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Understanding the need to expand your customer service team due to increased demand can be challenging. It’s not easy to recruit and train qualified individuals swiftly, particularly when you’re experiencing a surge from a successful marketing campaign or a popular new product. Implementing customer service optimization strategies can help manage this growth more effectively
But there are always ways to drive big efficiencies, many of which can be implemented very quickly. If you’re not using any of these, this can increase the capacity of your team anywhere from 20 to 30% a few days of getting it dialed in.
We run 24/7 live chat and customer service teams for over 100 e-commerce stores. We live and die by workflow and efficiency, and in this post, I will walk through a few aspects of our workflow that you can easily implement.
If you can get to the point where your team can process specific types of tickets in one sitting, their efficiency will go way up. For example, cranking through 20 or 30 order tracking questions at the same time is much faster than shifting from order tracking to returns to product questions.
To do this, you need to set high-level ticket types for the business and then automate the segmentation of those tickets.
Broadly, categorizing tickets as order tracking, returns, product, and other is a good start. The other category can eventually get splintered off into a few more categories.
But manually segmenting all of these ticket types would be crazy. It’s best to automate as much as you can based on rules that categorize or tag tickets based on keywords or phrases in the tickets. This won’t be perfect, but it will get you a long way in automating segmentation of tickets so your team can work in large batches.
Once you’ve automated segmentation of ticket types, you can improve your ticket intake process.
This will enable you to prioritize one or the other, possibly having it be different for certain types of tickets. For example, replies on a return ticket type might be lower priority than replies on a product question since the product question can turn into a sale.
If you’re already using keyboard shortcuts, you know they can save you a ton of time. This part of the recommendations alone can increase your team’s efficiency anywhere from 10 to 20%.
When addressing micromanagement concerns with your team, it’s important to determine which keyboard shortcut workflows will be most effective. By focusing on the most impactful shortcuts, you can more precisely guide your team’s use of these efficiencies. This approach is a key aspect of customer service optimization, ensuring that your team’s efforts are streamlined and productive.
Here are the basics:
Find someone on your team that’s already working really efficiently, work with them to figure out the most impactful shortcuts, and then put together a simple training for your team to leverage this.
Once you’ve made it simple for them to work like this, get to the point where you require it either directly or based on benchmarking metrics. It may take a push to get them over the hump of using shortcuts, but it’s a massive efficiency boost when you get it right.
Even if you’re not scrambling to keep up with the volume of customer service, getting these things in place will enable you to scale much more efficiently.
If you have any questions, I’m happy to clarify details in a Strategy Call. We are process nerds here at HelpFlow. Even if we do not work together, you’ll get a ton of value from strategizing on the call together. Book a time that works for you by clicking below. Always happy to help!
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