Not every customer query or issue is easily solved. This should come as no surprise. You can prepare for many situations, but somehow there will always be a situation that can not be resolved as seamlessly as you would want.
Situations that typically can’t be solved through a predetermined script require another department’s input or assistance. In addition, these situations usually require complex solutions to solve.
Enter the enemy of customer service; time.
Any customer service leader will tell you that time is the enemy. Customers rarely care how complex a situation is to solve. Instead, they care about quick turnarounds. To meet this demand, your business needs strong customer operations.
What are customer operations?
Behind the scenes, there are many operational roles supporting the day-to-day management of customer service. There is staff scheduling, contact volume analysis, knowledge base curation, and much more.
They are all essential functions to ensure the delivery of quality customer service. However, customer operations depend on behind-the-scenes processes.
The behind-the-scenes operations can be challenging, but these three customer service challenges can contribute to streamlining success.
- Internal Connection
Being “customer-obsessed” can be more challenging than most companies realize because of the complexity of inter-organization connections. Departments have to find processes that encourage and support cross-department working.
Technology will play a crucial role in the access teams have to one another, but more importantly, your business culture must strive for fewer silos and more integration. Encourage regular collaboration and inter-departmental connections.
- Review and improve systems and processes
Even with a strong customer focus, businesses may still struggle to succeed. Outdated processes and legacy systems usually create their own barriers. These can slow teams down and prevent quick turnarounds on customer issues.
To solve this, identify a few common customer issues that require cross-departmental collaboration to resolve. Then, go through a review process. Finally, review the process from when a customer engages with customer services through to resolution.
- Do agents need to perform manual steps?
- How many systems do they need to use to find the correct data?
- Can they locate the data in a set period?
- How do teams interact or connect?
This audit process identifies where processes and systems can be streamlined and offer room for a continuous growth mindset.
- Lean into the workflow process
Even if processes are put into place, and unnecessary steps are removed, customer support can still be challenging if it cannot be tracked or measured. But, again, efficient workflows solve these challenges.
As with the process audit, start small. Select a few challenges your teams have and create workflows that solve them. Next, have a review process that communicates the results with all the teams. Then start streamlining more processes within each workflow.