Choose the Right Time Management
Tools for Better Customer Support
Every organization’s main aim is to increase efficiency and productivity in the workplace. For the company to function as a well-oiled machine, each department has a responsibility to get their work done in a timely and exemplary manner. That is where the use of time management tools can come in handy.
Within a business, departments may vary, but they all have one thing in common: a customer support team. A company’s ability to stay on top of their customer service can make or break the business. There are numerous reasons why they could fall behind, which, in turn, could ruin the entire workflow in the company. So what does a company do when there’s a lag in its customer support?
How can deficient agent productivity impact the company?
Despite the fact that each part of your company can function as its own separate entity, they all work to achieve one ultimate goal. The development team, the sales team, the creative team and the customer support team are meant to blend cohesively together to help the business take off. So when the customer support team becomes the broken link, the rest may also falter.
The hold-up in the support team can range from a corrupt internal organizational structure, to insufficient training, inadequate management, poor planning and a faulty communication system. This can have an adverse effect on everyone on the team. Work in the department will then become more chaotic, and stressful. Tensions will grow high, leaving room for conflict, low motivation, and eventually high turnover rates. On the long run, or even on the short run, it’s possible this can lead to things escalating and seeping into other departments, affecting both overall work productivity and morale.
How do you identify the cause of the issue with time management tools?
So how does a company discover what its pain points are? If you think about the concerns mentioned above, they all lead to one particular consequence: wasted time.
- When the internal structure is disorganized? A lot of time will be spent getting work done.
- When an agent is lacking in training? It will take him longer to find the right answers to simple questions.
- When there’s an issue in communication? Things will need to be done and re-done because of misunderstandings.
In a way, all roads lead to wasted time. As such, the most essential thing to do here is identify the cause of productivity problems through analyzing each agent’s work time. By learning who is wasting time, you can dive deeper into the issue and figure out what the causes are.
The first thing to do is switch your customer support team to using time tracking apps. While apps such as Clockify and Pomodoro are very popular these days for solo work, a big company needs a more structured system. A project management tool, such as Jira, would be much more ideal in this case.
Jira integrates with a range of plugins and add-ons that help facilitate every part of the work process for each department. It is the ultimate solution for a company with a wide development team. One of Jira’s best time tracking add-ons is Time in Status for Jira Cloud. With the help of this add-on, companies will be able to generate reports with:
- Time in status for Jira issues
- The duration specific agents have been assigned to issues
- Average time spent in each state
- Date of entry into a status
- Transition and status count
With this information, you can discover where the team is lagging behind and how to address the issues they are facing that prolong the work process and how long issues take to be resolved. This isn’t meant to be a process of blame or to pinpoint a culprit and call them out as a scapegoat. There’s a reason agents are struggling, and this is the perfect opportunity to find the ideal solution to this struggle.
What happens if you’re stretching your team too thin?
Finding the right solution for your pain points will ultimately depend on the problem your agents are struggling with. But one of the biggest issues could be that your agents are having a hard time handling the various queries coming in from different channels. This can cause them to spend too long switching between channels and might make it difficult to log down the queries they’re dealing with and the time they’re doing it in. The best solution to this particular struggle would be to have all the queries go to one place. Thankfully, with Jira integrations with Infosysta apps, there’s a perfect fix to improve your Jira project management.
Currently, there are the following integrations:
- Facebook Connector for Jira
- Twitter Connector for Jira
- WhatsApp Connector for Jira
- Microsoft Outlook for Jira
- Google to Jira — GTJ
With Infosysta’s Jira integrations, you can create Jira tickets right from your email, as well as receive messages and even tweets from different channels straight to your Jira workplace as tickets. This can be a great help to boost agent productivity and eliminate one of the customer support team’s struggles. It will also ensure that nothing gets lost and that all queries are handled as efficiently as possible.
Conclusion
The departments in a company are like domino pieces; if one of them falls, it will take the rest down with it. What’s the use of a good product with incredible marketing if its customer support team is failing to keep up? No matter where a customer is in their purchase journey, they will at one point or another need to deal with the customer support team. If that team takes too long to respond or does a bad job of it, this will reflect on the company as a whole. So, implementing a better system with the proper time management tools can increase agent productivity and help identify where the problems lie to work on fixing them.
