Improving customer service agent productivity

Customer service agent productivity tells how much work is done within a specific time frame. For example, if the agents are spending 5 hours of their 8-hour work day on serving customers (i.e. closing customer cases) and 3 hours on administrative or background work, their productivity is only 62,5%. By decreasing the time spent on administrative tasks and increasing the time spent on customer work, you can make sure that the agents use their time efficiently.

These tips will help you ensure that you take advantage of all the benefits that Salesforce Service Cloud and Service Console offer in order to improve agent productivity.

Automate tasks with macros

Repeating similar tasks over and over again can be very frustrating and time-consuming for the service agents. Salesforce Macros are automated actions that perform multiple tasks with one click and thus help agents to minimise repetitive tasks and click patterns resulting in better customer service agent productivity.

In addition to speeding up work, macros help improve the data quality. Similar cases can be closed with the same macro, meaning that the cases are closed with the same data entries. Good quality data ease reporting and provides transparency.

Provide everything in one view

Ensure the service agents have access to everything they need about the customer and the case in one view. With Service Console, you can, e.g. have Salesforce Knowledge articles as well as customer’s contact details directly in the same view.

However, try to keep the service console minimalistic and show only what is truly useful for the agent. No need for clutter here.

Consider Salesforce Flow for Service

If you have a complicated multiple-step process, e.g. to verify the customer’s identity, you can consider implementing Salesforce Flow for Service. Salesforce Flow for Service is sort of a “path” for an agent that they can follow. It helps the agents to ask the right and relevant questions from the customer without missing an important step.

Many times following the process is important as mistakes could delay the case closing as the agent needs to spend more time filling in the forgotten information.

Provide fast access to information

Why invent the wheel again when you can find the solution directly from a shared knowledge base? Service Cloud’s knowledge articles are not useful only to customers but to internal users as well.

Sometimes the agents need to check facts quickly to solve complex cases. Enabling Salesforce knowledge helps to educate the agents and enable them to share case solutions and knowledge with each other as opposed to finding the solution on their own.

You can also utilise ready-made email templates and quick text to minimise the time the agents spend writing the same sentences over and over again.

More speed with skill-based routing

Skill-based routing is a Salesforce functionality that helps to assign the right cases to the right agents. Obviously, having the skills to solve certain problems allows the agents to close cases faster. With skill-based routing, agents also don’t need to spend time reassigning cases.

The first step is to configure the skills in Salesforce and then assign these skills to the agents who are knowledgeable about these topics. After this, when a customer case is submitted with the correct parameters, the cases are directly routed to a correct agent or queue.