The Experience of Service Delivery
In Service Delivery, experience is everything.
Too often you hear: “Help desk is never helpful!” or “That HR agent couldn’t tell me anything about this issue with X.”
Service delivery representatives have a tough job. They are front line to already frustrated, angry, and anxious people, often taking the brunt of emotions they don’t own. Compound that with cultural differences (since many centers are located in a separate region from the employee), you have a recipe for frustrated internal customers and short-tenure service agents.
What gives? How do you get beyond this type of hamster wheel operation?
It’s all about designing the employee experience – for the service delivery agents. Why? Because they set the stage for the internal customer experience. Happy agents = happy customers (or at least a better probability of walking away happy!).
How do you do that? Well…
Lesson 1: Get them connected to the business.
This means they need to feel like part the team, even (especially) if you’re using an outsourced provider. Think about it – you take your cues at work from what’s going on with your team and the organization. This helps you do your job, fit into the culture, know what key events are going on that are important.
Think about how we’ve all struggled in the early months of 2020 being physically separated from our teams. This is what most service delivery teams face every day – physical and organizational separation from the employees they are there to support.
Now, you don’t have to share everything with your service delivery team, but they need to have the larger context and a calendar of key events (which could equate to ticket spikes for them). They need to understand their place in the organizational value chain. This helps change the mindset from “us vs. them” to a partnership mindset – we’re a team all trying to solve a problem, answer a question, support each other.
Lesson 2: Measure the right things.
Oh, this is a biggie for me. I internally cringe when I heard about scorecards that are lauded before leaders reporting little to no ticket aging. It’s impossible to have no ticket aging unless you have a pristine environment and perfect processes (which, if you did, you probably wouldn’t need a service delivery team!).
Yes, aging is something that should be reported. It’s important for the customer experience. But when all metrics for your delivery team are based primarily on volume, open time and aging, you’re going to drive unhealthy behavior that will inhibit growth. To be blunt: agents are going to close then re-open tickets to keep within the aging threshold.
Not good. This hides problems in the environment; problems that need to be explored because, I bet, they are key pain points for your employees. Plus, this focuses agents on getting tickets closed quickly – not listening to customers, following up, digging deeper on an issue. In essence, the employee experience for the internal customer becomes a secondary goal – all because of the metrics.
What should you measure:
Customer satisfaction, 1 question, every ticket or interaction.
Then yes, look at volume, open time, severity levels, and aging. Remember – what you measure drives the behavior.
Lesson 3: Give them something else to do!
Think about it, would you want to be on the front line everyday? It’s exhausting. One of the best tools I had to help keep my agents engaged was what we called “kaizen” projects. Think of these as value-add activities.
These projects not only helped to build other skills in my agents, they also helped energize them by giving them a break from being front and center with the customer. It showed my leadership team who had potential to move into a lead role, where their skillsets were strong, where agents had growth opportunities.
There are many auxiliary activities that are needed to support a delivery team – process documentation, process mapping, agent script writing, scripting of common conversations to support chat/AI development, on and on. All these things also build the broader competencies within the team and connect them back to the business.
PS – Don’t forget to measure, quantify and report on completions because this is additional value the team is providing!
Lesson 4: Empower them with boundaries.
How many times have you been on a call and frustrated that all the agent is doing is reading off a script? When you ask a question, they can’t answer it. They don’t have a script.
As a leader I’ve learned people need boundaries. This helps them know where they can make decisions, stretch, and innovate as well as where they need to checkpoint with a supervisor.
If you don’t want the customer experience to be robotic, don’t treat your service delivery agents like robots.
Yes, they still need some scripts and procedures, but they also need to know where they have decision making authority. And it could be as simple as being able to reclass a ticket as a higher priority if it’s sent on to a Tier 2 or Tier 3 agent. This approach empowers the agent – “I can do this for you, but I’m not able to do xyz.” Boundaries allow for planned scenarios for push back on customer requests, reducing the mental strain and improving the day-to-day work environment for your agents.
PS – One of the benefits I saw with this approach was in increase in value-add activities, further increasing customer satisfaction. For example: They advocated to handle certain simple tasks (like a manager or location data update) because it was something that took them 30 seconds but for a user it could be a 5 minute task. The customer loved it because it got done quickly. The agent was happy because they did something to help immediately. And, metrics, including customer satisfaction, increased.
At the end of the day, it’s about deliberate planning for the agent’s experience which, in turn, directly impacts the customer’s experience. Remember: We’re all human, and we all want to do a good job at work.
Design the environment to drive the experience.
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