Analysis
Every customer service team gets Stuck somewhere.
Usually, you know when something isn’t working in customer service. Tickets are taking too long, too much is being escalated, customers keep coming back, or agents seem to spend half their day chasing information and waiting for other people. The harder question is why.
Problems and causes
The obvious explanation isn't always the right one.
If a lot of questions are being escalated, it might be tempting to look at agent training first. But what if the agents know exactly what to do and simply can’t access the information they need? Or they have the information, but not the authority to act on it?
The same goes for ticket volume. Finding a faster or cheaper way to answer more questions can help, but first I want to know why those questions are being asked at all.
What experience has taught me
I've learned not to trust the obvious answer.
The way I think about customer service comes in large part from having worked as an agent myself.
I’ve seen management level changes that made perfect sense on paper achieve very little in practice, including one time where I was promoted to be part of the team coming up with and implementing said changes.
Case 01
More manpower, somehow more problems?
At one company I worked for, I was promoted to team leader as part of a new management structure. We had an extremely capable and dedicated customer service manager, but far too much depended on her. Three team leaders were appointed, with the idea that we would take some of that pressure away.
Except very little actually moved.
We had new titles and higher salaries, but surprisingly little ownership. Much of our time went into individual meetings and reporting on KPIs that weren’t particularly useful. The three of us weren’t entirely sure what we were supposed to be achieving in the first place.
Meanwhile, when we raised problems that genuinely needed solving, they ended up right back on the desk of the manager we were supposedly there to relieve.
I was being paid more, had considerably less useful work to do, and nothing had meaningfully improved. The manager was still overloaded, the problems were still there, and none of us team leaders really understood what we were supposed to be responsible for.
Case 02
When the solution doesn't fit the customer.
At another company I worked with, a significant part of the customer base wasn’t particularly comfortable shopping online. Some customers preferred to call rather than email, and had many questions that might seem very basic to someone who spends all day online were completely genuine.
At the same time, some of the questions to customer service were being created by the website itself. Information wasn’t always clear, and localisation issues occasionally made things more confusing than they needed to be.
The pressure, understandably, was to bring customer service costs down. Automation seemed like an obvious way to do that.
But automating more of the support didn’t change the customers, and it didn’t fix the things that were causing some of them to need help in the first place. At times, all it did was just put another hurdle between a customer who was already struggling and the person who could help them.
Case 03
When tickets rot by design.
At one company, customer service was generally run extremely smoothly — right up to the point where something went wrong with a delivery.
This company shipped a high volume of orders, with quite a wide range in value. If a parcel was lost, damaged or otherwise not delivered properly, the usual process was to open an investigation with the transporter and wait for the outcome before deciding what could be done for the customer.
Those tickets could sit there for a long time.
This was particularly problematic because fast delivery was an important part of what the company sold. Customers had been given every reason to expect speed, but as soon as something went wrong, their problem could suddenly take days or even weeks to resolve.
Looking at the numbers it became clear that for a large proportion of orders, it made more sense to solve the customer’s problem first and recover the loss from the transporter separately.
Not for every order, and not without conditions. Higher-value shipments and cases with certain risk factors still needed a different approach. But there was no reason every customer had to wait simply because some cases did.
Once agents had clear conditions under which they could replace or refund an order without waiting for the investigation to finish, an entire category of tickets stopped sitting around in the queue.
SO, WHAT ARE YOU STUCK ON?
LET'S FIND OUT
WHAT'S GETTING IN THE WAY.
You probably already know where some of the problems are. I want to find out what’s causing them, what else they affect, and what can realistically be changed.