If anyone’s in need of building up, it’s your customer service team, right?

They have to listen to irritated, raging, and sometimes insane customers all day long. No matter who you are, you can’t tune it all out completely. It wears you down.

So, as a wise retailer, you know it’s important to do everything in your power to keep your customer service team positive and up-beat.

What are the most important things you can do?

Find out what will mean most to your reps so they give you and your customers legendary service that increases your market share:

1. Appreciate Your Team

This is by far the number one thing every customer service rep wants. Number two doesn’t even come close.

If you do anything during the day, let your customer service reps know exactly how much you appreciate their work and what they’re doing well.

This comes from a Glassdoor survey of more than 2,000 customer service pros.

The other two leading responses, a demanding boss and fear of losing their job, were less than half as motivating for reps.

The more gratitude you can offer, the better.

2. Coach In the Moment

Don’t wait for an annual performance review to offer your employees feedback. In fact, that’s about the least motivating thing you can do for your customer service team.

You’ll get the best response out of your customer service team by coaching them as close to the interaction as possible.

This includes coaching when your employees do awesome work, and when they make mistakes.

And the source for this? Forbes

3. When to Use Sanctions and Threats

Basically, you want to avoid these as much as possible. They do very little to motivate.

If you understand basic human psychology, people are wired much more strongly to act in order to gain a positive stimulus than they are to avoid a negative one.

However, sanctions and threats can work with employees who have extremely negative attitudes.

If they could care less about their jobs and coworkers, delivering them a boot in the rear end may be just the thing to do.

You might even see that they drag everyone and everything at your office down so much that you just decide to let them go and be a problem somewhere else!

4. Have Conversations and Listen

You listen to your customers’ needs…so why not your employees too?

Don’t just sit down and listen to what they say would improve their morale. Watch their actions and listen to those too.

See how they actually behave when you implement changes around your office.

Motivating your customer service team to do their best actually isn’t that difficult. So, that makes it a wise investment with a high ROI.