that might occur during the onboarding process. But the present situation is dictating its own rules, and we have adapted to them successfully. Plus, SupportYourApp are no strangers to onboarding the consultants for remote positions.

So, does anything differ now from the way it was before? Sure! We cannot treat the newest consultants to a delicious cup of coffee ☕ and take them on a tour around the office 🏢. Everything else is pretty much as usual. It is just done online.

Successful remote evaluation of the newcomers — yes we can!

While it might seem that evaluating soft and hard skills of the newcomers is impossible while not being in the same room with them, we have to correct you. It is more than possible to do successfully while being out of the office. After all, we have been developing our onboarding system for years and from the very beginning we have been keeping in mind that remote onboarding is the future. 

What is helping us?

1. 📹 Video chats

Seeing the results of one’s work is one thing. Seeing how they are getting the results is completely different. That is why having a video on while talking to our talented onboarding team is crucial and is a must (refusing to turn it on is actually a deal breaker). 

We need to see the reaction to what we are saying and asking. We need to see whether the person knows their way around a computer and whether they are open to communication. This helps us evaluate soft and hard skills from the get-go, which makes the process of choosing the right niche for the newcomer easier and faster. 

2. 🎋 BambooHR

It really helps us with tracking the progress and seeing how fast a person on the other end of the line goes through an abundance of different tasks and learning materials, even if they are on the other side of the city or out of the town completely. 

3. 🏫 Schoox

Learning is one thing, but showing that you have grasped and fully assimilated the knowledge, is completely different. That is where Schoox comes in. It helps us provide those onboarding with both learning materials and with tests on the topics. This is one of the best pieces of onboarding software that we can think of. 

Trust but verify

If the process is entirely online, that doesn’t mean that our Onboarding Department is not well-connected to those who are only starting their professional journey with us. While we give the newcomers the freedom to do the tasks at their own pace, we still check in on them to make sure that they are actually doing what they are supposed to at this moment — learning everything about the company and our customer centristic values. 

Onboarding checklist — what are the new consultants supposed to know after onboarding?

• ✅ The structure of the company and its management team;
• ✅ The rules and tone of communication in- and outside SupportYourApp;
• ✅ The feeling of our customer centric policies;
• ✅ How to provide the best customer experience while resolving tickets of any difficulty;
• ✅ How to implement customer centricity into every-day workflow;
• ✅ Get a grasp on all SupportYourApp company habits in order to be able to fully start working in the nearest future;

A decade of experience matters

Onboarding is one of the most important parts of the professional journey. For starters, it helps the future customer service consultant get a hold of our corporate values and culture. By providing them with all the necessary learning materials and knowledge bases, as well as checking their knowledge with quizzes (something that we regularly do for everyone in the company) we give them the opportunity to study at their own pace and to revisit the materials whenever they need. 

The main goal of onboarding both into the company and into the product, is to make the consultant comfortable enough to deal with the inquiries and tickets. If in the beginning they require a lot of attention and a lot of help from their Delivery Manager, after the onboarding is over, they feel totally capable to operate inside SupportYourApp structure without additional help. This means that they have already stepped onto the path of becoming true professionals in customer support. 

And, if we have to conduct this process remotely, so be it. We are too good at it to let this little nuance spoil the experience. 

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