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One of the biggest expenses businesses have is customer service. In order to keep customers satisfied, they need to make an active effort to listen to them. This means hiring a team of dedicated personnel that can help tackle any existing or potential problem a customer can encounter.

Some companies employ hundreds of people for the sole purpose of customer satisfaction.

Most small and medium-sized businesses, however, can’t afford to have hundreds of employees on staff. These companies need to not only work harder to meet demands, they also have to find ways to save time. Using the most advanced technology doesn’t just save time, it helps improve efficiency, leading to more satisfied customers.

How Time Affects Money

You’ve probably heard the saying “time is money” at least once in your life. The reason this phrase is so common is because it is very true. The more time you save, the less money you have to spend. You also have more time to earn money. This is why finding ways to improve the efficiency of your customer service department should always be a priority.

• Making more time for customer service representatives means:
• Being able to take care of more customers.
• Solving customer issues faster, reducing call time.
• Improving overall customer satisfaction by streamlining the experience.
• Needing less staff members to handle customer inquiries.

All of these benefits affect your bottom line. For example, if less labor is needed to handle your customer inquiries, you don’t need to have as many representatives on staff, cutting labor costs. If you are improving customer satisfaction by handling inquiries quickly, you are encouraging people to continue their business with you.

Encouraging Multitasking

One of the easiest ways to improve efficiency in the workplace is to encourage multitasking. Unfortunately, you need to be careful how you tell your employees that they need to do more. You can’t expect them to double their workload without making changes to the way you run your department.

While getting twice as much done in a day may sound impossible, it can be easy if you have the right tools available to you. Investing in a multi channel help desk can be a great way to help employees improve their organization and handle more inquiries at the same time.

By showing them how to use a cloud-based help desk and setting up notifications, you are encouraging them to find ways to multitask around the office. For example, they could work on filing, stop when they hear an alert, help the customer and then resume filing. This means they don’t have to stay close to their desk or be on the phone their entire shift, allowing them to take on more work.

Multitasking Doesn’t Stop in the Office

Your employees might already be multitasking when they perform customer service. Most modern businesses have multiple ways to be contacted, and a service representative needs to check all of these outlets several times per day. The most common customer service channels include email, phone and social media; although, companies are experimenting with new ways to communicate with their customers every day.

Companies work to streamline this process in several different ways. Some hire dedicated employees to answer customer inquiries in each channel. This is great if you have a lot of people in your customer service department, but many companies are trying to downsize.

Help desk software allows you to hire team members that specialize in different areas of customer service, rather than assigning one person to each channel. This is because it gathers all the customer inquiries in one place. Algorithms allow you to automatically send inquiries where they need to go. For example, a customer trying to make a purchase would automatically get sent to the sales department, rather than an agent with a general company knowledge.

Investing in Efficiency Isn’t as Expensive as You Think

Most small to medium-sized companies try to do things the old fashioned way for as long as possible because they think that change costs too much. Because technology is constantly changing and evolving, the cost of efficiency is actually decreasing. In the past, help desk software could cost thousands of dollars for the license, plus money to install it on every employee’s computer, and money to train the employees how to use it.

Modern help desk software isn’t locally based, its cloud based. This means that it is cheaper for the companies to grant you access to the software and it can be accessed from any device. Because distribution is cheaper, access is also cheaper. In fact, some of the best cloud-based customer service software can cost you less than $30 per person.

Your representatives will also appreciate how straightforward most new software is. Companies know the importance of being direct and lowering the learning curve of software. By having all of the features your representatives need readily available, they can often start using the software with little or no training. This makes it easy to start being efficient as soon as possible.

Efficiency is the Key to Saving Money

The more you improve your customer service department, the more money you can save as a company. You’ll be able to improve sales by quickly taking care of each customer inquiry. By getting organized and making efficiency your primary focus, you can save money on operations costs. To learn more about multi channel help desk software and the effect it can have on your business, please contact us today.