While multi-tasking can be a detriment to the customer experience, “multi-skilling” will be an improvement. Here’s why – and how – you want to cross-train customer service pros.
With companies doing more with less these days, it’s vital customer service teams become cross-functional teams. Just knowing more about the organization can help them deliver exceptional, one-contact experiences to customers. Actually knowing how to do more within the company will make them bigger stars than they already are.
In addition to training customer experience pros on your systems, service procedures and company protocols, consider broadening their knowledge and skills into these areas:
Market research
One of the best ways front-line employees can better help customers is by knowing more about customers and their habits.
Work with Marketing to increase employees’ knowledge and skills in the areas of:
- survey design and analysis
- sampling, interviewing and organizing data
- customer behavior trends, and
- creating and understanding metrics and statistics that come from data collection,
Service pros don’t need to do the market research, but they’ll be able to handle more issues and prepare for shifts in demand when they understand what the market research shows.
Problem resolution
Yes, front-line customer experience professionals solve lots of problems. But those are primarily after the issues happened. Getting these employees involved in product design or service creation – and the problem analysis that occurs during this stage – can help them improve their back-end problem-solving skills. Even better, their customer-facing insight might help those involved in product design avoid issues before they’re created.
Work with “idea” people in your organization – the people who come up with new products or services, design and/or build – to get service pros involved in the early stages, even just for observation.
Analysis
Leaders within your organization analyze nearly every element of business. Some examples: They look at how products or services are delivered, what the costs are versus profits, and the intricacies of vendor deals and quality. The more customer service pros understand the difference between what’s good, what’s better, what’s bad and what’s ugly, the more they can do to ensure customers only experience the good and better.
Find ways to get customer service more involved in the business and strategy side of your organization, not just the tactical and transactional side.
Adaptability
For customer experience professionals to become more cross-functional, they’ll need to sharpen adaptability skills. Those come from a background and training in:
- strong communication (so they can voice their thoughts on changes and relay changes clearly and confidently to customers and colleagues)
- leadership (so they can step up and handle change and working in different functions without looking for constant approval, which can stall progress)
- planning (so they can set and manage short- and long-term goals throughout change and while working in other functions)
- teamwork (so they can collaborate when necessary, influence when necessary, and charge ahead alone when necessary)
Those are mostly soft skills, so you’ll want to cover them in training, but more importantly, encourage them throughout their careers.
