From Chaos to Order: Centralizing Workflows for Better Customer Experience

What is the most pressing issue when it comes to customer experience? Many answers could fit, but still, one of the underlying goals is to increase efficiency in customer service. 

That’s because — whether your ultimate mission is to improve loyalty, increase revenue, or beat your competition — inefficiencies will always be a problem. The smoother the internal processes, the better for your KPIs.

So what could be a way to that coveted level of efficiency? In our experience as a customer engagement platform, it has much to do with centralizing workflows.

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The nightmare of silos

Every business has felt it: data, insights, and interactions happening in different parts of the organization and nowhere to be found when it matters.

For example, 54 percent of organizations report their customer experience operations are managed in silos. You may have a social media team answering requests or posts from customers, another fielding calls and emails, and yet another checking what pages customers visit or what knowledge base articles they’re looking at.

Information that could have been in one place, now lives in disparate sources. And the result? First, information gets lost, or it takes a long time to locate. Tie that in with the tool overload that’s observed in many organizations — as Asana puts it: 

“Amid the race to stay connected across tools, workers switch between 10 apps 25 times per day.”

Additionally, only 33 percent of customer experience professionals say they can actively communicate and collaborate across teams to drive improved CX. Not very efficient. 

And the worst part is customers can tell.

Disparate workflows, unhappy customers

Efficiency in customer service is a means to improve KPIs, and agent experience is at the forefront. But the agent experience and the customer experience are intertwined. 

When an agent struggles to find the right information to give the customer, spending too much time toggling between apps, and still not being able to see the full customer profile, the customer themselves are affected. It’s no surprise that 58 percent of consumers feel that they’re in communication with separate departments across channels and not one company.

That’s why, when you’re trying to solve for efficiency, you need to keep both the back end and front end in mind. What processes should we automate to better serve our customers? Which types of technology can help our agents know more about the customer at first glance? 

It’s all about delivering on customer expectations without hassle on either side. It’s about making things more streamlined for customer service teams and effortless for customers.

Optimizing workflows in Acquire

A big part of technology should be unifying disparate data sources and processes into one easily accessible dashboard. Here’s what we mean:

Unify data sources and tools

Customer journeys produce data on different stages, and all of them combined provide useful insights on what your customers want and need, as well as how much you cater to these needs. 

But this data unavoidably lives in various platforms; your CRM, your social media, your live chat tools and more. What if there was a way to integrate — or in other words, centralize — all that data?

That’s what we’re trying with Acquire. Seamless integrations with CRMs and other platforms, along with a powerful business analytics stack, can help your teams have quick knowledge about important parts of customer experience. All tools you use for customer experience (live chat, chatbots, cobrowsing, video chat, and more) exist under the same platform — and data from them is collected there, too.

What does this mean for your agents specifically? For one, the team can know which customer they’re talking to, instantly. They know what they bought and when, which pages they visited, which support issues they’ve asked help for in the past, and which channels they prefer. And all that without tabbing between multiple platforms or wasting time hunting down vital information.

This has a huge impact on the quality of customer conversations — dry interactions asking customers to provide details become “I see you have this issue, let me walk you through a solution.” Customers then get a more personalized experience and (much) faster service.

Automate workflows

Customer service workflows should require as few clicks and steps as possible. And of course, allow for smoother collaboration between team members.

At Acquire, we create efficiency by automating routine tasks, such as FAQs with AI chatbots — and also let you set up correct routing so that the appropriate department or agent will get the right request. 

Your live chat app can propose answers and let you send knowledge base articles instantly. Via our platform, the chat window can be automatically populated with suggested help articles, without the agent having to search for them. This way, the knowledge base itself can become a great point of reference for customers and agents alike.

For your team, this means, first and foremost, better collaboration. The right team members get the right requests, so there’s no confusion or lost time to track the right person. The clicks are minimized and routine questions answered automatically.

And for customers? Well, they can go through quick and straightforward experiences — no more looking for contact email addresses, waiting on the phone for hours or anxiously posting on social media. They get the information they want faster and more easily.

Declutter the customer service process with context

The results may be the ones you want, but how do you get there? Organizational efficiency in customer service is about minimizing the number of steps, but also making sure the next step is always clear and facilitating communication.

For example, let’s say a customer has conversations over multiple channels with multiple agents. With an efficient customer experience platform, there’s always an easily accessible customer timeline with all interaction history. This means each agent knows what the previous agents have tried to help the customer — they don’t have to go over the same information or steps but instead find different solutions. They can also tag other more experienced agents to get further help.

Another benefit of a customer experience platform is that the customer might get the help they need, even before they reach any agent. Through self-service tools, customers can have their questions answered instantly. This means fewer requests will reach the team helping avoid overloads. And even if the customer does have to talk to the team, those same self-service tools can be powerful allies to the agent looking for solutions, and delivering them faster.

The platform that bridges the front- and back-end of customer service

Centralizing workflows is part of our philosophy. We built our product to help you make life easier for both your customers and for your agents behind the scenes. 

You have all the tools you need to deliver excellent customer experience under one roof and your team can collaborate from the same dashboard no matter the channel the customers are in. No data is lost, processes become smoother, and customers so much happier.

Nikoletta Bika

Senior Content Specialist

Nikoletta Bika is an experienced content marketer, writer, and editor, with degrees in business and people management. She writes about data, tech trends, AI, and more.