The Impact of Corporate Culture on Customer Support Ops

All companies strive towards having a strong corporate culture. People make a business what it is, so keeping them happy, motivated, and positive has an impact on operations that is difficult to measure and describe. A great culture fuels a level of growth and productivity that all businesses want to achieve.

When it comes to customer support, a corporate culture can have a wide array of impacts. Here are some ways good and bad corporate cultures impact customer support operations.

A support team in a GOOD corporate culture:

- Better communication (both internally and externally) – This enables support teams to not only solve complex problems faster internally, but also to communicate the response with confidence to customers. A great corporate culture doesn’t have complex silos that hinders communication. 

- Easier to recover from mistakes – Everyone on a support team makes mistakes, but in a great company culture there’s a vibe that one error isn’t the end of the world. Colleagues will encourage instead of discourage when someone has a bad moment or day. 

- Better decision making – Support teams “doing the right thing”, even if it’s not immediately ideal for the business, won’t be viewed as negative in a great corporate culture. That’s because decisions in these cultures are less short-sighted and more about the big picture. 

- Easier to build customer trust – Customers want to communicate with people who understand their business. With a good culture that has a high employee retention rate, support teams can build trusting relationships with customers that can even be leveraged to upsell and drive revenue.

A support team in a BAD corporate culture:

- Trust and confidence will be lacking – Simply put, employees won’t have confidence in whatever they’re doing. One wrong message to a customer could get them fired. This hesitancy to make strong decisions will be noticed by customers.

- Customers will be more frustrated – What’s more annoying to a customer than when the product they’re paying for doesn’t work? When they can’t reach the right person to let them know about it! A bad corporate culture doesn’t go the extra mile to make customers happy and fails to manage customer expectations. Instead, they often ignore issues because there are little to no consequences.

- Team members will focus on themselves – A bad corporate culture comes with a “sink or swim” mentality where everyone is out for themselves. If making a colleague look bad so they can look good is encouraged, it will only create tension amongst the team. Everyone will be working in their own best interest and not for the needs of customers.

To summarize, the impact of corporate culture on customer support operations can be profound. A great culture will promote helping and doing what is right both internally and for the customer. A bad culture will be focused mainly on individual well-being with a cloud of uncertainty always looming over their head.

To work towards obtaining and sustaining a great corporate culture, businesses need to promote collective positivity and prosperity. A team is only as strong as its weakest link, so it’s essential that team members understand that working solely in their own interests will not have a positive impact on their well-being or career opportunities.