The team sets the standard of the service

Throughout this series I have been arguing with a view held by many large service organisations: that AI belongs beside the employee, and that an employee should stay on every customer request. I have disagreed with most of what follows from that view. On one point, though, I agree with them completely. People matter more in customer service as AI gets better.

Where I differ is on what the team’s day should consist of.

Share of the team’s day, an example

Today

With oHallo

Finding information and typing replies. Today 62 per cent of the day, with oHallo 8 per cent.

Writing the operating procedures. Today 6 per cent of the day, with oHallo 22 per cent.

Supervising requests and taking them over. Today 4 per cent of the day, with oHallo 24 per cent.

Approving what the organisation keeps for a person. Today 8 per cent of the day, with oHallo 18 per cent.

Handling the requests that need a person. Today 20 per cent of the day, with oHallo 28 per cent.

The proportions show the shift in the team’s day rather than measure an operation.

Much of a service day goes on the systems

Ask anyone who has worked in customer service where their time goes, and a large part of the answer is finding things. They find the customer, then the contract, then the invoice and then the rule that applies to this particular case. Only after that can they write the reply and log what they did.

The organisations I am arguing with see this clearly, and it is why they want AI to take the searching off their team’s hands. I think it goes further. When oHallo resolves the request itself, the searching disappears along with the request, and the time it used to take goes back to the team.

The team writes how the work is done

The most important work in a customer operation that runs on oHallo is deciding how the work should be done. When can a payment date be moved, and by how much? What has to be checked before an account is transferred to a surviving partner? Which refunds can be made at once, and which should wait for a person to approve them? Those are the organisation’s operating procedures, and oHallo follows them in every request, on every channel, at every hour.

In my view, the people best placed to write them are the employees who have been answering the customers. They know where the old rules were unclear, which cases kept coming back and what customers actually ask.

The team watches, takes over and approves

oHallo works in the open. The team can see the requests being handled as they happen and step into any of them. Some actions the organisation will always want a person to approve, and oHallo waits for that approval before it goes ahead. Some customers need a person from the first minute, and they are passed to an employee straight away with everything already gathered.

This is different work from answering the queue, and in my view it is the work that decides how good the service is.

Every exception teaches oHallo something

When an employee resolves something oHallo could not, oHallo works out what was missing and proposes a change, to the knowledge it draws on or to the procedures it follows. The team decides whether the change is right. Over time the exceptions that used to reach an employee become requests oHallo can resolve, and what the team knows is applied to every customer, on every channel, at every hour.

I find this the most encouraging part of the whole shift. What an experienced employee knows has always been hard to share with the rest of the team. Now it can be written down once, and every customer benefits from it.

The calls where a person changes the outcome

The rest of the team’s time goes to the requests where a person makes the difference. They include the customer who has lost someone and the customer who disputes a bill because money is tight. They include the complaint that has already gone wrong twice and the customer who is about to leave, and who would stay if someone took the time to understand why.

Many people in our field argue that customer service should be seen as a driver of growth and loyalty, and I agree with them. I think it becomes one when the team has time for exactly these customers.

People matter most when they have time for the customers who need them

So I think the organisations that say people matter more are right. I would only add that their employees matter most when they have time for the customers who need them. An organisation that gets there has a team that sets the standard of its service, and customers who reach that team when it counts.