How to empower customer service agents to deliver moments of WOW
Recently, I visited a John Lewis store with my wife to buy a stroller for our little one. Confused between two strollers, we decided to get help from an on-floor customer adviser. Not only was I impressed with her detailed demo, but her patience while trying to understand our criteria really made a huge difference to our experience. Not only did she understand what we were looking for, she was also detail-oriented while suggesting different strollers that fit our requirements. But what really blew me away, was when she brought out a 3.5kilo baby toy, helping us physically experience how easily we could fold one of the pushchairs with one hand, while holding a baby in the other. This was a ‘WOW’ moment for me!
Even though she was busy with other customers, she did not neglect us, and in fact, went above and beyond to delight us. I could have just as easily purchased the same stroller online, probably at a slightly cheaper price, but I will choose to buy it from John Lewis. That’s because this customer experience created a great deal of trust and loyalty in me, and made me feel strongly about the brand. This is the power of a good customer experience, and a true testament to what a simple moment of ‘WOW’ can do.
Why agent empowerment is critical for creating WOW moments
In the above example, while the store representative was motivated, she was also empowered with the right tools. According to this Forbes article, there are companies that arm their employees and representatives with the tools that they require to perform at their best and deliver the best customer experience. However, most organisations do not empower their agents enough to make the right decision on the spot. In my first article of this series, I talked about how I got a lot of empathy for my issue from the agents, but no resolution. They were held back by their ineffective processes and lack of tools.
Your agents need the right tools to deliver stand-out moments that go beyond customers’ expectations, resulting in higher satisfaction and greater loyalty.
Empower your agents with the right tools
A) 360 customer context on a single screen
When customers contact customer-service, they are most probably already ticked off and borderline frustrated by something. One wrong move from you at this stage, will only result in a further downfall. One of the most annoying things for customers is having to repeat themselves. In an omnichannel environment, information gets scattered all over the place, often in silos. It is usually lack of context that forces agents to ask their customers to repeat. A customer needs to be treated as an individual, not as an email, chat or a phone call. The first interaction with a customer is particularly important as it creates a long-lasting impression of your brand.
Which one do you think sends a more powerful brand message?
In the second example, the agent is empowered with the right context. This conversation is proactive, shows empathy and is instrumental in building an initial bond with the customer.
Quick tips to enable context for your agents:
- Show them the previous customer interactions across all channels such as phone, email, chat, social etc.
- Let your chatbot provide full context of its conversation with the customer, before agents start their conversation.
- Enable agents to see what knowledge-base articles customers have already viewed before reaching out to support.
- Integrate your helpdesk with all necessary systems such as CRM, Order Management System etc. This lets your agents access a customer’s account information, existing orders, and even their birthday! Look for information that could help you provide a personal touch to your interaction.
- Enable an integrated single screen experience, to avoid switching screens for information.
B) Embrace the rise of ‘friendly’ machines
Most agents fear that chatbots will take over their jobs. However, chatbots can help agents become better and more productive at their jobs. As I discuss in my chatbot webinar, it is very arduous and time consuming for new agents to get trained on handling all types of customer issues. For any difficult case, the new agent usually asks for help. This adds delay to their response time.
Agent-assist chatbots can help agents find the right answers quickly, by guiding them through a playbook of predefined Q/As. This significantly reduces the ramp-up time of new agents, improves response time, and drives consistency in agent responses. You can also empower your agents to wow their customers by offering incentives, within a controlled environment .
Artificial intelligence (AI) can also help automate mundane and manual tasks. This helps agents focus more on high-value activities and solving customer issues.
Tips on how AI can make agents faster:
- Suggest knowledge-base articles to customers via email, right after they create a ticket. If it resolves their query, they can close the ticket even before you pick it up.
- Use the same technique to suggest knowledge-base articles to your agents when they are replying to a customer. This reduces their response time.
- Automatically populate the ticket categorization fields using AI.
- Automatically link similar tickets (e.g. system went down) into the main master ticket to streamline and organize their management.
C) Power of contextual collaboration
Customer service is everyone’s job. As first-line agents deal with more unpredictable and complex customer issues, they need more help from other functional teams. An HBR study revealed that agents perform 54% better in a collaborative environment, than in one where they need to follow policies and procedures, or rely on their own judgement. Still, only 12% of agents in the survey worked in a collaborative environment.
Collaboration tools can help agents collaborate better within and across teams, especially if they are spread across different floors, offices or geographies. These tools are also very effective in collaborating with 3rd parties outside your organisation.
However, in order to be effective, you need to think carefully when investing in such tools. With an ongoing fashion to adopt such tools, businesses can easily become victims to tool-overload and a collaboration curse. Also, since most of these tools function outside your helpdesk, the useful context easily gets lost and as result agents fail to collaborate effectively. This leads to weaker adoption and usage of the tools.
Tips on how to choose the right tools for ‘effective’ collaboration:
- Ensure that agents have access to full customer context during collaboration.
- Ensure that all collaborators across teams, have access to the tool
- Consider a collaboration tool that’s built within your helpdesk or is well integrated.
- Preserve the context by keeping an audit trail of any collaborative conversations.
- Reward agents for collaborative behavior, like agents using their experiences to help colleagues resolve their issues.
Don’t just motivate, but also empower
People are naturally motivated to help others. In fact, when people help others it releases the chemical dopamine that boosts their emotions of positivity . Still, only a few people are able to go above and beyond to delight their customers. Why?
Sometimes even motivated people are not empowered enough to deliver their best. The right motivation drives the right behavior; but without the right empowerment, the effectiveness of the motivation is in question. If you empower your agents with the right tools and technology, they will in turn be more enabled to help their customers, thereby delivering moments of WOW!
