Masters of Moment

Where the shortage of skilled workers – your customer service professionals – and the demanding customer meet each other, the cohesion and the smooth interaction of individual team members plays a dominant role.

As business manager or owner, it’s up to you to decide how to best utilize the resources you have available. Good resource management can enable a business to excel in its domain. Some of the benefits of managing resources efficiently include: Lesser workplace conflicts lower overhead costs, better profits, improved quality in products and services and greater productivity.

How can you as the manager support the productivity of each team member, the team as a whole, ensure long-term success and the mental well-being of each individual as well as master team spirit? What steps can you take to help your customer service professionals to manage their workloads?

• Use clear classifications: Applying clear classifications to certain tasks makes it easier for employees to decide which ones to address immediately and which ones to delay, while other objectives take priority. How you classify does not matter (colors, numbers etc.), but a digital solution will help you introduce a clear system which will make it easier for people to manage their workload and feel confident they’re focusing their energies where they’re most needed.
• Link tasks to their value: Allocating tasks a certain value, based on the benefit the business will gain from them being completed will help finishing them as quickly as possible compared to tasks which have a lower immediate value. For example, collecting more reviews for your business will increase your visibility online, increase customer traffic and therefore your turnover.
• Train for flexibility: As fast as life in general changes, business changes. New targets and customer expectations emerge all the time and something that was a major priority yesterday might not be so urgent today. Flexibility and adaptability are extremely valuable characteristics that allow your team members to shift focus between different tasks when they need to. The requirement is that they are trained to know when one task takes precedence over another.
• Eliminate distractions: You as a manager need to act as a shield for distractions, so your team can focus on completing urgent or important tasks. Proven as effective is to structure your team in a way that minimizes distractions for certain individuals. By assigning certain tasks to individuals of your team, those can focus on exactly those tasks.
• Have regular feedbacks: Employees who are left to manage and complete heavy workloads on their own can soon feel left alone, unsupported and in the worst case highly stressed. Arrange regular feedbacks with team single members or within the team to discuss how they’re getting on with their work, if they have any questions and if there’s anything you can do to help them. Already the fact that there is an opportunity to talk makes your employees feel reassured and comfortable
• Be realistic: Placing too much stress or too high expectations on your employees is counterproductive. Stay fair and realistic about what they can achieve in a given timeframe. Sometimes you simply have to accept that there are situations when certain tasks have to be abandoned or postponed.

“Especially in these times when good employees are hard to find it is even more important to support and reassure them in order to avoid any fluctuation. The management of priorities is essential to reach your objectives and guarantee the success of a project or your business. As a manager, your sole responsibility should be helping your team work efficiently to manage the heavy workload the todays’ customer service comes with. You have to be flexible, adaptable, reasonable and communicate. Delegating is by far not enough. You need to develop a tracking system to evaluate how well the work is being conducted. Digitalization can help you even with only 2 team members to track, assign and evaluate your daily, weekly and monthly tasks. With the right system you can also asses or reassess certain roles within your team by analyzing single workloads, scope of tasks or meeting deadlines.” Markus Demirci, founder and CEO of mPocket.

Do you know already how to manage your team to get it to their highest productivity or do you want to learn more about supporting your customer service professionals in fulfilling their tasks?

Missed the live talk between Markus and Alan from Freshworks “How to prioritize tasks and improve productivity?” on 18.05.2022 6 p.m. GTM? Watch the recording.

Like what you’re reading? Sign up to our newsletter and be the first to hear about the latest on news about automation and digitization in customer service, retail and gastronomy. If you want to know more about automating your customer service or to get your sales team to a higher level of productivity, check our website contact us directly at hallo@mpocket.io.

*For reasons of better legibility only the simultaneous use of male and female language forms is not used. All personal names apply to both genders.

Stay up to date!