Don't panic. Good advice, but when business leaders are facing a severe global economic crisis, it's not a particularly easy direction to follow.
With economic indicators well below expectations, companies like Amazon, FedEx and Meta are in the position of tightening their belts. However, the crisis creates opportunities. Now is the time to invest in improving employee productivity and operational efficiency, working to eliminate redundancies and optimize workflows.
For customer service leaders, one of the best ways to reduce expenses without sacrificing experience quality is to expand automation initiatives and empower customers to help themselves and others. They can also invest in improving the agent experience to make problem resolution easier and more effective.
Invest in tools as much as in employees
Many leaders are tempted to go into crisis mode at the first sign of a downturn, and one of the most effective ways to cut costs is to stop hiring and downsize. But judicious investment in technology can help you maintain the status quo and even support growth. It’s not uncommon for service teams to feel challenged at times when they can’t scale resources.
Unity , a development platform that enables creators to produce interactive 3D content in real time, grew rapidly between 2019 and 2020. But as the company expanded, so did the volume of tickets. With a 56% increase in new requests, the company needed to find ways to scale support services without adding more employees.
David Schroeder, Senior Service Support Manager at Unity Technologies, implemented Zendesk automations and self-service options to create time-saving workflows for the entire support team.
“Zendesk solutions allowed us to quickly recognize a large increase in ticket volume, identify the cause, and create steps to mitigate the issue,” Schroeder explained. “Without Zendesk, our support team would have collapsed.”
Instead, Schroeder and his team saw a big comeback. “Last year, about 8,000 tickets went to self-service, a savings of $1.3 million,” the executive said.
Founded in 2015, Veyo provides ride-sharing for patients in non-emergency situations. It makes more than 35,000 trips a day for Medicaid and Medicare users in the United States.
The logistics of managing driver, customer, partner, and healthcare provider data for Veyo’s non-emergency patient transportation (NEMT) was difficult. With so many data sources, agents would struggle to manage multiple tickets associated with a single trip.
As the company began to grow, it hired Zendesk to streamline its tickets, allowing agents to automate email responses and ensure sensitive information was consolidated in one secure, centralized location.
“With Zendesk, we’ve been able to reduce about $450,000 a year in additional employee costs and outperform the industry average in customer satisfaction (CSAT) by 5%,” said Allison Hill, COO of Zendesk Veyo Command Center.
The new digital workflow india phone numbers list saves nearly 2,000 hours a year for Veyo and its customers. With this improved efficiency, agents can quickly view the history of a ticket, reducing wasted time, resources, and duplicate work.
Prioritize spending for efficiency
If Artificial Intelligence (AI) isn’t already part of your service offering, adding it can help reduce operational costs by eliminating redundant, low-value tasks for agents. These new, time-saving workflows can repurpose incoming interactions without requiring investment in additional tools, training, or staff. In customer service, AI serves three main functions well: automating tasks, recommending content, and predicting what customers might need next.
Another way to reduce costs and support your agents is to ensure they don’t work in silos. In addition to the support platform, connecting agents to other vital teams through collaboration tools allows them to easily interact and quickly get the answers they need to resolve requests.
This is also a good time to audit your FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) and develop a solid knowl