Have you seen The Marketing Factbook?

The Marketing Factbook will help you up your marketing game, walking you through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations you need for a hgih-profit, high-rentention marketing strategy. This comprehensive marketing guide has 400+ packed pages of marketing strategy, trends, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and tons of ideas to boost sales revenue, market share, ROI, and profits.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)

Service reps found behind great customer experiences

Your customer service agents are licensed to thrill

However, the average service organization operates under a model that puts the customer as the top priority. And, for good reason. An above-average customer experience correlates with increased customer loyalty.

This translates into more systems and tools for the service rep to utilize to not only be more productive, but also to provide a more seamless and effortless customer experience. By default, this is creating a much larger problem: More complexity and hurdles for the rep to overcome in order to solve a customer's problem.

Despite the investment in adding more systems and tools to improve the frontline, service leaders see little return. While these tools and systems should support and enable success, a majority (76%) of service leaders report they struggle with the planning and execution of these projects. Research shows that the average live service interaction is taking longer than it did in the past, and most service organizations report either flat or increased call volumes year over year. It has become clear that these projects do not return the expected productivity gains.

Gartner defines the rep experience as "the interactions of frontline reps with systems and tools required to resolve customer issues". To shift focus from the customer experience to the rep experience, service leaders must understand that by improving the rep experience, the organisation will see improvement in operational efficiency and the customer experience. In fact, improved rep experience can help to increase customer satisfaction by 11% and reduce customer effort by 9%.

"We've been living in an age of quality - organizations are focused on improving the quality of customer interactions, in order to increase customer loyalty," said Rick DeLisi, principal executive advisor at Gartner. "We see this in online services through more options, more control and more functionality, as well as in live service interactions by creating a more 'effortless experience' for the customer."

To better support reps, service leaders must lighten the load during live interactions. Specifically, Gartner research shows three key ways service leaders can tame the complexity for reps and allow them to focus on helping customers:

• Identify and remove barriers to rep productivity
  Service organizations devote a large amount of effort to understanding their customers' pain points through customer experience measures, such as voice of the customer (VoC). These same activities can be adapted to assess rep experience improvement opportunities as well.
• Uncover creative, quick-hit wins
  Uncover the nonobvious, quick-hit solutions to help reps focus their time and attention on the customer. By studying reps as they work and enabling rep-led solutions, service leaders can take near-term actions to improve the rep experience.
• Balance productivity and quality
  Research reveals four key strategies and tactics for quick wins in balancing productivity and quality. These include eliminating unnecessary customer contacts, keeping customers on the website, training reps to focus on the best customer outcome and helping to avoid a follow-up issue.

"The element that most service leaders overlook is what we call the 'rep experience' - we're so focused on the customer experience and how it translates into increased loyalty. Or, why it's important to feel empathy for the customer," said DeLisi. "However, our research shows that the rep experience is just as crucial to ensuring a high-quality customer experience. It's only through the performance of your reps that you create a superior live customer experience for your company and increased operational efficiency."

More information on what service organizations can do to improve the rep experience is available to Gartner clients in the report "Unleashing Rep Productivity in the New Work Environment".

Have you seen The Marketing Factbook?

The Marketing Factbook will help you up your marketing game, walking you through the techniques, metrics, reporting, analysis, marketing models, technologies, tools and innovations you need for a hgih-profit, high-rentention marketing strategy.

This comprehensive marketing guide has 400+ packed pages of marketing strategy, trends, best practices, do's and don'ts, practical know-how, facts and figures, and tons of ideas to boost sales revenue, market share, ROI, and profits. It's the report no marketer can afford to be without.

Find out the best ways to gather, analyse, and act on customer data to increase profitability, build your brand, empower your customers, beat the competition, reduce churn, and increase customer profitability.

Find out what works and what doesn't, who's succeeded and how they did it, and how the world's top brands keep their competitive edge against all odds. This report gives you the data you need for the best decisions for a more profitable, more engaging marketing strategy.

Get the hard facts, forecasts and trends identified by our experts from the global Marketing Factbook's vast database of market data, studies, research and white papers, and gain an invaluable library of ideas and practical support you can call upon at will.

With The Marketing Factbook at your side, you'll have a true goldmine of easily adaptable and up-to-date strategies, walk-throughs, trends, research and market data, plus all the supporting arguments you need to build a solid, profitable marketing strategy: All the know-how, strategies and ideas you need to get your own Marketing Playbook right, first time.

Get it on Amazon (Kindle/Print)