Ensuring the experience customers receive is to the highest standard has become a key challenge businesses have had to overcome, as they move into a hybrid work setting.
Those challenges have been met in many ways thanks to the technology that is in the industry at the moment, but cracks can still appear when employees are tasked with an increasingly complex set of business processes.
These cracks also have an effect on general productivity, as 2600Hz Head of Marketing, Alisa Bartash points out, without the proper tools, employees lose efficiencies by juggling multiple applications to complete a task.
“Now that hybrid working has been widely adopted, employees are collaborating frequently with colleagues within the organisation, utilising the unified communication and collaboration tools that the company provides.
“Improving the experience for these employees comes in the form of automating many of the manual tasks that are time consuming for them, and integrating other software that they use on a day to day basis. For example, integrating a CRM in a solution for someone in the sales team, or a call centre agent means that they’re not clicking around, having to go from tab to tab or programme to programme on their computer”
EX Impact on CX
Although how employees get their work done shouldn’t automatically affect customer experience, Bartash’s example is a simple demonstration of how sub-optimal working conditions can spill over into customer service.
Bartash went on to detail how providing employees with the best solutions has more benefits outside of customer experience, pointing to CPaaS capabilities and API’s that help to automate menial tasks. Ultimately that’s going to help both the typical employees, as well as the call centre agents, work more efficiently and be more productive every day.
“The experience the employee has in their day to day role can absolutely impact on customer satisfaction,” said Bartash. “If an employee is not able to get answers to questions very easily, or find the information that a customer is asking about, not only can that be very frustrating for the employee, it also impacts the customer’s experience because they’re waiting on hold longer.
“By streamlining the employee experience, not only are they going to have a better working day, they’re also able to provide customers with a better experience, and get them the information that they need faster.”
Value of Employees
This focus on the employee is part of a wider move within businesses to make working a better experience, prompted by ‘the great resignation’.
But, as employers have been strained to do more with less, in many cases employees have risen to the occasion and exceeded pre-pandemic levels of productivity. In fact, according to Bartash, the great resignation has meant businesses have discovered that their workforce are often their biggest asset.
“Before the pandemic, a lot of the focus was on the customer experience,” said Bartash, “obviously that is still incredibly important, but employees are also vital to businesses.
“Retaining employees is becoming almost as important as retaining customers. I think that has come from the employees advocating for themselves and starting to have those conversations about what can make their working lives easier.
“This change also needs to come from the top. Those at the top are recognising the need to enhance the experience for employees so that they can not only have a better experience in their day to day jobs, but also want to work for the business, and speak positively about the company that they work for.”
