Masters of Moment

The experience your potential customers make when first interacting with you, your brand, your shop or any of your customer service professionals decides not only if they will make the purchase, but also determines if they become long term customer and recommend you to others. To deliver an outstanding customer experience you need to deliver a high-quality product and service timely and solve problems quickly and accurately. But above all you need to put the customer at the center of all interactions to keep them coming back. Skills like empathy, active listening, communication and adaptability are just a few out of those a todays’ customer service professional must have. Without setting priorities to your daily work, these skills are not used effectively.

How can you prioritize tasks when everything is important?

During your opening hours tasks are often prioritized according to the needs of others – usually your customers – or according to deadlines. This procedure can turn out to be just busy instead of spending limited time on tasks that are actually important.

Prioritizing your tasks intentionally and according to future goals ensures that every task drives value and unimportant tasks are not overflooding your to-dos.

Thoughtful prioritization usually contains an evaluation of your tasks and allocating the time and effort to bring the most value in a short amount of time. It should be flexible, as you may need to interrupt low-priority tasks for urgent must-dos.

Strategies for prioritizing your tasks to keep your customers happy and to let your customer service professionals work as efficient as possible could be:

• Have a list that contains all tasks at one place: First you need to understand the full scope of what needs to get done, even the easiest tasks should be considered. In the next step you can prioritize them according to the importance, urgency, length, and reward of each task. Having such a list in digital form which all of your team members can access anytime from anywhere will increase the overall overview and productivity.
• Understand and identify your goals: While prioritization might appear at first sight like a time management measurement, it is in fact key for achieving long-term goals. Seeing the big picture and understanding in your team what you are really working towards will help you prioritize tasks.
• Highlight urgency and prioritize based on importance: Full visibility of deadlines, even when they are not formally required, helps you identify urgent tasks and reduce procrastination. Additional categorizing of your tasks by importance helps you identify the must-dos.
• Avoid distractions: Keep intentionally away from competing tasks, especially when their difficulty increases.
• Consider effort: When your task list is becoming too long, prioritize according to effort, delegate to your team members and push through those easier tasks more quickly.

“It’s important to be realistic in setting goals for you and your team and in prioritizing tasks. Otherwise, you’ll create false expectations first for yourself and also for your whole team. You will all constantly feel as if you’re falling behind and like you can never reach your goals.
The purpose of prioritization is to spend time working on the important tasks. Important tasks are those that will make a difference in the long run and bring you and your team in the right direction. You as a team will feel much more focused and intentional and the busyness you experienced until now will turn into productivity. You will actually complete your work and see some true progress. Digitalization and automation serve as your assistant when it comes to listing tasks, prioritizing them, setting and reminding of deadlines and analyzing progress and reevaluating these tasks again. Personal strengths of every singles person in your team must of course be considered as well in the whole equation. One might be better and therefore faster in a more difficult task, but others are more familiar with repetitive ones. There you need to consider each one’s effort.” Markus Demirci, founder and CEO of mPocket.

Do you want to learn more about prioritizing tasks in your daily work to achieve your weekly, monthly and yearly goals easier? Do you know already how much impact digitalization and automation can have even on simple, repeating tasks?

Join the Livetalk between Markus and Alan from Freshworks “How to prioritize tasks and improve productivity?” on 18.05.2022 6 p.m.

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*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.

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