Great customer support service is the need of the hour. If as an organization you cannot provide good customer service you are sure to lose their loyalty at some point in time. Therefore, you need to provide the best possible service to your customer.
While every business today tries to provide excellent customer service and reduce the customer effort with timely and effective support to improve their experience, it fails to recognize the most important aspect of delivering a customer experience – their employees who serve in a customer facing role.
If you make it difficult or the employees to do their job, it will translate to the experience they deliver to your customers. Even if the difficult task is not directly related to the customer, the frustration of doing that task somehow impacts the employee-customer interaction. Also, it gradually makes your employees disengaged resulting in an even poorer customer experience. Yet according to a CCW 2019 study, most companies do not pay as much attention to reducing employee effort as they do to personalization.
At Fusion CX, we give our employees utmost importance and recognize their unique position in delivering a good customer experience. Therefore, we always ask ourselves the following questions:
- What’s keeping employees from delivering the great experience that your customers deserve?
- Is there a way to simplify workflows and processes?
- How can we make it easier for employees to do their job?
- How do we make it easier for agents to deliver a great customer experience by removing complexities, complications, and bureaucracy?
- Are there ways to reduce effort for employees and ultimately, for customers?
With our vast experience in the customer service industry, we have found that making necessary changes to reduce the efforts of your employees leads to improved customer experience. Here are a few suggestions on how to turn things around for our employees, and eventually, for the customer.
1. Walk In Your Employees’ Shoes
Walking in your employees’ shoes in the best way to understand the effort they put every day. To do this, you can create any of the two following things:
- Employee journey maps
- Your own undercover executive program, in which executives take on the role of the employee.
Once you understand the effort, you’ll be able to unearth the inefficiencies and ready to improve the process. At Fusion CX, we have used undercover executive program to see whether the employees are finding it easy to do their job.
2. Pay Attention To What Your Employees Are Saying
Listen to what your employees are telling you. Watch them work. If they say a process is difficult or pointless, you need to look into it and fix it the best way you can. Ignoring it is not a wise decision.
3. Ensure Employees Have The Right Tools
When you define employee roles and expectations, make sure that your employees have the knowledge, skills, training, and resources required to do the job. Without the right tool, training and knowledge they will not be able to provide prompt and to-the-point solution to your customers, resulting in a poor customer experience.
4. Reduce Their Effort With Modern Technology
At Fusion CX, we believe in providing our employees with the most modern tools that make their jobs easier and less time consuming. For example – if customer service agents get AI assistance that brings all the data related to a customer on a single dashboard, it helps them serve the customer better. Having an omnichannel environment makes it easier for the agents to ask suggestions of other agents without putting the customer on hold and thus it reduces the agent effort and ultimately the customer effort as well.
5. Define The Idea Of A Great Customer Experience
Giving your employees a clear idea about your customers will help them understand what needs to be done. Defining the idea of a great customer experience to them will give them a clear target and help them understand how to get there.
6. Provide Ongoing Feedback
Giving your employees regular feedback and ongoing coaching provides them with the guidance they need to follow the right path, to do things in a better manner and to do it right every single time. Just like employee feedback helps create a better process, giving regular feedback and training to the employees help them deliver a better customer experience. According to Hubspot, regular employee feedback can greatly impact employee engagement.
These are some useful tips that can help you reduce agent effort, root out the inefficiencies, and create a streamlined and simpler work process that makes the job easier for the employees. A simpler work process with the right tools and technology result in a better customer service while regular feedback and timely training boosts employee engagement. As a result, your employees are happy and your customers are happier.
Fusion CX has always been an advocate of reducing employee efforts and engaging them with timely feedback and training. We feel that when our agents are engaged, they provide a far more efficient customer support that boosts customer satisfaction.
