Almost nine in 10 customer-facing employees (89%) want to please customers – yet they cannot.
This is according to research commissioned by Ricoh and conducted by Forrester Consulting, which reveals a gap between customer expectations and what employees are able to deliver.
“The upshot is that in many cases poorer service is the result of inferior business information workflows,” says Richard Pinker, MD of Ricoh SA. “Employees are left trying to find the right information to help customers instead of actually helping them because the systems at their disposal are outdated.”
The research found that customer-facing employees, who constitute more than half of the workforce, are critical for companies fighting to emerge from the recession. Unfortunately, gaps in supporting document processes waste time that could be spent personalising the customer experience – a failure that imposes a significant opportunity cost on business.
In fact, nearly one in four managers (23%) said poor document services support was a major limitation slowing the effectiveness of customer-facing employees in their organisations. More than a quarter managers (26%) cited poor information access as a major limitation.
Companies that invest in collaboration, instant messaging, mobile solutions and flexible workplaces make customer-facing workers more efficient and free up more time for them to provide the missing personalised service, according to the study. This assumes companies support these investments with the underlying document processes and systems required to maximise these types of technology.
Many workers today spend too much time on mundane tasks such as data entry and have trouble with a wide range of activities, including finding facts quickly, creating documents, editing, writing, processing information, solving complex exceptions, and leveraging mobile solutions, according to the study.
“As a result, they are not actively engaged with their customers,” it states. “It is by supporting these employees through improved document and process support that organisations will be in a stronger competitive and revenue-driving position.”
At the heart of the problem is outdated technology that is often inferior to that used by the customers on the other end of the interaction.
More than one-third of managers (36%) say their organisations struggle to have the newest technologies, and more than one in four managers (27%) says there’s a growing gap between their customers’ use of technology and what their customer-facing workers are equipped with. Not surprisingly, information access suffers.
This research, detailed in a study called: The New Workplace Reality: Enterprises Must Capture the Soul and Spirit of the Emerging Worker, is based on an online survey by Forrester of 250 global customer service strategy and operations decision-makers, as well as customer-facing individual contributors, between March 2013 and May 2013.