Look at any business and you will likely see customer care professionals on the frontline. Whether they are in customer service or account management, these people set customers up for success, keep them happy in the long term, and make vital contributions to the business’s sustainability.
However, despite its value, customer success is one of the most challenging roles at any company.
According to Pega’s ‘The good, the bad, the ugly: 2019 global customer service insights’ study, 79% of 70,000 customer service employees reported that they experience multiple pain points when doing their job. Customer service also has one of the highest turnover rates of all departments.
Why is customer service so challenging?
Let’s review some of the common pain points for customer service teams below.
Common Pain Points for Customer Care Teams
Many common pain points cited in Pega’s study come down to a combination of poor tools and processes that harm the customer experience. These include:
- Having to pass customers between teams and departments (a pain point for 43%)
- Having to manually enter the same information in multiple locations (a pain point for 32%)
- Having to prompt customers for information they’ve already supplied on another channel (a pain point for 24%)
These are problems for a lot of businesses, but the good news is that they are easily avoidable and fixable with iPaas.
How iPaaS Improves Employee Satisfaction
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) connects and integrates your business apps so you can keep data updated across multiple tools. It also provides an easy way to centralize data in one place, like your CRM.
iPaaS tools are great for improving customer experience, but they also boost employee satisfaction and reduce turnover – especially in customer-facing roles – by resolving the pain points that affect nearly 80% of these employees.
If you want to reduce the turnover of your customer service employees, read on for five common problems to easily avoid and fix with iPaaS.
Problem #1: Passing Customers Between Teams and Departments
As a customer, there are few things worse than being redirected to what feels like hundreds of different people in a business. In fact, 69% of customers expect a connected experience when they engage with a company, but few of them get it.
When you’re working in a business with disconnected customer service, it’s also demotivating for the employees. You want to provide a seamless customer experience, but the infrastructure isn’t there for you to do so.
The Solution:
Use an iPaaS tool to sync all customer data to a centralized CRM tool, so any team member can find timely customer data and take immediate steps to help the customer.
Problem #2: Manually Entering the Same Information in Multiple Locations
Repeating the same manual work again and again sucks. For many customer-facing teams, it can seem like part of the job to spend hours of your day inputting the same data into a CRM, project management tool, invoicing system, and Slack to share data with colleagues. But it doesn’t have to be that way.
The Solution:
Set up a two-way sync so your contact data can instantly flow to all of the right places. Set up rules to automatically attach the right segments, labels, and notes — and you’ve instantly saved your team a lot of time and hassle.
Problem #3: Prompting Customers for Information They’ve Already Supplied on Another Channel
One sure-fire way for a business to annoy its customers is to ask the same questions multiple times. 78% of customers expect consistent interactions across a company’s departments. This requires your employees to know what’s already been asked before — and what the answer is.
The Solution:
Store customer data properly the first time and sync it across all tools so anyone on the team can access it at the right time, no matter what system they’re looking at.
Problem #4: Using Outdated Tools That Hold Back Your Team
Despite all of the excellent cloud-based systems on the market, not all teams benefit from these products. It’s all too easy for customer care departments to remain stuck with a tool that no longer serves them because change seems like a lot of hassle.
The Solution:
Take time to pause and look at all of your business’s core systems from a bird’s eye perspective. Ask yourself: What tools are you currently using? And, how do they fit together?
Problem #5: Burnout From Lack of Automation
If your customer service and success teams aren’t using automation tools, they’re most likely overworked. Quite simply, automation provides a solution to the tasks that no one likes to do.
Think manually sending the same emails several times a day, judging when to follow-up with customers, and searching for the right customer data to pass to a coworker.
The Solution:
Add automation to your customer service processes. To get you started, here are some of the best tools for customer service teams.