Gartner: How to Boost Employee Productivity in Customer Service
Assisting customer service agents can “have a significant impact on employee satisfaction, operational efficiency and service quality,” according to Gartner.
One of the key challenges to achieving high employee productivity among customer service agents is that existing workforce optimization tools focus primarily on operational efficiency and treat agents as skilled widgets. Gartner recommends to focus first on solution value and then on vendor viability during the vendor selection process.
Out of 9 main categories listed by Gartner to help improve operational performance, engagement and employee productivity is “Process Guidance.” Among other things, this refers to the ability to automate specific repetitive aspects of a process, spanning one or more systems, improving operational efficiency and driving employee engagement through removal of tedious tasks. Gartner states that advances in robotic process automation allow machine-learning techniques to be applied so that automation is continually refined.
Gartner brings the example of TrueBlue – a WalkMe customer – that was struggling to deliver an efficient and effective training program for its sales and customer service teams on Microsoft Dynamics CRM, due to the complex environment and different training required for the different roles within the teams.
TrueBlue deployed WalkMe to the first touchpoint when onboarding Microsoft Dynamics. WalkMe then provided continual knowledge reinforcement after training. Now, TrueBlue team members are required to go through all the WalkMe guidance before they can begin work, and TrueBlue uses WalkMe Analytics to ensure everyone successfully completes training. Implementing WalkMe helped greatly increase employee productivity and quickened the onboarding process.
Process guidance technology like WalkMe are great for environments with complex processes as well as for rapid growth environments where agent onboarding is a challenge, as these tools can dramatically reduce the associated time for this.
The report is comprehensive and highly recommended. Gartner subscribers can read the full report go here.