Anyone who has been a manager to at least one person or has had a "boss" knows that work performance depends mostly on motivation. The motivation can come within themselves (desire to get advanced skills) or from outside factors (earn money). In any case, when we are talking about customer service and direct interaction with customers, proper motivation does count!

With average motivation level, your online service reps will do their job according to the rules, and nothing more! That means you are missing a whole bunch of opportunities to perform better, gain more customers and increase your profit. Below are some ways you can achieve that:

Restore the Importance in the Service. Service is usually considered as second-class work which requires low profile and consists of repetitive processes. It is compared to servility. If that is the way your employees view customer service, than it is time you bring back the importance it deserves. Doing this, you need to stress the vitality of their jobs and turn their perception into "a profession they should be proud of".

Give them the freedom to be creative. People really give their best when they are motivated and have enough freedom. If some operator has noticed some new trend or a better way to sell your products/services, he should have untied hands to use it and develop the concept further more.

Provide them with appropriate decision power. The nature of the operator's job is to answer all the questions and inquiries from customers. This means they should know every single detail that can be of customers' interest. That can be the case, but in small number of companies. Many of those questions require making decisions immediately and your operators must have the authority to do that.

Learn from the mistakes. It is true that you can't anticipate all the situations and give directions to your operators how to deal with each. So, it is best to do that continuously. You can do that by reading the transcripts of their chats and noticing bad practices. After that, on regular meetings you should discuss the issues with your employees.

Let them become important part of the sales, marketing and R&D department. The operators are the ones that hear the customer voice. And since the whole organization should be build and function around customer needs, proper management of the feedback is crucial to the company. According to that, your online operators should take important roles in the marketing, sales and R&D teams. That way operators deliver them the needed feedback from the final customers. Also it provides them with more motivation, being considered as very important part of the company.

After all, reward their efforts. Nothing is worse for your employees' moral than effort that is not acknowledged. Be sure you come up with practices to reward each of their efforts and give them even more will to continue performing good.

All of these practices come to one conclusion at the end - you shouldn't tell operators what to say! When you motivate them enough with the previous tools, they will certainly find the best path. And that's a win-win situation.