Customer service collaboration: Teamwork makes the dream work

The days where contact centers were mainly confined to four room walls with customer service agents working in cubicles, side by side and in rows, may soon be gone. Gartner predicts that by 2024, 30% of organizations will have moved their contact centers’ operations off-premises, with a 60% jump in all agents working from home.

Remote contact centers are more than just a pandemic-era trend; they’re here to stay. How can organizations make sure their customer service teams remain motivated and effective in this digital environment?

As it turns out, teamwork produces stellar customer service. Here’s why customer service collaboration is becoming a priority for many companies.

All together now: Customer service collaboration

Wherever there’s a challenge, there’s also an opportunity. With more and more customer service agents working remotely, organizations have been forced to find new ways to enable effective online communication and collaboration across teams.

At the same time, this has allowed companies to experience the real value of teamwork. By fostering collaborative customer service, they’re realizing a number of benefits, including:

1. Increased agent productivity
2. Higher agent motivation
3. Lower agent attrition rate
4. Reduced time to resolution
5. Increased customer satisfaction and lifetime value

Better together: Collaboration streamlines service

Within an organization, customer service agents have different sets of expertise, skills, experience, and knowledge. Each has their own talents. By working together, they can share their knowledge and combine their skills to solve customer issues faster.

Resolution times can be boosted even more by bringing in experts from outside the customer service team, if needed. This is also known as “ticket swarming,” a team-based approach where you bring in the right experts to help resolve complex customer issues, instead of creating an escalation queue.

New collaboration applications and tools help organizations connect their customer service management solution to these platforms.

The result: Increased customer service efficiency since agents don’t need to toggle between applications – fewer clicks. For example, they can easily assign a ticket to a shared workspace, where teams can collaborate in real time via chat – or even meet or call.

Collaboration tools are taking off as companies shift to a long-term hybrid work models, according to Gartner. A survey in August 2021 revealed a 44% rise in workers’ use of collaboration tools since 2019, Gartner found.

Knowledge is power

Knowledge management is another way to drive customer service collaboration. The knowledge base is a central repository of content that organizations can use to provide both agents and customers with timely access to contextual and relevant product information.

With knowledge management, businesses can streamline content collection, and leverage insights from analytics tools to continuously improve the content in the knowledge base. Think FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and articles.

Now imagine if you could empower your teams to contribute to that knowledge collaboratively, creating a rich content database that you could extend and scale across the organization.

The knowledge base becomes a platform not only to access knowledge, but to share knowledge, leading to better service outcomes and more motivated agents.

The future of service is collaborative

With customer service and contact centers going through a major transformation over the past two years, we might be already experiencing the future of customer service.

Not only has customer service shifted to a digital-first model, but it’s playing an even more critical role within all organizations to protect the brand and build loyalty. By fostering collaboration, businesses can deliver the stellar service that outshines the competition and drives growth.