Low agent effort results in more client happiness.

If you look at any customer experience guide or framework, you'll see that it emphasises the significance of reducing consumer effort.

We can comprehend why.

According to Gartner, 96% of consumers who have a high-effort service contact become more disloyal, compared to only 9% who enjoy a low-effort experience.

The message is straightforward: if you want to keep your clients loyal, make their lives simpler.

However, decreasing consumer effort involves a lot of moving components if you delve under the surface. The most crucial is... agent effort.

Consider this: how can you develop low-effort service encounters if your agents are finding it difficult and time-consuming to discover answers to consumer questions?

This is why, as a customer service manager, you must ask yourself:

Are you making your agents' lives easier?

Can you improve their workflows and guarantee they bring their A-game to work every day?

Let's look at some successful techniques to reduce agent effort in this post.

3 effective techniques to reduce agent effort

Empathize

One-on-one interaction with the team is crucial for knowing their goals, pain spots, and expectations. Paying attention to their workload can also assist you in developing practical solutions to lessen the amount of effort they put into day-to-day chores and discover methods to simplify them.

It becomes easier to streamline your support team's workflow if you have a deeper knowledge of them. How do you get rid of their mundane daily tasks? How can you keep them from wasting time on insignificant, time-consuming tasks?

Hiver, for example, enables you to automate monotonous operations (like assigning queries, tagging customer requests, and so on). Something like this can relieve your agents of a lot of effort and increase their productivity.

Empower

When your team's time and effort are wisely organised, chances to learn, grow, and improve their skill sets open up. A common cloud area with shared enterprise resources is required to assure accuracy and service standards. Agents may use the papers to deliver rapid replies to consumers, as well as to improvise and come up with solutions.

Industry-available add-on tools can dramatically improve agent productivity. Grammarly, for example, is a fantastic application that integrates into your browser and helps you improve the quality of your writing - emails, messages, chat comments, and so on. Grammarly, for example, enables agents to focus on providing outstanding service rather than worrying about typos and poor language.

So, if you're in charge of a customer service team, a smart strategy to improve quality is to offer your agents with all of the required tools and software for easy work.

Elevate To improve your team's overall performance, you must do two things.

The first step is to create a friendly work atmosphere in which each individual is respected and heard. This will strengthen their loyalty to your organisation and provide them with the final push to work to the best of their ability.

Teamwork is another important cog in the wheel. When agents interact and communicate openly, their separate abilities tend to converge, resulting in a high-performing team.

Advice on how to properly help your frontline agents

Every customer service leader's responsibility in a high-stress setting like customer assistance should be to assist the team in managing their time, effort, and energy.

So let's break it down and talk about how we can help frontline agents by making their work easier.

Reduce Your Effort One of the most difficult problems for support teams is dealing with a steady stream of inquiries. However, certain smart tools and software can significantly cut agent work.

Agents are frequently required to do repeated activities manually, which consumes significant time. This is where a helpdesk solution like Hiver might come in handy. One of its key features is that it automates repetitive processes such as query assignment and client request labelling. More significantly, it operates on top of Gmail's original UI, making it exceedingly simple to understand and employ. As a result, your team won't have to put in any extra effort to get used to it.

Find a platform that allows you to interact with other teams and streamline work. Slack is a wonderful example. It enables cross-collaboration, delegation, media and file sharing, and so forth.

With client information spread across numerous technologies and channels, agents must juggle several resources in a single day. Jumping through hoops to obtain the proper information might consume a significant amount of their productive time. You may assist them remove this effort and save up to 9 hours per week by using OSlash to create easy shortcuts for crucial URLs.

Finally, consider'mobility and flexibility' so that agents may work on the go and transition between devices (laptop and phone). Hiver, for example, helps you stay connected anywhere and anytime – via its mobile app.

Self-Help One interesting aspect of modern customers is their independence in terms of finding information. They usually find their way around and don't mind a little self-help as long as the experience is smooth. Ikea is a good example of a company that has a specific fan following of DIYers.

Self-help may drastically reduce the cost of serving for service teams while also improving the client experience. Some clients choose self-help since it may be obtained without the waiting time associated with supported aid. Self-service solutions, on the other hand, should be carefully developed to provide maximum client enjoyment with minimal effort. Customers will be forced to use more expensive aided channels if this is not done.

Self-service does not have to be limited to one thing. Instead, there may be a mix of pathways that direct buyers in the proper direction.

Chatbots have long been a popular approach to provide a personalised experience while reducing the need for a human agent. Furthermore, chatbots and IVR capabilities can assist in resolving some fundamental client concerns, ensuring that neither the customer nor the agent needs to exert extra effort.

Rapid access to FAQs and a knowledge library will enable an agent to provide quick resolutions without breaking a sweat. They can either exchange links with clients or refer to pre-written replies.

Include an email address in case customers have more inquiries. While monitoring email enquiries requires manual labour, it does provide agents some breathing room. When there is an option to email, customers will avoid other touchpoints such as phones. It benefits both consumers and agents.

Optimize on the basis of Purpose and Function "What type of client experience do you want to provide?" is a crucial question to ask yourself.

A comprehensive customer support system enables agents to engage with customers across numerous channels. Knowing your consumers' communication preferences can thus assist you in developing an appropriate plan.

For example, American Airlines has a Social Media Hub, which consists of a staff of 30-40 support employees that diligently monitor the company's social media platforms for any mentions of consumer concerns or complaints. The crew works hard to handle client issues such as rebookings, missing flights, luggage, refunds, and so on. A straightforward example of being available on your customer's chosen channels.

Bonus tip: Deflect it before it occurs!

When you behave reactively rather than proactively, your agents acquire workload. This is especially true in today's environment, when the average number of support tickets has increased by 16%.

If you observe or recognise a possible problem, take action before it worsens. Many businesses highlight possible problems ahead of time in order to warn and alert clients. Cable TV providers, online gaming firms, and other businesses, for example, are aggressively addressing concerns through public venues. This is a brilliant method of evading questions. The same is true for favourable results. When businesses prepare for new launches and anticipate high activity, they may plan ahead of time and brace themselves for the effect. Planning offers your support team an advantage.

"Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents Poor Performance," as the old British Army saying goes.

Finishing up

One of the most powerful predictors of client loyalty is little consumer effort. In fact, it is more essential than client happiness in several instances. Customers will continue to do business with you if they can swiftly attain their objectives.

This is, after all, genuine human psychology. We're all searching for methods to do our work more efficiently and effectively. So why should support agents be any different?

"Work wisely, not hard," as the wise folks say.