Benedict Bleimschein, COO and Vice President of Customer Success at Mindbreeze looks at the challenges for customer service employees working in a hybrid workplace and suggests new tools that can help them.
One size does not fit all when it comes to customer service strategies. The most successful companies will be those that adapt to and appropriately manage the hybrid workforce that is becoming the new standard among businesses today.
Companies are embracing flexible work arrangements as a means to recruit and retain employees. However, many companies are encountering challenges in managing and supervising a hybrid workforce and keeping customer service departments staffed and supported. Real operational advantages are realized when managing a hybrid team by taking a more custom and sophisticated approach than in the past.
Managing Customer Service in a Hybrid Workforce
Today, companies need to be as strategic with their approach to hiring, retaining, and promoting employees as they are with their overall strategy for serving customers. Creating the right culture and training will prove to be the most effective and sustainable way to attract and retain a diverse and talented team — both in their job title and in their title structure.
Sticking with an outdated, one-size-fits-all curriculum can be challenging, especially as companies navigate the challenges of returning to the office, whether full-time or part-time. It is best for employee retention to deploy a hybrid program that covers the needs of both current and transitioning employees. This type of sustainable model will allow for flexibility in both hiring and training representatives.
If you’re running a business with a hybrid workforce, you’re likely facing unique challenges keeping your customer service department staffed and supported.
For example, ticket support professionals or customer service hotline staff are often desperately looking for the relevant contextual information to help customers at a moment’s notice, which can be challenging. Finding these crucial pieces of information quickly and efficiently will largely dictate your team’s success. The secret to success in accessing and managing company data is in enabling holistic views of data for your customer service team.
What you Need to Know About Holistic Views of Data for Your Customer Service Team
Holistic views of customer data and the analysis of this information from multiple sources help uncover trends, answer questions, and provide actionable insights. Having a holistic view of data and a strategy for data-driven decision-making will help prevent your customer service department from falling behind within your respective competitive market.
Enabling holistic views entails bringing together structured and unstructured data to search for otherwise siloed data from different departments. The best way to do this is to implement an enterprise-level intelligent search solution that is AI-driven and can provide relevant insights for your customer service team. This is critical to consider when adopting a hybrid customer service strategy to maximize employee engagement and retention and ensure success with your company’s hybrid policies and practices.
Customer service professionals need a platform to make data-driven decisions. They need to quickly identify where silos of data intersect to make frequent predictions of customer behaviors for high-event or high-value interactions. This process requires support and updates from an AI-driven search platform powered by large data sets and human data from internal services and training.
Most customer service teams have several tools at their disposal, but no single system puts all that data together and helps them make sense of it. This problem, however, is only going to intensify with the added circumstances of the new hybrid workforce. That’s why it’s crucial to ensure that everyone in your team has access to the right tools and information so that they can respond efficiently and effectively as soon as there’s an issue. Enabling your team to effectively work with large amounts of data is a vital aspect of ramping up your hybrid workforce for the future.
About the Author
As COO and Vice President Customer Success at Mindbreeze, Benedict Bleimschein is dedicated to boosting team collaboration. His expertise in digital technologies and organizational development makes him the go-to expert when it comes to delivering cutting-edge projects that benefit both Mindbreeze’s internal and customers‘ organizational structures.
