Every business strives to deliver a great customer experience, but how much room exists for improvement? Surprisingly, employees see more room for improvement in customer service capabilities than managers do.
This is one of the key findings in a new Forrester Consulting Thought Leadership Paper commissioned by Ricoh and titled: “The New Workplace Reality: Enterprises Must Capture the Soul and Spirit of the Emerging Worker.”
Managers surveyed thought their organisations communicated well with customers through old and new channels such as text and email by a factor of nearly three to one (43% to 17%), whereas customer-facing employees, those
on the frontline dealing with customers first-hand, felt this was far from the case.
Simultaneously, more than double the number of employees compared to their managers agreed that businesses have older systems that require the customer to communicate in ways that they don’t always want to. Both groups
however do agree in one core area – they have a strong internal programme to address multichannel communications – but aren’t fully there yet.
“Now is the perfect opportunity for every company to objectively re-evaluate the customer experience it’s delivering and the possibility of improving it,” says Richard Pinker, MD of Ricoh SA. “Customer service personnel can be
empowered with timely information, or not, which obviously affects customer service. The difference is found in systems and underlying information management processes.”
According to the study, customer-facing workers stated they need “smarter solutions” that improve information capture, analytics, process management and information access.
This assumes companies support these investments with the underlying document processes and systems. Customer-facing workers need “agile processes” that will enable them to handle exceptions more flexibly by having expert
guidance, quick communication with experts and the ability to start new case processes.
Why do customer-facing employees see more service shortcomings than their managers do? And how did this perception gap arise in the first place?
“The answer may be that these communication issues fall through the cracks,” the study states. “They do not result in exceptions, lost customers, or delayed orders – things that managers track – but they will degrade the customer
experience over time. Not closing these gaps through improved document and process support may result in inefficient workers, high employee turnover, declining competitiveness, and lost revenue.”
The disparity in the way employees and managers see customer-satisfaction capabilities builds on findings Ricoh announced last month from the same study. Nearly nine in 10 customer-facing employees (89%) – such as bank
clerks, call centre operators, nurses, bank managers and shop supervisors – said there’s a gap between the experience they can deliver and the experience the customer expects.
According to the study, customer-facing workers are obligated to use systems that require too much time on low-value tasks – time and energy that could be invested more directly in providing a richer customer experience. Still,
there’s hope for improvement.
“We beat the problem by mobilising valuable business information from capture through transformation and management so that customer-facing employees can quickly and completely address their customers’ needs,” says Pinker.
