Lots of hard work pay off, no doubt about it. But how about smart work?
When your activity increases and you feel you need more help to handle business, take some time before jumping onto hiring new people. Check to see if you’ve done everything to make your business smarter and efficient.
As long as you have the right mindset and a flair for good idead and resources, than you can actually postpone the sinuous process of hiring. Instead of working hard and long to maintain your current level, you could find ways of better engaging your existing resources.
- Find out what takes a lot of your time
In order to declutter you need to make an inventory, therefore find out what little issues keep popping up and how to handle them more efficiently to save time.
Use metrics for customer service and support and see what is the most prevalent problem. Labels are always a good idea to categorize your assesments and have a broad perspective over your functionality.
Once you’ve fixed some small, but time consuming bugs you can be successful in matters of higher importance and save time for the entire team.
- Make a comprehensive diary, only containing business info
Enable your customers to take care of themselves and only come to you when there’s no way out. If your clients have access to organized knowledge, they can cut down on your team’s resources for handling issues.
It may take some effort to put up a guide or booklet or whatever you want to call it. But once you are done, heaven awaits and burdens disappear.
Your knowledge base will be a first choice for many of your customers as statistics show that as many as 91% of people would go for such a resource if available.
However, you need to gain customer’s trust as well, because not many people currently trust the accuracy of information in such databases.
Put in effort to do maintenance and update constantly!
- How about First Contact Resolution?
This means guiding your customers and solving their request in a single interaction. Imagine how much time you’ll save here! One call, one e-mail, one live chat message exchange session.
Calculate your FCR rate like this:
No. of support issues solved in a single contact / (divided by) No. of FCR issue claims that are possible to solve in a single contact
Once you’ve done this you need to keep it up to date and use it to your advantage.
An increase in your FCR rate is equivalent to the same increase of customer satisfaction apparently. Work on decreasing the total number of replies per ticket on your customers will be happier overall. Plus your support team will have more time to breather.
- Tools – there’s plenty out there and can boost your efficiency
You may feel the company is too small for engaging automation tools, but that is not true. Tools can benefit any type or size of business by getting rid of boring and repetitive tasks that consume time and energy.
It is hard to comprehend now how big an impact such a tool can have, but once you automate dull tasks your team will have won hundreds or thousands of hours yearly. These hours can go into more important matters.
Examples of such tasks that can be automated are: mail forwarding, assignments of tasks, replies sorting etc.
And consequently to time saving, you can also read money saving!
- Clear Processes and an Up to Date Guide
Help your team be more efficient by making everything clear. Sort through the most common and repetitive scenarios and build simple scripts. They save energy, time and give the impression of fast resolution. Customers will be happy, employees will be happy.
For example, you can use e-mail templates for certain situations instead of writing from scratch every time you report a problem or pass it over. You can describe standard procedures in a guide together with the customer support guidelines. You can talk about and explain the metrics you use, your core values and goals.
How will this benefits you?!
For one, what is written down stands as clear proof, people won’t have to wabble around asking coworkers and wasting time and everyone should be on the same page if following the same guide. Plus, when you add new members to the team, they already have the starting-off material.
Find your smart moves and call them super powers! You are all set to improve your business and customer support.
