Super Customer Experience: Are Your Teams Tooled & Ready?

How long do you think customers will wait for information and answers? Well Google engineers have found that for people surfing the Web, even 400 milliseconds (the blink of an eye) is too long. Wow.

Now picture your typical customer, pressured for a solution. Double wow.

This age of instant information has increased customers’ expectations of front line customer service knowledge and of the CSRs, agents, and technical support reps (TSRs) that deliver it.

Super Customer Experience: In the Blink of an Eye. Ready? Image by:miuenski

Are Your Front Line Teams Tooled & Ready?

Super Customer Experience Info Checklist

  • Can your front line reps see what the customers see on the Web? Can they at least see your own company website? In my consulting work, I often here the incredible answer, no.

    I ask, why not? “Because we don’t want them to surf the net. Only the teams that monitor social media can see the Web.” Huh?

    Wake up call from customers: “If we can see it, we expect front line reps to be able to see it too!”

  • Do the front line agents and all other teams use the same tracking system software (without cumbersome interfaces that create errors)? For a super customer experience, customers expect that all involved in delivering service will be able to see what they need.

    Checkpoint: How many of your customers are dissatisfied because your service and support teams cannot access the same customer information? In today’s world of instant information, the customers don’t even think this could be happening. Instead, they just think you don’t care about them.

  • Do your front line technical support reps have remote control to the customers’ desktops? For customers with computer problems, remote control as an option has eliminated their stress, sped up problem solving, and increased their satisfaction. Many customers will grant permission for the rep to use remote control, yet many front line teams don’t have it.

    Advice: Give front line technical support reps remote control. Don’t let organizational politics, internal turf wars, and hierarchical structure keep this wonderful technology from the front line.

    Customers tolerance for front line technical support reps who can only route tickets to problem solvers continues to decrease. In today’s world of instant information, it seems antiquated and illogical and a far cry from a super customer experience!

It can be a big challenge in large companies to have seamless integration of systems and information. Yet the technology is available to make it happen and customers assume you will have shared information.

They expect it, in the blink of an eye, for super customer experience.

Will this challenge make it to the top of your 2012 goal list? They surely hope so!



Question:

As a customer, what other information would you want and expect the front line teams to have?

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™

Related Posts:
Customer Experience: Customers & Us in Harmony
Does Customer Service Fix Failure or Build Success

©2012 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. If you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please first email info@katenasser.com for terms of use. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.


Kate Nasser, The People-Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on customer service experience, teamwork, and leading change. She turns interaction obstacles into business success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results. BS Mathematics. Masters Organizational Psychology. Former techie!!

2 Responses to “Super Customer Experience: Are Your Teams Tooled & Ready?”

  1. Khalid says:

    Kate,

    I very much relate this to my work as an IT technical support serving IT users in my company.

    One challenge which I see we have that can add to you post is the vision of our manager! He wants us to serve our clients before they even have to call our help desk! He wants us to be proactive and that’s what our customer missing!

    Out of what you said, we have the feature of remote login and a centralize system of logging users incidents and requests (yet to be merged). We don’t have an outside website to look after!

    So our challenge is to implement a proactive system that monitors system errors and report them ASAP before users sense the problems.

    We currently have such a system but it’s not fully integrated and not properly customized to serve all users need. We have such a system to look after our servers only!

    One more obsticle o see in serving customers is the data sensitivity! Some users handle very sensitive information which they fear IT staff access to.

    Such barrier distract IT support help and may impose some restrictions on tools used to serve users all over.

    Thanks Kate for your excellent spot on post 🙂

    Regards,
    Khalid

    • Kate Nasser says:

      Hi Khalid,
      Proactive info is the core of great service. Even if the customers don’t recognize it, it’s worth so much.

      Thanks for highlighting that here.

      Best,
      Kate

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