Much has been said about the decline of customer service, but it's especially unfortunate when customer-facing employees desperately want to please - yet can't.
This appears to be the case for nearly 9 in 10 (89 percent) of customer-facing employees - e.g., bank clerks, call center operators, nurses, bank managers and shop supervisors - who in a new Thought Leadership Paper1 commissioned by Ricoh Company, Ltd., and conducted byForrester Consulting, said there's a gap between the experience they can deliver and the experience the customer expects.
"We intuitively understood that less-than-optimal customer service experiences are often traceable to inferior business information workflows," said Yoshi Sasaki, General Manager, Business Services Center, Business Solutions Group, Ricoh Company, Ltd. "In many cases, customer-facing employees are simply too preoccupied trying to find the right information and hampered by working with outdated systems to deliver a personalized, human-to-human experience. We wanted to investigate the problem, and measure it, to help organizations better define and improve their customer service strategies."
The research found that customer-facing employees, who constitute more than half of the workforce, are critical for companies fighting to emerge from the recession. Unfortunately, gaps in supporting document processes waste time that could be spent personalizing the customer experience - a failure that imposes a significant opportunity cost on business.
In fact, nearly 1 in 4 managers (23 percent) said poor document services support was a major limitation slowing the effectiveness of customer-facing employees in their organizations. More than 1 in 4 managers (26 percent) cited poor information access as a major limitation.
Companies that invest in collaboration, instant messaging, mobile solutions and flexible workplaces make customer-facing workers more efficient and free up more time for them to provide the missing personalized service, according to the study. This assumes companies support these investments with the underlying document processes and systems required to maximize these types of technology. A Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper Commissioned By Ricoh, The New Workplace Reality: Enterprises Must Capture The Soul And Spirit Of The Emerging Worker , December 2013
But today, many workers are spending too much time on mundane tasks such as data entry and have trouble with a wide range of activities, including finding facts quickly, creating documents, editing, writing, processing information, solving complex exceptions, and leveraging mobile solutions, according to the study. "As a result, they are not actively engaged with their customers," it states.
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