We are in daily contact with customer service managers. We work with smaller organisations as well as expanded customer service centres in several different industries. We have pooled all our knowledge, and the following six points are currently the focus of attention!
More people are looking around for a new job – what action should we take?
People have had more time and opportunity than previously and have also found new reasons to look around for a new job. A pandemic, a crisis or other major change makes us start thinking anew, prioritizing anew, and evaluating where we stand today. Our data shows that employees are often very pleased with and grateful to their manager when working remotely. The impact on employees’ mental health and well-being, however, has been debated during the pandemic. That is – you may have seen evidence that a lot of things look all right, but job satisfaction still risks going in the wrong direction. How do we retain our employees and managers? It has probably never been more important to work on your culture and well-being in the workplace. Take the employee appraisal seriously and get involved in issues together. Here you can find out more about our solution to increase your employee involvement.
We rely more on data than we used to
A crisis gives us the courage to challenge and change things. We are opening up to remote working even after the pandemic. We can often use data and digital communications tools to check that the work is done well regardless. Our data shows that both customers and employees can have a very good experience whatever the location of the workplace. But it also shows that, compared with the workplace, remote working requires different things for it to work in the long term.
We’re more flexible at staffing
We reorganize, rethink and are even better at only maxing capacity precisely where it is needed the most. We have home agents who perhaps only work those hours when there is the most to do, and then do other tasks. We recruit from other places or countries, and so on. Quite simply, more part-timers to stand in when customer service is at its busiest. What has become clear is that during the pandemic technology has been replaced or modified in order to facilitate remote working.
More and more people see customer service as an increasingly important part of the organisation
Yes, you read right, and nothing can please us more. We have recently seen that the management has shown a greater appreciation of customer service and the more communicative parts which have been extremely important during the pandemic. For example, that social channels are often moved from marketing to customer service. Or more parts of the organisation are participating and showing an interest in the customer knowledge that is collected. When everything is made digital and communication is speeded up, production and other parts of the organisation need to keep an ear to the rail, and our customer service is then the fastest way of capturing issues. You can find out more about our customer service solution here.
Management of the different channels is made more efficient
The most common channels for customer service centres are still the old and trusted telephone and email, and then come Chat and Facebook. Of the social media, just Facebook and Instagram are used the most. This year, however, we can see that the average number of channels used to receive customer contacts is not growing but, on the contrary, has somewhat decreased. Centres are now trying to narrow down, clarify and quite simply streamline their resources and processes as best they can.
Cases we handle in the ”first line” are becoming increasingly complex
Thanks to our websites’ easier search tools, chat boxes, etc., the simple and quick questions are removed from our customer service, and, as employees, people need to be able to do more and have access to more information to be able to successfully provide a first-class service. There is a growing expectation among customers that organisations have the same information internally. It is taken for granted that marketing, customer service and other sections hold the same information about the customer.