Companies exert a great deal of effort to deliver the best possible experience to customers. The idea is to create or provide an environment where customers feel at home, where they are pulled by the brand with pleasing thoughts, or where they are made to feel special. Happy customers mean more business, that's the thought.
Companies focus on satisfying customers, as this improves retention and helps drive revenue. Customer satisfaction is also essential for keeping one's employees happy.
Support agents are equally important as customers
The reason is that a happier workforce stays motivated to do their job with perfection, which is providing excellent service to customers. This, in turn, benefits companies by improving their customer satisfaction scores and helping provide a better customer experience.
In every industry, before new products are launched, business leaders promise good bonuses to factory workers if they exceed production targets. To deliver better-than-expected results, companies are bound to provide a good work environment where people can work to the best of their abilities with the help of modern technology and tools. Without the essential technology and manpower, the company can't expect to have any of its products in the market.
Ditto with customer service and support teams. Hiring the right people alone won't get the job done. As a customer support provider - in-house or outsourced - your top priority must be creating a suitable environment for your support agents. The effort must be centered around creating an environment where employees can thrive.
Most contact centers today witness high attrition rates and disgruntled staff. Burnout is often cited as a common reason by people who want to quit customer service. Is smiling and politely resolving problems too much to ask for? Certainly not! Then what is the reason for disgruntled professionals? Let's find out.
Also Read: Proven Methods To Empower Customer Support Teams
Most customer service professionals have to follow a set of rules and are limited by SLAs (service level agreements) regarding what they can promise to customers. Sticking to service rules can be stressful when faced with an angry or upset customer, but not always.
When performing customer support duties, agents get irked with helpdesk software that claims to deliver unicorns and rainbows, but in reality, it unnecessarily complicates the flow of work. A poor-quality helpdesk software causes more interruptions in service delivery than providing benefits for customers.
With communication channels increasing almost daily, agents often find it hard to enter customer data every time the customer's interaction touchpoint changes. Some other helpdesks, especially used in finance and insurance firms, mandate agents to enter customer information during the call despite the customer clearing all verification procedures. Long call duration is a barrier to the brand faring well on the customer experience (CX) scale.
Consider this example — the need to transform the way customers are serviced
A North American e-commerce company with operations in the US, Europe, and the Middle East tries its best to keep customers satisfied with its range of products, shipping, and promise of on-time delivery. The firm competes with the likes of Amazon and Walmart and aims to deliver a satisfying experience to its customers.
An organization of this scale is expected to run on sound infrastructure, which means powerful software to help in its day-to-day business functions, a dedicated customer support team, and a robust logistics team to supervise and coordinate the delivery of customer orders.
The e-commerce firm signed up for a helpdesk, expecting the software to help agents and make customer service and support easy without unnecessary complications. Sadly, the company's expectations of efficient and robust customer support didn't materialize.
Let's see why.
Customer support is outsourced to a service provider company, and agents are given only the bare minimum training and are made to hit the call floor. Customer support agents are made to work on legacy helpdesk software at least a decade old. The software has bare minimum automation. There are no mechanisms to capture customer data automatically. The helpdesk doesn't have any smart content templates to respond to customer messages quickly, nor does it have an easy document verification system. In fact, no feature in the helpdesk can speed up agents' work. Everything has to be done manually!
Also Read: How Conversation Bots Aid Conversational Commerce
In an age where messaging platforms have text-autofill features inbuilt, imagine having to deal with legacy software that required repetitive customer data entry by agents who (not surprisingly) felt they were back in the Jurassic age. The frustration at the customer support center was palpable. New hires were left dismayed the day they were introduced to the software that helped run the company's service operations.
Consequently, employee dissatisfaction remains at an all-time high, and the attrition rate keeps climbing. Unsatisfactory workplace software, more specifically, software that discourages employees from performing their best, does more harm than good, even if it appears to save money in the organization's annual returns.
If customers sign up, they are promised excellent products and unfailing customer support. If the company's customer support is a major pain point, there is no point in guessing how bad the overall customer experience might be.
Support teams, on the other hand, are promised modern technology and a healthy work environment to ensure they can live up to the brand's promises. An ideal work environment elevates the customer service agent's experience with technology.
The lack of information processing capability in contact centers irritates agents the most. Repetitive mundane tasks without intelligent workflows are generally disliked. When agents dislike the main components of a contact center, you know it's time to change your helpdesk software - for good.
Consider changing your Helpdesk Software
Contact centers have a very dynamic environment. Agents have to deal with tickets/calls continuously, and it is not an easy job. Every customer that reaches out to the contact center is special, and, for that matter, every ticket is unique.
How does ThinkOwl further agent experience?
Incoming tickets can be automatically classified into various categories, such as payments, returns, refunds, customer inquiries, and the list can be endless. Thanks to its artificial intelligence, ThinkOwl analyzes customer messages and decides which category is suitable for each case.
ThinkOwl has several intelligent features that make real-time information processing easy. It can also be integrated with third-party applications, which helps support agents source information from other platforms. The multichannel capability helps provide seamless services to customers, irrespective of their chosen communication channel.
Also Read: Why Workflow Automation Is Imperative For Your Business
Automation is the key!
On a typical day, support agents receive thousands of calls, emails, and messages from customers enquiring about their issues. Responding to customer requests is now easier than ever. Agents do not have to scramble for necessary customer data. Looping workflows, manual search, and population of customer data by agents are made easy where they can do away with manual data entry.
Responding to customer messages is easy for agents because of smart responses and pre-defined content templates. Your agents can provide customized responses to customers without any manual activity. When service executives are expected to deliver personalized service, time devoted to every ticket becomes crucial. And that's where automation has proved to be a blessing.
Automation drives businesses to achieve optimal efficiency, by eliminating the bottlenecks that cost both time and revenue. Any organization can drastically reduce workload by automating routine tasks with a touch of human intelligence and improving productivity while minimizing operating costs.
As a business owner, you aim to ensure every agent becomes your best agent. For that purpose, you should tap into the major innovations in AI and automation, transforming the world of analog voice and legacy customer service software.
ThinkOwl helps every customer support agent be the best version of themselves!
Here is how!
- Agents are prepared to best understand and respond to every customer's situation, however unique.
- Intelligent case distribution ensures every agent is allotted tasks corresponding to their skill, training, and experience.
- Agents can dive deep into the customer's problem right away with the help of lightning-fast automated data capture. This results in a lesser workload for support teams as they do not have to manually enter customer data/ticket details into the helpdesk software.
- Provide excellent service consistently across multiple channels without any extra work.
Employee well-being has five dimensions: Mental, Physical, Social, Environmental, and Occupational. We will focus on the fifth aspect because we can help you bring about a solid change. After all, occupational well-being strongly affects the other dimensions.
From large corporations to small and medium enterprises, anybody can join the movement to provide better tools to agents who handle customer issues. Creating the best agent experience directly translates to an excellent customer experience.
Using the right service desk software helps you manage growth and makes the overall experience satisfying and manageable for your support teams, directly translating into happier customers.
To know more about how ThinkOwl can help you further your agent experience and let them deliver a smile on your customers' faces, sign up for a 30-day free trial now.