Research Data: How CX Organizations Are Tackling the Efficiency Mandate

Summary

In this webinar, the focus is on how customer experience (CX) organizations are handling the efficiency mandate. The presenters, Gabe Larsen and Andrea Paul, provide insights from a survey conducted on customer service professionals in the US. The survey revealed that 92% of CX organizations report a need for greater efficiency. The main challenges hindering efficiency were the volume and nature of inquiries, unclear policies, and limited technology tools. Surprisingly, 57% of companies are not currently using tech and tools to achieve efficiencies, with a lack of budget and executive buy-in being the primary reasons.

Key Takeaways

1. Efficiency Mandate: The webinar highlights the growing importance of efficiency in customer experience (CX) organizations, with 92% of them reporting a need for greater efficiency.
2. Common Challenges: CX organizations face challenges like handling the volume and nature of inquiries, unclear policies, and limited technology tools, which impact their ability to achieve efficiency.
3. Technology Adoption: Surprisingly, 57% of companies are not currently using tech and tools to improve efficiency, with budget constraints and lack of executive buy-in being the primary reasons.
4. Balancing Efficiency and Customer Experience: The debate exists on whether efficient customer service comes at the expense of the customer experience, with varied opinions among CX professionals.
5. Adopting Effective Strategies: To strike the right balance, CX organizations can explore self-service options, deflection strategies, and technology tools, like chatbots and intelligent routing, to enhance efficiency while still meeting customer expectations.

Transcript

Welcome everybody to today’s webinar.
We’re excited to get going. We’re gonna be talking about how CX organizations are tackling this efficiency mandate.
We’ll do quick introductions, housekeeping items, let a few people straggle on in here. And that get rocking and rolling. So, I’m Gabe Larson, vice president of growth here at customer and then I’ll turn it to my esteemed colleague, Andrea. Give us a quick intro.
Hey, guys. My name is Andrea Paul. I am the director of research here at customer.
I was a journalist sort of at the beginning of my career and then have been working in the content production and and research space for tech companies, last companies for about the last ten years. Awesome. Awesome. So if you need some, the you need the slides.
You gotta ditch out early. We’ll probably only be going about thirty minutes here. Let us know. Happy to get those to you.
Do want this to be as interactive as possible. So if you can right now, open up that little chat box. It’s that bar you’ve got, and it should say chat, I think, there.
And if you can, there’s a little bar that says, you know, you can chat with either all panelists or everybody, all panelists and attendees, Hi. I’m I’m oops. That’s how I spell mine.
It like that. So if you can just tell us your name and where you’re from, that would be awesome if you could throw that in there and then use that chat. Throughout today’s conversation to kinda get us going here. So looks like we’ve got Britney Dion, Kevin, Kim, Louise, tanner.
Perfect. Yep. We’ll let a couple more people squeeze on in, and then we will rock and roll. Ash brokerage, Kim, where is Ash brokerage?
And I wasn’t I was I was expecting Fort Wayne, okay, for I love it.
Lou, welcome. Yeah, Kim. Welcome. Alright. Well, let’s get going to you guys.
Let’s start high level.
Question for you if you could put this in the chat. What percentage, of CX organizations report a need for greater efficiency.
What percentage of CX organizations report a need greater efficiency. Feel free to throw that in the chat box there. Britney’s got seventy seven. Kim’s got a hundred. The own eighty. Hundred percent Kim’s going strong. I guess that’s what happened when he come from, ask brokerage.
Andrea, well, I can’t ask you what you think because I think you know the answer. I do know the answer. To give you guys some context, we did run a survey of about a hundred and twenty a little bit over that, on customer service professionals in the US. They’re employed full time across a variety of industries.
This was done sort of from the end of May to the beginning of June. So very recently.
And we just really wanted to know, you know, What are their challenges of achieving efficiency? Are they feeling a need to be more efficient?
What are the strategies they’re using? So this is sort of like the headline what’s going on with efficiency and customer service. Love it. Alright.
Well, hopefully that helps set the stage a little bit better. Let’s see what the survey says. Service says ninety two percent. I think that’s right.
Kim Kim actually put a hundred pretty close. Ninety two percent of organizations, Phil, they need a greater efficiency. That’s not too surprising.
Was that surprising to you, Andrea? No. I mean, that’s No. I mean, I I don’t think it comes as a surprise at all that the vast majority of respondents said that they needed to be more efficient.
We also looked at, like, various factors that were impacting organizations efficiency and So the the number one reason was was a limited staff. They they couldn’t be efficient. And that goes sort of like hand in hand. Right? If you’re if you have less less staff, then you need to be more efficient.
There were also forty four percent said that they had a strict budget so they couldn’t get the right tools to be efficient, and a lot of companies were struggling with with twenty four or seven support while maintaining this efficiency So, you know, when when budgets are unexpectedly slashed or or, you know, we don’t have enough enough staff to sort of man customer service twenty four seven having technology tools in place that can minimize the impact and and make agents jobs easier is gonna be really, really important. So I think, you know, that goes hand in hand with the the next question we have for you guys. Yeah. So what percentage of organizations report a greater need for efficiency than a year ago?
Any context on this one or same context?
I mean, it’s just, you know, a matter of last year versus this year.
What what sort of were organizations feeling? Have they gotten more efficient Have they felt like they’ve met that mandate, have things gotten harder for them from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty?
Let’s see what the service says.
Oh, almost went to there. E for fifth oh, my goodness. Sorry. Slow computer. Come on.
There you go. Fifty one percent reported greater need for efficiency in the year ago, and then what’s this other one? Six percent report they need for efficiency heads decreased. What’s that?
Yeah. So the way that this question was formulated essentially, there was an option for no change at all.
So that’s why the fifty one percent may seem a bit low.
You know, Yvette and Dion put higher numbers there.
That’s because a good a good cohort of respondents did say that there has been no change from last year to this year. Yep. But only six percent of respondents said that the need for efficiency has decreased over the past year. So I think just hammering home the fact that almost no one, only six percent of respondents said that they have achieved this so called efficiency mandate within the last year is pretty big. It means that companies are are struggling significantly and it’s you know, a lot of them, it’s only gotten more difficult to achieve that efficiency and the need has gotten greater over the last year. So whether it’s a a recession or a pandemic or, you know, changing customer expectations, the the success of a business can really swing, without notice as I’m sure all of you guys have experienced within the last few months.
And organizations have felt this really strongly. So this mandate of efficiency and the gaps in their strategy in order to achieve that, are only, you know, getting more transparent to them. So, you know, maybe efficiency wasn’t the number one priority for some organizations when the business was booming or a lot of resources were available to them, but, you know, now being efficient and effective, as a customer service organization is is really a top priority. No.
I like it. I’m I’m Amy asked such a great question. I apologize, Amy. I don’t know if we did this, Andrew.
Did we set up kinda what this study was and and some of the details behind it. I don’t know if we did.
Yeah. Oh, you mean at the very beginning. Yeah. I mean, I I I did set the stage with the fact that this was a a survey from sort of May to June that we ran with a around a hundred and twenty one risk respondents from the US.
I think that the the big question that we were trying to answer was you know, do all companies feel this this need for greater efficiency? You know, we’ve been hearing it so much in the last three months probably due to the global pandemic and the the consequential sort of recession that we’re seeing as a result of that. But we wanted to know, you know, what sort of companies are being affected by this? What strategies are they using to achieve efficiency?
What was preventing them from leveraging technology?
So, you know, both short term and long term effects of of this sort of mandate that that a lot of the customer service organizations are Oh, I love it. I need to apologize if if you would miss that or if we skipped over that a little bit quick. So question from Dion, you know, Diane Diane Dion. I apologize if I’m saying that wrong. So she said, how does one company measure efficiency in order to say there’s no need for change?
Quick thoughts on kinda how people interpret that, maybe, Andrea? Yeah. I mean, I feel like that’s always, sort of struggle for customer service organizations, a lot of their goals, so to speak, can feel intangible.
And efficiency is definitely one of those those goals that feels a little bit wishy washy. And a lot of organizations, you know, can measure it in different ways. I think as company’s, staff gets cut. That’s when they start to feel it a lot more, because they have to handle more tickets in a shorter period time. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that their ticket volume is going down or, their, the questions that are being asked are getting any easier. So it’s how do we, you know, figure out how to do that without impacting the customer experience?
Organizations measure it in different ways. So whether that’s average handle time or the number tickets that an agent, can actually handle within a certain period of time or the deflection rate.
There’s a lot of different ways that, you know, organizations can approach it, and it’s very specific to a business. But there are definite metrics that can be tied to sort of code unquote customer service efficiency. Yeah. No.
That’s helpful. That’s helpful. Keep the questions coming, you guys. Thanks, Dionne, for the question. What are the top challenges to delivering efficient and effective port.
These could range from things like what? You’ll have to throw in maybe a couple guesses here, but Andrew, what would be some of the things that would fall on a list like this?
Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, things like volume of of, inquiries that are coming in. Maybe there’s product issues that are popping up all the time or the nature of the questions, the technology tools that you have, things of that nature. So we’d love to hear what you guys think in terms of what is stopping, you know, organizations from from being a active and efficient. More people issue technology, process. Let’s see what the survey says here.
So walk us through this.
Yeah. So if you look at the graph on the right here, you can see that sort of the nature of the inquiries, the volume of the inquiries, and unclear policies surprisingly were the top reasons that organizations were struggling to be efficient. So the number one reason challenging inquiry is, you know, this makes a lot of sense.
Traditional tools that companies use to be efficient. So things like automation and self-service tools, those aren’t necessarily effective in resolving really challenging customer issues. Right? But the the good thing is is that the implementation of those sort of technologies can actually free up agent time to handle these inherently more time consuming tasks. So instead of them spending hours and hours of answering simple inquiries like like product and policy questions or or things of that nature, customer service teams can really spend their time tackling those inherently more time consuming tasks the higher level support, the relationship building.
The surprising one for me to be in the top three were the unclear unknown policies So when, you know, when agents have to go searching for accurate information across a variety of different systems, you know, I guess customers are are sure to suffer and that and that also, you know, is is a roadblock to efficiency for customer service teams. So making sure that there’s a way for your agents to be able to surface that relevant information instantaneously and that your organization has the ability to update it in real time as policies shift. I think is super, super important.
I know we we did a a COVID nineteen research study and a lot of organizations, you know, in the last few months have shifted their policy as a result of the global pandemic. So maybe this is why it was so high because that’s sort of top of mind for a lot of organizations. They have had shifting policies.
And even, you know, things like chat bots if if they leverage, the right technology they can tap into knowledge bases and and surface you know, accurate, relevant, policy information to consumers instantaneously as well. I love it. Love it. Interesting. Yeah. Too many inquiries challenging inquiries.
Those, I can’t argue with them. Those would definitely be things that might knock your effectiveness, and it does seem like with all that’s going on with COVID, Those are things that are coming more to the forefront.
What percentage of companies say they’re not currently using tech and tools to achieve efficiencies.
Quick context on this one or thoughts on this one, Andrea? Yeah. So, this would be, you know, traditional tools that you could think of to be more efficient. So things like chat bots, things like, knowledge based deflection or intelligent routing, things that save agents time or deflect conversations that are coming in.
So I we would love to know what percentage you guys think aren’t using anything like that right now. Yeah. We got a couple different things coming in. More a little bit lower.
So twelve twenty five. We’ve got fifteen forty five.
We got a seventy five coming in sixty.
Alright. Let’s see. Survey says Britney went higher. She went with sixty. Let’s see Britney.
Fifty seven. Oh my goodness. Look at that. Yeah. Training was the closest, surprisingly. You need like prizes or something.
Brittany. I know.
We’ll we’ll send you some customer swag. Yeah. That’s I need to do that in the time. So, yeah.
What’s your thoughts on this, Andrew? I mean, this one was very surprising to me. I think, you know, probably partially because I live in the customer world and the we’re all about these sort of technology tools. That’s essentially what we are. So maybe I’m in an insular bubble and I I didn’t realize how many organizations weren’t currently doing this.
So, you know, it kind of makes sense when you think about how many organizations said that they achieved a fish more efficiency in the year. And they don’t need to be more efficient. There were only six percent of organizations that said that they their need for efficiency was lessened in the past year. So those two things I think go hand in hand.
We also looked at why companies were were not adopting sort of tools and the top reasons that organizations gave were a lack of budget and a lack of executive buy in, which I also think go hand in hand. So if your leadership team doesn’t understand the value behind the top adopting these efficiency tools and they likely, you know, won’t allocate budget for you to do so. So it’s kind of ironic because when you adopt efficiency tools, you could really transform your customer service organization from what’s been traditionally thought of as a cost center into a profit center and that will ultimately benefit the business and thus the executive.
So, I think that they, you know, they go hand in hand, but you know, time is money. So when you’re spending this valuable human time on these low level tasks that technology can handle really no one benefits, and when there are things like tagging conversations or routing conversations or answering really simple questions these can be sort of menial and and brain numbing quite frankly to agents.
And I think that, you know, with the advent of of this new technology, customer service agents can really drive revenue. They don’t need to be relegated to the the low level work that they’ve traditionally done. They can take a more prominent role in the organization.
They can spend time building relationships proactively reaching out to customers, making customers feel valued and and even really like, you know, closing more business. So I think that, you know, those are definitely challenges that organizations are feeling.
But coming to the forefront to your executives getting budget to do so can can actually ultimately, not only make agents happier, but benefits business is bottom line as well. Yeah. This is this is the challenge I think of that, you know, we want the efficiencies, but the dollars and cents are hard to come by. And finding that business case, which is a little, you know, that that’s that’s not as easy as it sounds sometimes, right, to build that person. It takes a little bit more effort and you need some documents, and, it’s not I I I don’t envy when people are kinda thinking through that. So here’s some of the top ideas that people are considering You’ve hit on a couple of these.
Surprised though that intelligent routing was number one. I mean, I’ve heard a lot lately. I was shadowing a company not long ago, and they use the word hunting and pecking. I hadn’t really heard that term very much, but, you know, I go into the inbox, and it’s a waste of time. It’s a shared and email inbox and we try to find the right issues and we pull it out. And, there were some frustrations, and they were laughing about this term hunting and pecking.
It’s it’s the way they using sophisticated route So that was a little bit different for me, but surprise and intelligent routing was kinda on top there. I mean, I think that most customer service organizations that don’t currently use intelligent routing. They spend so much time doing it that it makes a lot of sense. It would be a number one priority because as I said, it’s that low level, menial work that can be kind of brain numbing and being not super satisfying or fulfilling.
And they could be spending their time doing a lot a lot better things. So I think the the promising thing is despite the fact that fifty seven percent of respondents said that they weren’t using current tools, vast majority said that they were planning on a doc tools and these were the ones that that they were sort of considering, sort of an order of of popularity, so to speak.
You know, I think that, you know, fifty six percent of customer service professionals reported that their they thought their customers liked self service options as well.
So things like the knowledge based deflection where they could potentially get their questions answered from, you know, in an article that you have on your website and FAQ and knowledge base.
Customers are more open to that than ever before. Yep. Chatbots were a little bit lower on that. I think chatbots can often get a bad rep because Believe it or not, a lot of chatbots are kinda crappy and historically have been.
But I think this just shows shows it. Those are fight words you really like. I’ve had some bad chatbot experiences. I’ve had some good ones too, but some of them have not been been so great.
But I I do think that it’s promising that, you know, a lot of a lot of respondents said that, you know, they know that this is what could get them to be more and and they’re considering all of this. Yeah. Yeah. Britney feels me.
Britney has also had bad experiences with Jetbuds So makes sense. I’m I’m filling two against one, but that that certainly I can certainly bounce for that. Definitely as you look at those top ones, these are the easier things. These are the easier where people are saying, Hey, why don’t we not have to answer the password?
The where’s my order question? Right. I don’t see if we can kind of deflect some of that So I’m not too surprised down there. Some of those bottom ones, outsourcing auto translations what’s the auto translations?
Is that just that’s dealing with some of the language barriers that we’re finding? And sometimes that’s — Yeah. — causing problems for agents, you think? Because again, I’m thought that would maybe be more of a routing thing where, you know, I got routed maybe language.
I can’t speak. And so, therefore, we need more intelligent routing based on language detection. Right. Nothing like that.
Which I think is, you know, goes hand in hand with the intelligent routing. A lot of maybe customer service teams have different teams for different regions so they don’t need to translate or maybe they don’t do business in places that aren’t English speaking. So it kind of makes sense that it would be on the lower end of things. It was, you know, a factor for some organizations, but maybe they handle it in different ways that aren’t necessarily through auto translations.
It’s through other tactics. Got it. Got it. How many of you are deflecting of doing some form of deflection in your current customer service organization.
Would love to hear that just by raise of hands. You can’t raise your hand, but put it in the chat in some form of fashion just yes or no. Yes. We are deflecting. No. We are not deflecting.
Because it seems like that definitely the direction people are going. It looks like overall we’ve got yes. No. Actually, look at that. No. We’ve got a handful of nos.
It’s about fifty fifty.
I know in certain organizations, it is, you know, it it’s something that’s, newer, their customers are not used to it. So it’s a little harder to adopt. They’ve been used kinda using the phone. I was talking to a gentleman the other day that just said, I just don’t think we can go that direction, but I do think there’s some small ways to start down that path.
But I really like number two for that. You know, it’s like, hey, is there a way you could potentially start using the flexion, maybe just in your knowledge base or on your form? Oh, I love that one. That’s a small way to do it form to function.
Right? So don’t think you gotta tackle the world if you haven’t really jumped onto that. Know that there’s some small ways you might wanna test it out to if your customers may not, you know, may not not like it or like like it or not like it. Okay.
So I think the next the next question definitely speaks to this as well. Alright. Alright. Well, do you agree or disagree with the following statement efficient customer service comes at the expense of the customer experience.
I needed to get a little more bravo on that. It should customer service comes at the expense of the customer experience. Yes or no or agree or disagree I think I would love to know your guys opinions on this because I was kind of surprised at the answers that we got from the survey that we, sent out. So Yeah.
I think Britney Been a lot of disagrees here. I think Britney’s always just trying to piss a pick a fight there. Oh my goodness. Adam just came in with all capital disagree.
Okay. Well, he’s he’s apparently very serious about this one. So do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Official customer service comes at the expense of the customer experience.
What do I think of this one?
It shouldn’t. It shouldn’t.
But I do think it probably does. I do think it probably does.
Oof, we got a lot of here going. Andrew, tell us what what what Yeah. There’s a lot on this slide. So be patient here, but You can see from this sort of data visualization on the right.
The opinions on this one were totally across the board. So I’m I’m glad that there is a consensus within this group. Like, that gives me a lot of hope, and it’s probably one of the reasons why you guys joined the webinar because you believe in efficiency, but, there really wasn’t a consensus. And and whenever I do research, this is often very rare. Because we’re serving people that have very similar roles.
Somewhat similar opinions usually and even when we sliced this data by industry and by business size, it was still, like, all over the map.
And I think one of the reasons for that is that the technology that can actually truly provide a good customer experience is so new and not widely adopted by companies yet that the strategies and the practices that a lot of companies have historically implemented to be more efficient, probably have had an impact on the customer experience.
You know, people are asking themselves is it worth creating a negative customer experience just to save agents time. Could I lose a customer if I try to deflect you know things like that and and their issues that customer service organizations struggle with and I think rightfully so. And as we were talking about before, you know, chatbots have often gotten a bad rap in the past because they couldn’t answer a customer’s or they would send them to a really dense knowledge base article, that might have been irrelevant to the actual question that was being asked or you know, instead of being a helpful tool to customers, they would be another barrier to to get access to an agent. So I think it’s just because the technology is still relatively new in the grand scheme of things.
But for chat for instance, you know, they can be so, so powerful when they’re leveraging, AI and machine learning and they can integrate all of your customer data. So instead of just slapping on a chatbot onto your site for the sake of having one, I think it’s super super important to do your due diligence.
Understand the strengths and the weaknesses of sort of the the tools that you wanna be implementing. So, you know, for a chat bot specifically would be what’s the average reflection rate What happens when a bot can’t actually answer a question? Does it just sit there? Does it get sent to an agent? Do they send a relevant article, what sort of data sources can the chat bot access? What happens to all the information that chat bots are is gathering.
So all of these questions are super, super important to ask in order to figure out, like, what efficiency tools are actually gonna be to for your organization. But this response really surprised me. Yeah. And I see I mean, I think this is a little bit of a debate.
You know, Britney, I appreciate your comment here. It should work that way. It should be that efficiency does kind of align with better experience, but I think we found that sometimes that does it doesn’t go hand in hand. Right?
I’ve talked to customer service leaders that it’s all about, you know, handle time. And so sometimes we’re cutting conversation short, you know, just so we can be quote unquote efficient. Right? Sometimes it’s your point on bots.
It’s like we make it very difficult to hand it off.
I I I work with the bot bot bot bot and I wanna talk to the agent and that it doesn’t work very well. Or it doesn’t work at all. And and so we’ve become more efficient, but we’ve ultimately hurt the customer experience. And so I think that’s why great leaders do look at the customer experience through the customer’s eyes. When they look at their handle time, their efficiency, their deflect rates, etcetera, because I think sometimes looking at it in a silo can believe people in, maybe, sometimes, not a great place.
Back over to you. Let’s what what do we have here?
Yeah. So we only have a couple more slides left to sort of wrap things up, but you know, I think that we have to still keep meeting our customer expectations, to by trying to achieve this efficiency. Right? So it’s clear that customer service professionals know that they have to be much more efficient and they’re not sure how to achieve that in order to do it in a way that maintains a positive experience for the customers.
But all of your customers have to be served. Oftentimes, there’s roadblocks to doing that.
But one of the questions that we actually did ask was around long wait times, around needing to repeat information. Customers really expect that immediate and that accuracy and that seamless experience.
I think that customer expectations are really at an all time high.
Ninety one percent said that their customers can’t stand waiting any long wait times whatsoever and seventy nine percent said that their customers won’t tolerate repeating information.
So by giving the customers the option to self serve, and then using that information gathered in order to hand it off to the agent if that self-service was not success full. I think that CX teams can really deliver on both that efficiency and the effectiveness mandate that we, you know, so often feel.
But CX professionals, you know, they may be nervous about implementing self-service options, but Consumer research actually like contradicts that nervousness.
There was a study by Nuance Enterprises that said that sixty seven percent of consumers actually prefer self-service over talking to an agent.
I know, you know, I don’t particularly love getting on the phone with anyone. And so I kind of feel that. I I sort of try out different options before I go there.
And forty eight percent said that they don’t really care whether they talk to a chat bot or a real person. So I think balancing that cusp customer research, the consumer research with CX research is really important because you need to know what your customers expect and also how we can deliver on that.
Oh, I love So these are the little technologies that you can use to kind of move in that direction? Yeah. And I think we’ve you know, talked through a lot of these already, and I’m sure that our attendees sort of, you know, know But I think these are a lot about these. Are good places to start you guys as you look for these efficiencies in your customer journey.
Think that’s exactly what you wanna do. You map your journey. You look for those efficiencies, and these are some of the things start jumping out. It’s that self-service.
It’s that routing. It’s that engagement, when I actually work with with somebody, can I get content to myself? Those are different ways you can find efficiencies in the customer service process. And, again, I don’t think it has to be something huge.
I think these can be baby steps and run with the crawl walk run. So how would you kinda summarize it, Andrea, as we wrap up here? Yeah. I mean, I think it’s very, very clear that customer service organizations are just continuing to feel the need to be more efficient and they’re confused as to how to approach that in a way that doesn’t break the bank that that doesn’t sacrifice the customer experience.
So, you know, a lot of a lot of you guys in the chat have sort of shouted out what you guys are doing now, what you’re testing out, what you found success with, but It’s that test and learn approach. It’s the the exactly what you said gave the crawl crawl walk run and figure out you know, what is working for you, what technology tools that that are within your budget, within your strategy that you can adopt We have a full research report that goes a lot more in-depth into into the data. So a lot of the the staff that I sort of threw out. Additional ones, we sliced it by a few different industries, a few different business sizes.
So definitely encourage you guys to read that full research. It’s gonna be launched tomorrow. You guys got sort of a little sneak peek here.
Yeah. But, I think, you know, it’s gonna continue to be sort of a mandate for anyone that’s in the customer service realm. And additionally, like, right now specifically, it’s just comes so much more to the forefront if organizations can prepare for any sort of economic downturn or surprise that happens in the near future. I think it should be a priority for for just about anyone.
Awesome. Well, Andrea, really appreciate it. Thanks everybody for the audience. We are at the the the mark, so we’ll let you get back to your day job and wish everybody a fantastic day.