By
Jeremy Watkin
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Date Published: January 24, 2019 - Last Updated December 03, 2019
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Comments
When I was a customer service manager some of our team members employed a
practice I affectionately referred to as “fishing,” or perhaps it’s spelled
“phishing.” This, of course, could refer to anything from catching a salmon
to illegally catching someone’s credit card information. But in my context,
it was contact center agents casting a wide net by instant messaging
multiple supervisors and managers on duty for help with an issue.
When agents have an impatient customer on the other end of the line and
don’t know the answer, can you blame them for doing whatever they can to
take care of the customer? Still, it was annoying when I’d respond with an
answer that took a significant amount of my time to gather and they’d write
back saying, “Oh sorry, what’s her name already responded to me.” [Insert
eye roll]
While I’d argue that even with the existence of this fishing (or phishing)
practice, instant messenger was and still is an invaluable tool for support
teams, Slack has burst onto the scene in recent years to take contact
center communication to the next level. The beauty of Slack is that it has
merged features like instant messenger, group chats, and tons of apps and
integrations with other tools to tailor a communication platform to the
specific needs of your organization and contact center.
Using Slack Effectively
Even with the best of tools, it’s all about how you use it, and Slack is no
exception. A little over a year ago I surveyed my colleagues here at FCR to
understand how they use Slack. Since then I’ve had more time to think about
and observe Slack in our contact centers and think I can boil my findings
down into four recommendations.
1. Use channels with a purpose
While there’s a time and a place for one to one instant messaging, the
purpose of this communication should be clear. In a busy contact center
environment, chit chat, whether it’s standing around the water cooler or
chatting with others, can be a huge time suck that we can ill afford.
The most common use for Slack in contact centers is as an escalation
channel for frontline agents. The typical flow is that they face a question
from a customer that they can’t answer and take to Slack for help. Rather
than directly messaging (unless there actually is only one person who can
answer), I recommend posting the question to a channel — and it doesn’t
have to be the main channel.
Perhaps you set up channels specific to certain issue types. The beauty of
channels is that multiple people can monitor them, eliminating single
points of failure. As your operation scales, create a schedule of who’s
monitoring channels and at what times. That way everyone doesn’t have to
spend all day every day monitoring Slack.
Another tip is to keep the conversation about one issue from dominating the
feed by using the threads function within Slack. This keeps all of the
conversations about a particular issue organized and prevents multiple
people from answering the same questions.
2. Leverage self-help
We talk so much about self-help for our customers but let’s not forget the
importance of self-help for your agents. Slack can help with this. As I
spoke with our leaders at FCR, I found that many of them were focused on
never requiring agents to ask the same question more than once.
Here’s a totally free hack that many of our teams employ to turn Slack into
a robust self-help tool. Any time an agent asks a question, they edit the
post with the question to also include the answer to that question. The
searchability in Slack is quite robust so they instruct their agents,
before asking a question, to see if that question has already been
answered.
3. Collaborate
When I mentioned eliminating the kind of chit chat that can kill
productivity, the last thing I want to do is to squash the spirit of
collaboration. Slack can help foster this. Here are a few types of
collaboration that are made better in Slack:
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Surface trends- As teams scale, it’s challenging to keep a finger
on the pulse of what’s happening on the front lines. Perhaps your
engineers released code with a critical bug, or there was a piece
of news that went viral about your company or a variety of other
issues that can cause a spike in call volume. You want to know
about these things as quickly as possible and it will take a bit of
time for individual agents to recognize a trend. But if one agent
says, “Hey did anyone else experience this issue?” and other agents
confirm they have, you can determine if there’s a trend that needs
to be addressed.
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Bridge multiple locations- Whether you have multiple locations,
remote agents, or a team at an outsourcer, Slack can foster
collaboration between these groups. Yes, there’s sometimes no
substitute for face to face, in-person communication. But let’s
face it, even when you’re all together, you’re adding to the
average handle time of your agents if you ask them to put the
customer on hold and walk across the office to ask a question.
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Distribute information quickly and get feedback- Things are
constantly changing in contact centers and email can be an
inefficient means of sharing these updates. Slack does this better,
provided that agents are checking for updates regularly. To
increase the visibility of critical updates and get prompt
feedback, try pinning posts and also reading email updates each day
to make sure nothing is missed.
4. Gain efficiencies with integrations
In my last article
for ICMI, I spoke about some technology upgrades for contact centers and my
first recommendation was tighter integration between Slack and other
support tools. How many windows and applications do your agents need to
have open in order to do their job? 5? 10? 15? This can pose a huge
challenge for serving customers effectively and efficiently.
One of the brilliant things about Slack is that they have all sorts of
applications and integrations for tailoring the platform to your needs.
Besides the Giphy app (does your contact center like animated GIFs as much
as mine does), here are a few types that have helped our teams be
successful:
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Integrate your knowledge base so agents can not only search for
answers but they can also update and add content to improve your
customer-facing knowledge content.
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Integrate your ticketing system so agents can automatically
escalate tickets to Slack. This also allows others within your
organization to add notes to tickets without logging into the
ticketing system.
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Stream customer satisfaction survey results to a Slack channel for
a more consistent celebration of the wins and more effective action
in closing the loop on the negatives.
I know there are a ton more integrations out there and it’s probably
worthwhile to do a work study to see how often agents are navigating
between applications to see if there are efficiencies to be gained.
Bonus Tip: Join a Slack community
Finally, I have one bonus tip for you. If you’re looking to beef up your
contact center knowledge and network with other like-minded professionals,
Slack is proving to be an excellent platform for this. One community I gain
a ton of value from is CX Accelerator, first of all,
because it’s free, and secondly because it brings together hundreds of
professionals from a variety of industries and countries who are passionate
about customer experience. I know it’s been a rich source of learning and
growth for me.
Being someone who cut his teeth in the contact center on instant messaging,
I’m still learning about this whole Slack thing — and so far, I like what I
see. If you have best practices that you employ in your contact center,
please leave a comment or just Slack me. I’d love to chat more.