Besides advancements in topics like AI in customer service, which is excellent but still beginning, things are getting more challenging for customer service leaders.
The expectations of customer service and the volume of work for the agents keep growing every year, while turnover rateof the contact center agents is the worst among all industries.
Let’s take a look at the numbers.
For creating this post, we had the pleasure of chatting with Gustavo Bianco. Brazilian living in Estonia, current VP of Customer Services at Restream, former Global Head of Customer Success at Pipedrive, Angel Investor, Board Member, and Advisor for startups.
We asked him the following question:
“What are the top challenges in customer support in your experience?”
Another priority topic for both is making the agents constantly aware and accountable for their goals and progress, which makes all the sense since these are fundamental for achieving solid engagement and efficiency.
Gustavo, for instance, mentions that “most of the solutions for customer service in the market focus on execution stuff, like creating and tracking tickets, and some top-level visibility reports and dashboards. It’s rare to find one that delivers clear visibility to the individual about his performance and progress”.
The importance of this topic is partially reinforced by statistics if considering, as mentioned before, that only 14% of customer service agents are happy about how they are measured (Zendesk, 2022).
It also makes all the sense when you learn that, in different industries, less than 50% of employees know what is expected from them and only 21% feel their performance metrics are within their control (Gallup, 2019 and 2022).
Another priority challenge was maintaining the engagement levels of the agents in a way to foster improvement and career development.
Describing this challenge, Gustavo mentions that “it’s not an easy task to establish and communicate a formula that agents can use to check how they need to perform to be considered a senior level, for instance”.
He also mentions that he sees potential in gamification for that purpose and for keeping people engaged in achieving the goals.
In his own words:
“I see big value in gamification for the agent development. New gens need to feel progress, and important stuff doesn’t need to be boring.”
Regarding gamification and engagement, the benefits are already well-known and mentioned in business and scientific media channels. The Flow Research Collective, for instance, found out that, on average, applying some level of gamification in the workplace can boost up to 48% of the employees' engagement
Finally, another priority mentioned by Gustavo is the famous duo speed and quality. He mentions that the leaders of his teams keep a constant and sharp eye on indicators like First Time of Response (FRT), Average Handling Time (AHT), and Internal Quality Score (IQS).
The mentioned priority for the speed of reaction makes all the when we learn that almost 60% of customers report that long hold times are the most frustrating aspect of a poor call center experience (Zendesk, 2020).
Also, regarding the quality of the experience with customer service, as already mentioned at the beginning of this post, 76% of customers would switch to a competitor due to multiple poor customer service experiences (Zendesk, 2022).
We’d love to listen and learn about your experience and challenges as a customer service leader or agent and feature it in some of our posts and future reports.
If that’s the case, feel free to use the link below to schedule a moment with one of us:
https://calendly.com/eduardo-yera/30min
With love ❤️ from Estonia 🇪🇪!
Eduardo Levenfeld
CEO of Yera.io
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