Top-class customer service brings a host of benefits – quickly-solved problems raise satisfaction, increase purchase value, and attract new buyers. Such service is costly, though. Every new service agent, apart from the obvious benefits, is an expense.
How can you get more people engaged into customer service and rationalize the costs?
Not all Agents Face the Customer
Your company has a customer service office. Not a big one – just over 20 agents. All connected to a modern customer communications system. It’s multichannel, automated, and features advanced team management functionalities.
Everything’s in order.
But… not all agents use the system in full. 15 people talk to the customers directly, the rest handle the orders and request internally. It’s a bit of a shame, full user accounts cost money…
On the other hand, to make it all work, all agents need full-time access to customer contact history and internal communication. Or have the ability to handle issues directly. This makes them part of the process, which you can always monitor, measure, or improve.
Everyone is into Customer Service
Then again, it would be great if other people from your company had access to the system. Often, processing a request involves many people from various departments – Sales, Complaints, Accounting, Technical, Collections… This kind of processing is done outside the system: by email, phone, or face to face. Firstly, it’s slow, secondly, there is no trace left. Correspondence, talks, decisions – none of this is stored in the system.
And it happens that you have to check the whole history of an issue. Because of errors, promises made, agreements reached. Digging up the correspondence is a horrendous loss of time, with no guarantee of success.
It would be so much easier if everyone were part of the process in the system.
But, as we said, the system isn’t free – every month you pay for every agent account. If you only added one person from each department, the invoice amount would double.
A Light Account
Cutting edge communication management systems have a solution for you. It’s a “light” version of the full account, designed with internal agents in mind. It’s made lighter by limiting some functionalities, and reducing the price. It’s popularly called light, lite, internal… We call it Agent Lite.
This account type was built for companies where only a few of the customer service agents actually contact the customers, and other departments are also involved in the service process.
Just like in about every company.
Agent Lite offers three main benefits:
1) it has access to all system functionalities, so it takes advantage of service scenario automation, direct processing of issues and orders, full contact history, and is part of the internal communication loop. It’s also visible in statistics and reports.
2) it can’t do any outbound messaging or customer calls – it’s completely cut off from external communication channels.
This is crucially important: only trained personnel should be allowed to engage with customers directly.
3) Agent Lite accounts are much cheaper than full accounts. Suddenly, system access for all employees is much more affordable.
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