When you’re a customer service manager you’re responsible for a lot: the loyalty and happiness of your customers, the success and satisfaction of the people on your team, and so much more. But not everyone makes it easy. And with COVID-19 disrupting the world, the service industry was forced to adjust accordingly. Even on the best days, customer service managers were faced unreasonable customers, long hours and cumbersome, inefficient internal processes.
A lot of managers (especially new ones) are so busy trying to do everything expected of them as managers, that dealing with an unfulfilled employee is the last thing they want to do. When an employee seems to just be “going through the motions”, many leaders get overwhelmed with the prospect of shaking things up in order to boost productivity. But if you’re a manager, your job is to make every customer service representative (CSR) happy and successful by enabling them to do their best work and strengthen their career. Employees don’t want to just do a few specific tasks over and over again until they quit or retire. It’s demotivating and professionally unfulfilling. Don’t be afraid to provide employees with new challenges and responsibilities, as it will allow CSRs to grow more confident in their abilities while making them feel more valuable to the organisation.
Though some managers might feel that introducing new technology, such as order management automation, presents a risk to productivity, it actually heads off other issues. The challenge in customer service is that CSR responsibilities have become more order entry and data processing with less time solving issues and proactively developing customer relationships. Orders come in a variety of formats and through a variety of channels, but among the most predominant are fax and email. These orders continue to create the challenges of time-consuming, labor-intensive processing that can cause high error rates and low fulfillment speed in comparison to electronic orders. They’re tying up customer service staff with non-valuable, unfulfilling tasks rather than serving customers. Ultimately, the order-to-cash cycle is lengthened, and your CSRs start viewing their role as that of a data entry clerk.
Empower your employees with the right tools so they can spend time on more fulfilling, customer-centric tasks. Through automation, CSRs gain the ability to:
- Quickly retrieve any and all orders (even before processing)
- Instantly view order images
- Run customisable reports on orders
- Communicate with customers via an online chat tool
- Resolve order disputes immediately
- Process orders up to 80% faster
- Spend more time on value-added tasks
Author and poet Maya Angelou wrote: “People will forget what you said. They will forget what you did. But they will never forget how you made them feel.” Making your customers happy starts with making your CSRs happy.
-Written by, Diana Eagen
