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Customer support is becoming more critical than ever. As the pandemic continues to change how the world does business and innovative technologies emerge, more customers are growing more impatient and expect organizations to provide immediate service.
Customer support is becoming more critical than ever. As the pandemic continues to change how the world does business and innovative technologies emerge, more customers are growing more impatient and expect organizations to provide immediate service.
Recent data reveals that most consumers are only willing to wait for 14 minutes before being served while another 75% report that they leave a business due to increased wait times.
However, keeping up with an overflow of customer service questions and requests manually can be difficult and may even lead to more errors. Therefore, customer-facing teams must take advantage of the different types of customer service systems to handle customers and daily operations. With the right tools, customer-facing organizations can gain insights on their existing business workflows to improve customer lifetime value and ensure profitability and higher satisfaction rates in the long term.
Unfortunately, picking the right tools can be challenging with so many software options available in the market. The challenge of finding the right tool is that every provider in the market always has a list describing how their solutions can help customer-facing teams improve their business processes. In this article, we’ll outline the tools and resource for customer service teams to manage their workflows and optimize their operations.
Collaboration is at the core of a successful customer-facing team. As customer expectations rise in terms of the range and volume of their concerns, customer-facing team members have to work together to solve workflow issues across different functions, management levels, and departments. By pooling together their expertise, the collective knowledge available increases, making the team a stronger entity.
An excellent way to enhance collaboration among customer service teams in the remote work era is using a video conferencing solution. With a dynamic video conferencing tool, organizations can build and strengthen relationships between virtual customer-facing teams, which in turn, allow them to improve work processes and deliver a better service. A Wainhouse Research survey reveals that 94% of respondents believe that video conferencing allows them to enhance productivity and efficiency.
Video conferencing tools also provide much more than visual and audio communication. In some cases, innovative video conferencing solutions are brimming with features such as real-time screen sharing and one-click scheduling through your personal email calendars. This way, you can discuss workflows in real-time and keep your processes moving forward while ensuring that everyone does not get lost in the translation regardless of the lack of physical contact
Each customer-facing organization creates workflows to understand customer service processes and identify steps that can be automated and centralized. This allows them to ensure consistency in how things are done and reduce the likelihood of missed opportunities. However, these workflows can add up over time, especially if an organization continues to grow and expand to meet customer needs. Sortd is one such tool that is built for Gmail-based customer facing teams.
While this can create more growth opportunities, it also makes it even more challenging for leaders to keep track of workflows while ensuring productive efficiency. After all, the importance of tracking workflows is too hard to ignore, considering that real-time monitoring is key to identifying bottlenecks and inefficiencies in business processes. Utilizing a robust workflow management system allows businesses to stay on top of customer service processes thanks to its ability to juggle multiple workflows easily and automate processes.
The advantage of workflow management systems is that it allows you to create pre-defined business rules and configure the solution to trigger actions based on conditions. This way, you can delegate tasks automatically while reducing errors and increasing trust and transparency. It also reduces micromanagement as workflow automation eradicates shadow tasks, making it easier for customer-facing teams to become more goal-driven and collaborative.
Effective task delegation is becoming a key competitive advantage in the customer service industry. As teams deal with an overflowing number of customer issues and requests, having the ability to delegate tasks allows an organization to allocate sufficient time to address each issue and ensure a smooth workflow. With so many requests coming in, it is not uncommon for customer-facing teams to get stuck with a backlog of tasks, which could result in slow response times and inefficient workflow management.
Unfortunately, despite all of this, many managers would still do mission-critical tasks on their own. The reality is that these managers are worried about the myths and misconceptions of handing off work to others because of a possible lack of control of their workflows. One of the tools to improve customer service and manage remote teams is a task management solution. Using a task management platform, leaders can manage workflows, monitor time, and collaborate with remote customer-facing teams easily. It can also streamline the collaboration of remote teams by tracking milestones and adjusting priorities accordingly.
A dynamic task management software tool also provides them with a comprehensive view of tasks in a centralized location and make workflow prioritization easier. This way, you can eliminate the need for constant forwarding and ensure that customer requests end up in the right hands. It can also help you monitor the progress of the tasks you’ve delegated to your customer-facing teams. Through this process, you can determine which individuals need more training to become a more effective asset for your organization.
Customer behaviors are changing rapidly as government regulations and distancing measures are implemented in response to the pandemic. More often than not, these changing behaviors can have a direct impact on business workflows and how customer-facing teams operate. Thus, having the ability to monitor evolving customer behaviors in real-time is essential in recalibrating service efforts.
One way for teams to take advantage of these behavior changes and improve their business workflows is to utilize robust reporting tools. Through reporting, you can identify actionable insights related to the customer experience which you can use to modify existing workflows to make it more effective in a changing market. Technically, customer service reports include several metrics that gauge the overall performance of your customer-facing teams.
You can use these metrics to monitor how your customer-facing teams are meeting business goals and identify areas for improvement. Reporting also allows you to monitor the volume of customer service tickets in a given period. This makes it easier for managers to scale up their customer-facing teams and identify workflow gaps to address them all effectively.
Today’s customers post questions and complaints in multiple support channels. This makes it even more challenging for organizations to monitor each concern and ensure that nothing will slip through the cracks. After all, failing to address a single customer issue can ultimately boomerang and result in your business suffering a massive reputation blow.
Forbes reports that roughly 65% of individuals deemed negative business reviews to be accurate and the true reflection of an organization’s overall service.
One way to prevent this from happening is to take advantage of business-class emails that have all-in-one inboxes to ensure multi-channel support. Using a powerful business-class email provider, customer-facing teams can unify their conversation across multiple channels, departments, and intake options in a single and centralized location.
This way, customer-facing teams can keep track of customer issues in real-time and offer immediate help while eliminating the madness that is involved in accessing multiple channels at one time. It also makes it easier to direct requests to the right personnel and organize business workflow. By creating the right structure and introducing shared email for teams to receive concerns and complaints, businesses can escalate conversations and fast-track request processing.
Establishing an effective workflow management is no longer an option for customer-facing teams to succeed. As a business leader, you have to equip customer service teams with powerful customer service tools and software tools such as Sortd to manage workflows, tasks, and customers. Get in touch with us to know more.
