Retiring the two-fingered salute!
Have you ever been put on hold in mid-sentence by an agent? Chances are, your wait happened because the agent had to hunt through a dense thicket of systems, tools and views just to find a simple piece of information.
The average CSR goes through several thousand iterations of ALT+TAB each day while customers are forced to wait. Each ALT+TAB, or two-fingered salute, is a sad, yet accurate, measurement of distress and customer dissatisfaction.
For most organisations, critical information is buried in disparate, hard-to-reach systems. Agents are forced to constantly ALT+TAB among these systems, sometimes a dozen or more at a time.
Here are five steps that all organisations should take in order to reclaim control of the customer service experience and, in the process, improve customer loyalty and retention.
1) Regain control through integration
The starting point for getting technology under control is ensuring that technology works together.
Universal integration of all enterprise data and tools offers managers and agents increased standardisation and control over the end-to-end service experience. As a result, agents on the front line can easily view a customer’s account history, as well as suggested scripts such as troubleshooting tactics and financial discounts that compensate for the problem and build brand loyalty.
Best of all, integration allows agents to pull information from many places onto one desktop, which avoids the dreaded two-fingered salute.
2) Enable real-time, universal workflows
Customer service technology can map out service experiences and build composite applications that carry out those workflows on agents’ screens.
When building workflow applications, customer service managers can arrange necessary information and the proprietary tools that their agents may need to complete a service request effectively. Such technology allows business leaders to guide agents as they move through various service interactions, controlling them without extensive training.
3) Contextual presentation of information
Just like a car dashboard, an agent should be presented with important metrics like a customer’s call time, hold time, prior service problems and revenue in a condensed, graphical format. The new, adaptive technology model — controlled and monitored by the customer service manager — is interactive and leads agents down the path to customer satisfaction. Agents are not only able to answer the customers’ questions and requests effectively, they’re also able to anticipate them.
If things happen to go wrong and the customer gets cranky, then the same real-time data integration mechanisms that help anticipate requests let agents and managers monitor key business metrics. This high-level visibility allows them to evaluate and optimise multiple metrics, such as cost and productivity, at the same time.
4) Checks and balances
Workflows do more than just enable flexible, quick updates to processes and policies, and ensure a consistent service experience. Timed, multi-step processes, as outlined by the business analyst in the workflow application, create a sort of “checks and balances” system.
Before an agent can move forward, they receive a scripted alert on their desktop reminding them to complete a specific step or process. The agent must address this item before they can proceed to the next screen or step in the process. This ensures that government regulations are met.
5) Manage services across all channels
Genuine control of the service experience requires the ability to manage across all service channels (voice, email, Web, live chat, etc.) and across departments.
This isn’t a far-off pipe dream, it’s the reality for an increasing number of companies that are realising that control over the customer service experience translates directly into greater revenue, improved efficiency, and lower compliance risk.
Mark Angel
Mark Angel is the CTO at KANA Software (www.kana.com)
