Time management: from issue to action

‘I just can’t cope with all these tasks’ or ‘damn, I should have called that customer back!’. How often you or your team refer to the concept of TIME with a negative aftertaste? I’m asking because poor time management is a frequent cause of stress for employees, as well as bad customer experiences. Whenever such a ‘lose-lose’ situation continues overtime it’s bound to affect the whole business with sales drop and/or customer churn.

Lack of time kills customer relationships

As more and more interactions take place over digital support channels, customer’s demand for faster responses is at an all time high. Like it or not it’s not going to drop, that’s why your Digital Customer Service needs to be 360° fully effective which means focussing on:

Having an omni-channel platform enabling you to integrate all support conversational channels. In fact I still observe too many companies relying on too many different systems / applications for each channel (one for for phone, a second one for email, a third one for Live Chat support. As a result, such time dispersions generate low productivity, meaning slower responses (sigh!) and lack of a single view of customer conversations. 💡TIP: in your selection process for a platform take into account both your current and future needs as per kind of channel (e.g. Whatsapp, Live Chat) and number of users (e.g. today your customer service team, next year another facing department?).
Up-skilling your people. I’m talking about developing new digital competences based on professional roles. First of all for customer service managers needing to optimize their time in an hybrid working scenario (balancing office days meetings with their team and remote days). Moreover they need to be fully aware of the necessary up-skilling differences lying behind every digital channel. 💡TIP: a properly trained customer service team is able to enhance each digital conversation with the customer in terms of mutual time spent and experience (First Contact Resolution and Customer Satisfaction are valuable KPIs to monitor and improve on both areas).

Make Time Management your priority

Improving time management both within your team and across departments has become an issue for many organizations. Smart ones have taken a great leap forward turning the ‘complaining about’ into a priority in order to face it. That’s why time management is also one of the 5 key topics in my Customer Culture Academy so I invite you to get to know it here.