{"id":2150,"date":"2016-07-08T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-07-08T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/dynamics-365\/blog\/2016\/07\/08\/10-tips-to-empower-customer-service-agents\/"},"modified":"2023-05-31T17:02:29","modified_gmt":"2023-06-01T00:02:29","slug":"10-tips-to-empower-customer-service-agents","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/dynamics-365\/blog\/business-leader\/2016\/07\/08\/10-tips-to-empower-customer-service-agents\/","title":{"rendered":"10 Tips to Empower Customer Service Agents"},"content":{"rendered":"
With customer service and customer experience beginning to overtake price and product as brand differentiators, big investments have been made over the past few years in empowering customers with more ways to engage, provide feedback and share their experiences.<\/p>\n
Yet, most employees are trying to engage the empowered customer with the same siloed technologies and stagnant knowledge repositories they\u2019ve used (or not used) for years. This is creating a customer service and customer experience divide that will further separate leaders from laggards as we head into the future.<\/p>\n
Consider these statistics: 72% of consumers<\/span><\/span><\/a> expect a customer service agent to know their contact information, product information and service history as soon as they engage with a brand for assisted service; 90% of consumers say they expect consistency and continuity from a brand across channels.<\/p>\n Yet, according to Forrester Research<\/span><\/span><\/a>, only 36% of contact centers have implemented multichannel integration to provide consistent experiences; 70% do not train agents to support multiple channels, and 56% do not offer an agent-facing knowledge management solution. In addition, a third of Gen Y workers say their at home technology is better than what they have at work.<\/p>\n Microsoft recently worked with Nucleus Research to develop a customer service maturity guidebook with one of the pillars focusing on agent empowerment. Nucleus interviewed approximately 40 brands (also Microsoft customers) to determine the characteristics of customer service organizations at three distinct stages of maturity: functional, tactical and dynamic which represents the most advanced or mature organizations).<\/p>\n Nucleus found that companies with advanced customer service maturity leverage technology and organizational structure for agent empowerment, \u201cboth by delivering predictive and prescriptive advice to agents within the application and streamlining escalation paths.<\/p>\n \u201cThis reduces resolution time, but also enables companies to do more with their agents (like enable them to identify cross-selling and upselling opportunities),\u201d notes analyst Rebecca Wettemann, who identified primary benefits as increased agent productivity, accelerated time to productivity and reduced agent churn.<\/p>\n 10 Tips to Empower Customer Service Agents<\/b><\/p>\n For all organizations striving to empower their agents and move ahead in terms of customer service maturity (and who isn\u2019t?), here are ten tips that have proven successful for our customers as they advanced through to the functional, tactical and dynamic stages of maturity:<\/p>\n ———<\/p>\n Check out the characteristics of each stage of customer service maturity, metrics-based customer success stories, along with insights and advice from Nucleus Research on how to incrementally improve in customer service, in this new guidebook report: <\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n With customer service and customer experience beginning to overtake price and product as brand differentiators, big investments have been made over the past few years in empowering customers with more…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247,"featured_media":2152,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ms_queue_id":[],"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","_classifai_text_to_speech_error":"","footnotes":""},"post_tag":[],"product":[4713],"content-type":[18],"topic":[7608],"audience-type":[],"audience":[4684],"ms-author":[],"coauthors":[1717],"class_list":["post-2150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","product-dynamics-365-sales","content-type-thought-leadership","topic-collaboration","audience-business-leader","review-flag-1593580425-950","review-flag-and-o-1593580421-190","review-flag-forre-1680212567-456","review-flag-lever-1593580262-871","review-flag-new-1593580245-522"],"yoast_head":"\n\n
\nreasonable compensation boundaries. <\/b>Empower agents to solve more complex or escalated issues or to be able to offer some type of compensation to upset customers without waiting for approval.<\/li>\nGet the Report<\/strong><\/h3>\n
<\/a><\/h3>\n