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Enablement
MattersCUSTOMER SERVICE
ENABLEMENT
The common phrase used in customer service
circles is “hire for attitude & train for skills” and it is
a saying that has a huge amount of merit and truth.
Without people whose sole reason for being is to
help others, then everything else becomes a
pointless exercise. We’ll assume that’s in place; so
how do you enable them to work brilliantly?
Enabling CS teams to deliver their best starts with
happy agents. Happy staff translate to happy
customers. CS leaders with robust recognition and
development plans are able to identify potential,
develop skills and track agent progress toward
career defining succession steps.
“Total Productivity and Total Resolution
work hand-in-hand.”
Next come the terms of ‘Total Productivity’ and
‘Total Resolution’. They work hand-in-hand and
both are essential in driving customer loyalty.
Attitude…
Total productivity and resolution is the outcome of
knowing exactly how your CS team function, then
elevating this to understand the combined effort
of every agent. This knowledge determines and
prioritizes effective enablement programs. Start by
asking the right questions – a mix of measured
statistics and agent satisfaction / opinion.
You get the idea.
How many calls are handled daily,
then resolved, left open or lost?
How much time is spent finding
information needed for calls?
How easy and effective is it to
deliver training to your agents?
How much time is spent creating
custom response to tickets?
How much time is spent
duplicating / adapting work done?
How much time do you spend
following-up open customer calls?
Q
Q
Q
Q
Q
Q
Small improvement. Major impact.CS organisations look to total productivity and resolution metrics to see how well they
benchmark and perform. Small improvements can have really big impact.
Let’s look at some examples. In your head, why not think about your own CS team as you read through?
Searching | 16 %
Time-away | 8%
Duplication | 11 % Training | 14 %
Interlinking | 6 %
Call-handling | 45 %
Here is a simplified survey from a global technology firm (who were in an early state of enablement readiness), where results give insight to how a 120+ hybrid in-house and external agent team use their time across an average week.
How much time in a week CS
agents spend away from desk
in non-core activity.
Time away from desk
How much time in a week is
spent duplicating responses
Duplicative responses
How much time in a week
agents spend looking for
news, answers, updates
Searching for content
49 %
Time spent developing
knowledge and skills for
agent effectiveness
Training and development
How much productive time in
a week CS agents actually
spend talking with customers
Call handling – core role
51 %
Displaced TimeCore Time
Time spent developing joint
support solutions with strategic
account managers.
Positive interlinking
Displaced Time
Core Time
The impact between different enablement
levels can be startling. Impact is not just
limited to one performance measure; one
impact point can lead to many problems.
Customer Satisfaction
The top priority to CS teams is successful issue
resolution with high attributed customer
satisfaction levels. However, to truly drive this,
agents need the ability to feedback customer
insight to the product development groups. If you
fix the issues at the source, then overall volume of
issue will reduce.
Sales Interlinking
The spin-off is that sellers become more confident
and successful, selling working products that
delight customers. Yet customer issues will never be
eradicated. To avoid loyalty issues and promote
retention and renewal, CS teams must interlink with
the account managers. So clear communication
and customer handling across teams is essential.
Loyalty.
Core Time 89%
Displaced Time 11%
Highly Enabled CS Organizations
Core Time 32%
Displaced Time 68%
Poorly Enabled CS Organizations
Where are you onthe scale?
This is about how you collaborate across teams;
jointly preparing responses and sending them to
customers. It’s a critical productivity process.
Insights
Where many companies fall down is knowing what
happens with the documents once sent to the
customer. Have they looked at it? Which person(s)?
When? For how long? How many times? What
pages in particular? Such insights are incredibly
powerful when agents or sellers make follow-up
calls with the aim of successfully closing the call.
Self-help & training
Of course the other step that helps resolve calls
quickly and effectively is having a fantastic self-
service customer portal blended with seriously
robust agent training.
The trick with agent-training is to optimize total
training time with total call handling time. Smart
CS organizations are now starting to invest in
media based training which is directly attached to
the specific core content an agent needs.
Agents can quickly view this snackable training
content directly within the document and
immediately utilize the knowledge at source.
Agent talent retention.
Companies with high levels of enablement capability
have agents actually resolving calls. They spend as
little time as possible doing repetitive tasks, admin or
being away from the desk. Top CS agents love
technologies which make theirs and their customers
experience delightful; especially when it can automate
repetitive tasks and improve their capability levels.
Conversely top-agents will quickly realize if the job of
serving customers is compromised by poor process, or
technology that does not support them. That’s when
good agents leave.
Assess your total productivity & resolution
It is easy to paint a bleak picture of the CS
environment. However, service operations, sales
effectiveness and your leadership teams are usually
well aware of the challenges and interconnected
nature of managing productivity and resolution.
Firms like ours help find, prioritize and fix the obvious
challenges as well uncover and resolve the subtle. For
many organizations, investment in enablement is not a
choice, but a necessity. For them and especially those
with highly distributed CS teams, it is critical.
Telepathy is hard.
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