No company is an island, and every company depends on having customers – and on having employees who understand what customers need.
According to New Voice Media, the top reason why customer switch providers for products and services is that they feel unappreciated. And one-third of Americans say they consider switching providers after a single incident of poor customer service. Moreover, U.S. companies lose an estimated $62 billion per year due to bad customer service.
But what about the employees who spend every day ensuring customers have the products and services they need? Employees must also feel appreciated and listened to, and they must believe they have the agency necessary to solve customer problems. Otherwise, they’ll have one eye on their work and the other on the exit door.
A successful company’s workflows must be designed with both the needs of customers and the needs of employees in mind. It’s a careful balance, but the right workflow tools make it possible.
Understanding the Customer Journey
The customer journey is the series of decisions that leads to the choice of a provider for products or services. It’s not the same for everyone, but there are commonalities, and those commonalities are used by smart companies to develop and understand key customer personas. When companies understand the motivations, triggers, emotions, and challenges of customer personas, they can design workflows that empower employees to ensure the best possible customer experience.
Creating Workflows Based on Customer Touchpoints
Customers need personalization, knowledgeable customer service agents, and reasonable, timely solutions to their problems. Designing customer service workflows based on customer touchpoints should be driven by understanding of customer personas as well as hard data. The hard data can be collected in many ways. One popular data collection method is simply asking customers to check a box indicating their satisfaction level after a customer service interaction and tracking the data in aggregate, over time.
Customer service workflows can also be used to match the customer with the right helper. Automated workflows that act based on keywords can help ensure that someone with a purely transaction-related issue speaks with someone trained in handling such issues, and that someone with a technical issue speaks with an agent skilled in talking customers through technical difficulties.
Empowering Employees, Reducing Distractions
Employees are human too, and workflows must also be designed with their well-being in mind. Employees can’t be expected to deliver their best work when they’re corralled in an environment that is dirty or noisy, when their equipment breaks down, or when they feel unappreciated and without agency.
Automated workflows must account for employee feedback as well. The employees who use automated workflows every day are the ones who know where bottlenecks occur, and often they have suggestions for addressing problems. Therefore, it’s important for employees to know that their feedback is valuable, and for supervisors and managers to take it seriously.
Workflow Training Essential
The best workflow in the world is useless if nobody knows how to use it. Taking the extra time up front to train employees in how to use automated workflows (whether for customer service or anything else) is an investment that pays off. Carefully-crafted training sessions help ensure that employees hit the ground running when it’s time for new workflows to go live. Reassuring them that their feedback from using the workflows matters can keep discouragement to a minimum.
Without the right workflow software, designing workflows with customers and employees in mind is difficult or impossible. PerfectApps, however, offers the flexibility, power, and user-friendliness companies need to design customized automated workflows, test them, and take them live in record time.
PerfectApps has an intuitive interface that means no programming is required to create sleek, perfectly customized workflows with features like automated alerts, audit trails, and customized workflow permissions. It is the right solution for the company committed to creating workflows that ensure outstanding customer service while making the most of employee skills and talents. If you want to learn more, we invite you to watch our demo video, and if you have questions, feel free to contact us at any time. We would be delighted to hear from you.
