Employees before customers: Streamline teams for better customer experience

Friction between teams leads to bad customer experiences

Think of this - a customer raises a query and it gets assigned to a support agent. The agent isn’t sure of the answer and responds with “I’ll get back to you on this”. Meanwhile, the agent rushes to the sales team only to hear “Probably the tech team knows it”. You go to the tech team and what now, “product team knows it”. Keep in mind, all this doesn’t happen in a span of minutes. Everyone’s busy prioritizing their own problems and your DM can go unnoticed more often than you can imagine. A few hours (or maybe even days) later, you finally get the product team's attention only to be hit right across the face with “I don’t know, can you check with the sales team?”. Thus, begins a vicious cycle of the same game while the customer reads reviews for another product on G2.

‍

‍

Delayed responses is the main culprit

Hierarchies breed structure but the downside is the silo that’s created because of it. Working in silos has been the single most consequential problem since the industrial revolution, leading to unnecessary friction, delays in approvals, communications gaps, information leaks, dysfunctional teams, and inefficient processes. Larger teams are more susceptible to such hierarchical pitfalls and specially when it comes to customer support. Support or customer experience is a facet of business that survives on immediacy and urgency. Faster resolutions are the foundation of better customer relations and bad hierarchies are the leading causes of delays in responses and resolutions.

One query is assigned to an agent, which gets escalated to another if unresolved. This is escalated to another, and then another, until it loses significance or gets lost in a pile of “priority” tickets or unless it’s flagged as urgent which, unfortunately, cannot always be the case. These bottlenecks are the friction points within teams and this dysfunction is precisely what leads to a bad customer experience.

‍

Misinformation or inconsistent information

How different people and teams interpret or understand information can be different. This means everyone approaches the problem differently, solves it differently, and now you have inconsistent resolutions for the same query posted by the same customer. From a customer’s standpoint, this can be extremely frustrating, having multiple answers to the same question is arguably worse than having no answer at all. Silos and no proper coordination between teams can also lead to multiple communications, conflicts in updates made to the ticket, and discrepancies that should’ve been resolved amongst each other but instead reaches the customer, leading to frustration and extremely distasteful customer experience.

‍

Reduced accountability: Who’s really responsible?

When there are too many cooks, who really spoiled the soup? Is it no one or is it everyone? A game of finger-pointing brews in the atmosphere as no one really takes accountability for what's causing bad customer experiences. The numbers will be apparent, you might have countless meetings to discuss why you have an upward graph representing customer churn and revenue discussions will lead to stressful decisions, a lot of which will not favor the employees (layoffs, budget cuts, delayed appraisals, etc.). Blame culture is a termite for businesses and it will eat you from the inside before your customers realize what’s happening, only for everything to eventually come crashing down.

‍

‍

When your teams are overtly focused on internal conflicts, focus shifts inward instead of on customers or on the brand in general. Bad customer service becomes inevitable as no one is truly listening to what they want. When you’re not accountable for your actions anymore, the importance of your work is lost between “This is not my job” and “This is not my fault”.

‍

Fragmented customer journeys and multiple touchpoints

Have you ever been on a customer support call and it kept getting escalated to another agent who handles <insert your problem here>? Most of the call is a sad attempt to make waiting seem less painful with the most generic music playing in the background while you stare at your screen, watching the call time turn from seconds to minutes to hours. All you want to do is hang up but you don’t see any other option - either get through the call or write emails to inboxes that never get opened. It’s a joke really, how good customer service takes a back seat when teams don’t have their stuff figured out.

This fragmented approach to defining customer journeys is the problem that is born from teams that have too much friction between them. Each team handles a different part of a customer touchpoint which leads to 1) Customers having to connect with a different POC each time they need anything, 2) Varying levels of customer service depending on which team is handling them, 3) Repeact information being shared or customer having to recount their problems each time they get escalated or reassigned to another team, 4) Inconsistent answers from every time they connect with a different team, and 5) Prolonged wait time and resolution time from multiple touchpoints across the customer experience journey.

Eliminating friction, bottlenecks, silos, and doubt

A natural response to these problems is to implement strategies that promote transparency, flexibility, and consistency, easing the friction between teams by reducing touchpoints and streamlining functions.

‍

Communicate more, it’s not very hard

The very first step to transparency is communication. Every customer-facing team should be aware of what’s going on wrt customers and have a common dashboard to view and add updates. Mandate ticket collaborations for teams to always know which ticket has reached where and what the customer needs now. Even when escalating tickets to a different team or asking teams for answers - everyone’s role and department should be critically defined so there’s absolutely no room or mismanagement or information leaks.

Have regular meetings to discuss irregularities if any. Create a culture of open-sharing and make your employees feel comfortable enough to be upfront about the problems they face and the problems they see in management in general. This will uncover problems from the roundup, helping you understand what the real problems are that lead to silos. The thing about silos is that it can stem from the bottom just as much as it can stem from the top. Constant focus should be on assuring and then reassuring that everyone, across teams and functions, is always aligned on who needs to do what, when, and how.

‍

Seamless tradeoffs to improve resolution time

A lot of, not just time, but also information gets lost in communication between teams. Sometimes, it so even happens that an issue is completely misunderstood by the time it crosses 3 different teams working on 3 different problems; a classic case of Chinese whisper. This is where the friction is loudest. Loud enough for even your customers to hear it. Your focus should be on eliminating these points altogether to make sure it never happens.

How one team transfers or talks to another team should be as simple as possible but also contextual. There should be a provision for teams to communicate via a common platform where one employee can summarize the details of a problem and post it for the next person or team responsible to solve and tag it as quickly as possible. Transparent communication means a visible platform that draws all eyes to the teams responsible.

‍

Minimize customer touchpoints

Another big factor leading to bad customer experience is having too many touchpoints and POCs for customers. This is a problem. A perfect way to manage this is by appointing customer success managers for each account and only having them as POCs for their entire relationship with the company. Encourage these customers to only talk to their assigned CSMs and not anyone else. These CSMs will be responsible for solving all their concerns without them having to interact with anyone else. The CSM should be aware of teams and assign the right personnel to solve a concern i.e. a payment-related concern needs to be discussed with sales whereas a feature-related issue needs to be discussed with tech or product. Eventually, the solved concern should be communicated by the CSM and no one else. Only under critical or urgent circumstances should multiple POCs be assigned to a customer for possibly faster resolutions.

‍

Define responsibilities and encourage collaboration

Everyone should know exactly what they should know. Every customer-facing team member should be aware of what problems are they supposed to address and take complete responsibility for them. Any problems that occur in the entire customer journey will then be able to be linked to the one responsible, eventually affecting their KPIs. This way, accountability is maintained and everyone is expected to own up to whatever they are responsible for. The team automatically becomes more careful in carrying out their responsibilities as expected.

An environment of accountability also promotes better collaboration as everyone knows what they have to do. People help more easily and understand their part in the grand scheme of how the company functions.

‍

Review and repeat

Once all the processes are in place they should be reviewed constantly to identify further scope for improvement or even existing problems in the process that might not have been realized before. This review system can be a feedback loop where each member gets a say in what’s working and what’s not. This has the potential to become a core part of company culture where everyone is encouraged to review their own work and the work of the team as a whole. A constant cycle of reviewing and improving how you work will further refine and streamline the process, improving customer experience.

Or, just introduce Threado AI

Automating chat support

Threado AI enables businesses to build AI agents that can understand the intent behind customer queries and break them down into action items - search through hundreds of documentation and give instant answers or perform actions like calling an API to cancel a plan or extend a trial. Threado AI contextualizes customer queries and provides answers that are precise, without fuss or fluff.

‍

‍

Immediate assistance 24/7

Be it customers or your customer-facing teams, Threado AI offers immediate assistance 24/7 across platforms and channels for convenient access and faster support. Teams can resolve 5X more queries in the same amount of time across - Slack, Microsoft Teams, or on the Web with a Chrome app. Get reliable and instant answers anywhere and anytime you want.

‍

‍

Unified data platform

Threado AI makes it super easy to connect all of the company sources - knowledge bases, CRMs, ticketing platforms, and more. A single source of truth for your teams and customers, available wherever you need it.

We support integration with Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot, Freshdesk, Salesforce, Google Drive, Confluence, Notion, and Slack. Threado AI understands not just help docs but also the conversations through tickets, conversations, and internal docs to answer contextual queries such as customer information related to accounts, help support agents resolve complex concerns, and onboard new customers faster without the hassle of tutorials and videos.

Changing with time

Crafting great customer experiences begins with better team dynamics. And in this new age of AI, it’s become staggeringly easier for teams to work better together. Threado AI as an internal tool lets you connect all your data sources including integrations with tools like Zendesk, Intercom, HubSpot, etc., into a single source of truth. Set it up as a chatbot on your website, within Slack channels, or as a Chrome extension. It makes it very easy to access information wherever it’s convenient for you and maintains transparency as all questions asked by you can be seen by the rest of the team on the platform or on Threado AI’s dashboard as well.

‍