Your customer service department can be a significant cost center to your business, so driving operational efficiency is paramount to keeping your operating costs under control. A single focus on operational efficiency, however, can compromise your customer satisfaction and ultimately harm your business more than inflated help desk operating costs. Achieving a balance between operating efficiency and customer satisfaction is key to keeping your customers happy and loyal.
Agent Efficiency
In order to be efficient, your agents require well-defined processes guided by operational software that puts everything they need to help their customers at their fingertips during a customer interaction. Help desk software will automatically track customer interactions and associated metrics, reducing busy-work for your agents while also empowering them with a uniform interface to guide their contacts and ensure they collect all necessary information. Help desk software uses integrated knowledge bases to provide agents with the information they need while working an interaction without their having to track down other personnel or search through product or service documentation.
Customer Satisfaction
Luckily, many of the same operational processes that streamline agent work also make your customers happier. Ultimately, customers want their issues resolved as quickly and accurately as possible. In fact, many customers want to self serve, which means they want to get help for their issues without contacting you at all. An optimized customer service operation will not only empower agents to work efficiently but will also reduce your customers’ efforts to get help.
Offering help through multiple channels such as email, phone, chat, and social media is just the beginning. Providing a self-service center that includes intelligent issue identification guides and accurate, succinct help information can allow your customers to resolve the most simple or frequently-occurring issues on their own. Enabling this self-service not only gives the customers what they want but reduces the overall number of contacts into your customer service desk.
Performance Improvement
Using the reporting and analytics provided by your customer service software is key to driving performance improvement within your customer service department. Use agent performance metrics such as response time, resolution time, and first contact resolution to identify agent staffing or efficacy issues. Spikes in response time at certain times of the day or week can indicate staffing challenges.
Elevated resolution times or lower first contact resolution times for certain agents or for certain types of tickets can spotlight agents who need further training or topics for which training needs to be improved. Tracking ticket volumes and ticket volumes by channel helps you better staff according to your anticipated volumes and your customers’ preferred methods of contact, ensuring you have the appropriate staff available at the right time and on the right channel to meet your customers where they are coming to you.
Business Improvement
Customer service is a two-way street. Every time a customer reaches out for help, whether through self- or assisted-service, is an opportunity to learn how to help serve them better and, ultimately, how to make your business better. Information collected about the types of challenges your customers are having should drive improvements in your overall products and services, not only your help desk services. Responses to post-contact customer satisfaction surveys will give you important information about customer loyalty, allowing you to better predict and prevent customers from abandoning your company for a competitor.
Improving your help desk performance, which includes giving customers options to get efficient help how and when they want it, is an important part of improving your overall customer service. Great customer service lets you drive business improvements that ultimately lead to very satisfied customers who stay with your business and away from your competitors.
