A Gartner study of more than 2,000 customer service reps from nearly 30 companies worldwide shows that service organizations can increase their productivity by 19 percent and their intent to leave decreases by 25 percent by making reps a priority.
This translates into more systems and tools for the service rep to utilize to become more productive and provide seamless and effortless customer experience.
These tools and systems should support and enable success. But 76 percent of service leaders report they struggle with the planning and execution of these projects. The average live service interaction is taking longer than it did in the past. Most service organizations report either flat or increased call volumes year over year.
The interactions of frontline reps with systems and tools required to resolve customer issues. Service leaders must understand that by improving the rep experience, the organization will see improvement in operational efficiency and the customer experience.
Improved rep experience can help to increase customer satisfaction by 11 percent and reduce customer effort by 9 percent.
Service leaders must lighten the load during live interactions to better support reps. Gartner research shows three key ways service leaders can tame the complexity for reps and allow them to focus on helping customers:
Service organizations devote a large amount of effort to understanding their customers’ pain points through customer experience measures, such as voice of the customer (VoC). These same activities can be adapted to assess rep experience improvement opportunities as well.
Uncover the quick-hit solutions to help reps focus their time and attention on the customer. By studying reps as they work and enabling rep-led solutions, service leaders can take near-term actions to improve the rep experience.
Research reveals four key strategies and tactics for quick wins in balancing productivity and quality. These include eliminating unnecessary customer contacts, keeping customers on the website, training reps to focus on the best customer outcome and helping to avoid a follow-up issue.
“Organizations are focused on improving the quality of customer interactions, in order to increase customer loyalty,” said Rick DeLisi, principal executive advisor at Gartner.
