Have you recently been in contact with some customer services call centre, had a non trivial question and ended up being passed around from one lovely customer assistant to another, or worse, from one AI agent to the next?
Unfortunately this is how scaled out customer services typically work, or rather, not work. For any text book problem, you can get a near immediate answer (even through self-service or through a chatbot), but if you have a question that is somewhat irregular, chances are you can forget about getting an answer.
The question when running a customer services team is:
- How do you ensure that your services team remain a group of sharp, outside of the box thinking individuals, whilst still providing standard answers to the obvious questions?
- How do you ensure your team become true experts in their trade, that are working with the latest cutting edge technology whilst still maintaining the level of standardisation that does not require re-inventing the wheel?
The “Question Everything” Culture
While the manual is there to provide guidance, it should be seen as a starting point, not the final word. Encourage your team members to ask “why” things are done a certain way. This isn’t about challenging authority or standards; it’s about understanding the underlying principles and goals. When they understand the purpose behind the rules, they’ll be better equipped to make sound judgments when a rule doesn’t apply.
Empower Your Team to Take Ownership
Mindless work often comes from a lack of ownership. If people feel like they’re just executing a series of steps, they’ll disengage. You need to empower them to see themselves as owners of the customer’s experience or the project’s outcome, not just a set of tasks. Allowing for autonomy and creativity is key.
Invest in Continuous Learning and Development
Just because an employee’s onboarding is complete doesn’t mean their learning should stop. Learning does not stop at the end of the manual. Continuous learning opportunities become harder to find but also more important for the individual as their skills grow! Role-playing, being a mentor (knowledge sharing) as well as a mentee (bring in external mentors if need be) are all techniques that help you keep things interesting for the most skilled team members. It will help you build the operating manual for the future.
Standardise intelligently
Finally, most people don’t enjoy repeating the same job over and over, so they might want to build in variety in the repeatable work, thus steering away from the standardised approach that guarantees quality.
But standardisation isn’t about stifling creativity; it’s about providing guardrails that ensure quality and consistency on the repeatable work, and ensuring that bright minds can spend time on working the more challenging tasks.
The key is to ensure your employees understand that standards are there to make sure they can focus on the more challenging tasks. Standards can and should be challenged. Standard can and should be improved. Standards have to evolve and adapt to the future. But they do have their place!
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