5 Ways to Turbocharge Your Customer-facing Team’s Productivity

Customers are the King, the Queen, and the Jury. After all, they are the ones driving the revenue. But ask yourself this – who is fuelling the vehicle that’s driving the business towards its goal? Who is responsible for keeping the wheels in motion?

Answer: The customer-facing team.

From assisting customers in their shopping journey by recommending the right products and services, and ensuring the customers receive timely updates about the latest promos and deal, to resolving their queries and complaints, the customer-facing team have always been at the forefront of delivering exceptional experience.

Engaging with customers requires knowledge, patience, minute attention to detail, a healthy dialogue, and on-the-feet thinking to maintain a delightful customer experience and resolve complex problems.

For individuals who are still on the edge about the direct impact of customer engagement on revenue growth, the following numbers may help in understanding a customer-facing team’s contribution to the revenue growth.

• 70% CX professionals have reported very high ROI after deploying CX solutions for their businesses.
• 93% customers are more likely to repeat their purchases from your business after engaging in a positive dialogue.
• 90% customer rate ‘immediate response’ from customer support agents as critical to making a purchase decision.
• Attracting new customers is 5 and 25 times more expensive than retaining existing customers.

Every word in this article can be backed by credible statistics to emphasise on the contribution of the customer-facing agents to business growth. But they should not be expected to deliver exceptional service with one hand tied behind their backs.

It can be quite stressful for the customer-focussed teams to manage their expectations and deliver exceptional experience if they are not supported with the right tech solutions.

Let’s take a look at some commonly known, but often overlooked challenges faced by customer-driven teams and ways to overcome them.

Challenges Faced by Customer-focussed Teams

Easy to Abandon and Move On

In a traditional setup, when agents are unable to resolve customer enquiries, they are faced with three options.

1. They fall into an endless loop of repetitive questioning their customers.
   
   
2. Unable to find a resolution, they find it easy to wash their hands off the enquiry altogether and transfer the customer to another agent.
   
   
3. Give up on helping the customer altogether and ask the customer to call back at a later time.

What binds the three scenarios?

The agent’s inability to answer or assist the customers. Aside from leaving a very poor impact on the customer’s sentiment towards the business, this brings into question the operational efficiency of the customer support team in managing customer expectations.

How you can empower your customer-focussed team

Invest in data-driven technologies to empower your agents. Especially, a centralised knowledge base that provides your agents with a centralised view of the customer interaction data that can give them a perspective of the customer’s background and history of previous enquiries.

It Takes Forever to Resolve Customer Enquiries

If your customer-facing agents end up taking too long to understand and resolve customer enquiries, it almost certainly puts a death-knell on the chances of retaining the customers. Not to say, it increases the call and operational costs.

Without a proper methodology in place for team leaders to monitor ongoing chats, the quality of engagement can never be improved until it is too late. If an agent is struggling to grasp a customer’s need, it should be easy for them to bring in a subject-matter expert to ensure the customers’ enquiry gets resolved quickly and to their satisfaction.

How you can empower your customer-focussed team

The CX solution powering your customer-facing team should be able to provide your experts with contextual view of the customer’s journey the history of interaction with the previous agent. This can be achieved by labelling the enquiry with the right labels to categorise the conversation.

It should also be possible for businesses to use the CX solution to match the returning customers with the right agents who helped in resolving their previous enquiries. This way, the average response time can be reduced, and businesses can build and maintain a long-term relationship with the customers. It is important that for managers to be able to have a real-time access and visibility on how their employees are performing, to be able to drive efficiency and mentor them basis on case-to-case basis. Agents should easily be able to invite their colleagues over to the chatroom to assist in resolving customer queries.

When The Floodgates of Service Requests Crashes

Without a centralised solution, the number of customer enquiries can quickly pile up and leave the customer-facing team gasping for breathing space. When faced with the heat, the quality of service is bound to take a dip. While it is very important for businesses to give their customers the flexibility to connect with them from any channels, it is equally important, if not more, for their employees to be equipped with an omnichannel platform that helps them manage the flood of queries from one dashboard.

How you can empower your customer-focussed team

A comprehensive and fully equipped CX solution does not only benefit your customers, but also helps your agents by providing flexible routing capabilities. In order to create efficient workflows, customer-focussed team should be able to route the enquiries to the right destination. For example, a product related enquiry can be directed to the team specialising in product features, or a sales related enquiry can be directly transferred to the sales team. This helps in eliminating unnecessary pit stops and relieves the burden from the customer support agents to go back-and-forth internally in order to seek the right response for a customer’s enquiry.

No Access to Real-time Actionable Insights

Customer-facing team cannot provide frictionless service without having access to customer information first. This can quickly become an uphill battle for them if they cannot see the customer’s journey through your business website before they reached out for support. Customers are expecting to receive personalised service, and whether or not they receive it from the agents directly impacts the lifetime value of the customers. Real-time analytics can help an agent meet customer demands. It would not be far-fetched to say that without a real-time view the agents will be operating in the dark.

How you can empower your customer-focussed team

Businesses should empower their customer-facing team with a solution that enables them to know their customers before they engage with them in a conversation. A Lightweight CRM can give your team 360-degree visibility of all incoming customer enquiries. If agents have access to insights on customer behaviour and all the interaction data, right up to the moment of the ongoing conversation, they can easily pick up right where customers left off in the journey and maintain consistent, meaningful dialogue.

Operating As Lone Rangers

An organisation’s operational efficiency really takes a hit when agents have to hop, skip, and jump between multiple channels to engage with the customers. When conversations can take place across scattered mediums, it not only impacts the customer-facing team’s ability to deliver optimally, but also makes it impossible for them to have a unified view of customer data from various mediums and channels. You can forget about capturing customer sentiment when the employees are fighting their own battles in keeping up with the influx of queries from multiple channels.

Without equipping them with the right collaboration tools, businesses are not providing their agents with the opportunity to operate as a unit. The right collaboration tool can also help in bringing down attrition rate and curtail burnout.

How you can empower your customer-focussed team

When opting for an omnichannel CX platform, businesses should bear in mind that the highway to delightful customer experience goes through the narrow lanes of gratifying employee experience. A collaborative CX solution should come with the capability to seamlessly connect customer-facing agents with other internal teams.

An ideal solution should encourage employees to collaborate with experts from various internal departments over an ongoing live chat with customers, or even invite them to an ongoing 1-on-1 call or video calls.

Embracing Omnichannel Strategy to Boost an Agent’s Productivity

Over the past two years, most businesses have rightly identified the need to provide consistent experiences not just for their customers, but for their employees as well. While many companies still swear by multi-channel communication strategy, they fail to take into account this approach’s inadequacy to deliver seamless customer experiences, because agents don’t have complete historical view of customer interactions.

It is essential for customer-facing teams to provide fast, reliable, and quality support in order to build and retain customer loyalty. This can be achieved by reducing their time spent on mundane, administrative tasks so that the agents can use their time more efficiently to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

An omnichannel strategy helps customer-focussed team to consistently manage customer expectations without leaving the comfort of their dashboard. When all communication channels are brought together on a single platform to function in harmony and enable your agents to provide a hyper-personalised experience for your customers that compliments their stage of buying cycle, that’s when the true power of omnichannel is unleashed.

This can be achieved by following few simple steps:

Build A Knowledge Base

Customer-facing employees manage many workflows, including, but not limited to, interacting with customers, guiding them through the buying experience, feeding the interaction data into the system, and working across multiple channels. However, all these tasks are prone to human error.

Repeating similar tasks is far from being productive and it wastes precious time. Total experience solutions like CINNOX empowers the employees to help themselves by labelling all incoming customer enquiries, so that all the agents within the system have a view of the customers’ information when they approach for support the next time.

One Command Centre for All Communications

While you are giving your customer the flexibility to connect with your business on any channel of their choosing, it is important to provide your agents one-window access to all these communications, instead of expecting them to jump from one channel to the next to handle the barrage of incoming enquiries.

An omnichannel platform like CINNOX provides one-view of all communication data from not just digital channels, but also telephony and interactive services like IVR. Take the load off your agents and help them maintain sanity by managing all customer enquiries from one dashboard.

Achieve Synergy in Collaboration

Depending on the nature of the inbound enquiries, the customer enquiries should be routed to the right team or experts. Customer-facing teams are not required to be subject matter experts. Their work requires them to understand a customer’s pain-point and quickly resolve the matter as smoothly as possible. After determining a customer’s need, the employees should have the flexibility to bring in team members to assist the customers during an ongoing conversation.

CINNOX enables your customer-facing team to invite members of their team to join an ongoing conversation with customers and enhance their experience with your business. It is easy for them to transfer enquiries to another expert while providing full context of the conversation.

Be an Omniscient Mentor to Your Team

Customer support team managing multitudes of enquiries every single day. The routine can quickly become dreary and can eat at their productivity.

With CINNOX, the all-seeing, all-knowing team leaders can ensure that their teams are well-trained and are providing highest level of service standards by supervising and supporting ongoing chat enquiries in real-time. They even have the flexibility to dive-in to assist them or take over the enquiry if the need arises. Live visibility to all interaction data and reports ensures the team managers are never out of the loop.

Backed by Smart Routing Capabilities

If your employees have already expended their time and energy in successfully resolving customers’ problems, it would make no sense in directing the returning-customers to other staff if they approach again. All that time and energy invested by the earlier employees go to waste and the new, assigned staff is left to start building the relation from scratch.

The smart routing capability of CINNOX helps redirect inbound enquiries from returning customers to the appropriate individual staff or to a desired destination. The destination can be configured basis your organisation’s requirement. The system determines the routing priorities based on logic rules and criteria for routing set by the administrator.

While most businesses deploy chatbots to automate the process of addressing basic customer enquiries, the value of human touch provided by customer-facing team cannot be substituted. Customers feel more comfortable interacting with humans when it comes to seeking help on complex issues. Customer-facing teams are essential for businesses to grow and prosper.