A day in the life of a customer service representative

Customer experience is mighty important, right? Yep, I thought you’d agree. We all know that treating your customers right is critical for getting the sale and for building and nurturing long-term relationships with your customers. You don’t need to be told how much of an impact it has on boosting customer loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value.

But can you deliver exceptional customer experiences if our customer service representatives don’t have everything that they need to support your customers in the best way possible? Taking your CX to the next level gets even harder if you aren’t creating a great employee experience (EX) for your customer service team. After all, EX drives CX to a large extent.

We wanted to help you step up your employee experience so that your customer service reps feel motivated and are enabled to create amazing experiences for your customers. But you can’t really do that if you don’t know what their day looks like.

That’s why we’re breaking down what a typical day in the life of a customer service representative looks like. While most things will be pretty similar for the vast majority of customer service agents, there are going to be differences sprinkled throughout, depending on the team and organization. So, treat this article as a general guide, but make sure to actually speak to your customer support team, see what their day looks like, and check whether there are any improvements you could make.

What does a day in the life of a customer service agent look like?

Check their calendar

First up, your customer service reps would check their calendars to see what meetings they have scheduled throughout the day. They’re looking for the customer calls that they have already scheduled, so that they can structure their day to fit ad-hoc tasks and make time to deal with unexpected customer issues.

Check queries assigned to them

They’re also going to check for new customer requests assigned to them and ensure (or hope) that they don’t have any pending issues to resolve. Your support agents do this to ensure that they are prioritizing the handling of issues. They might need to move questions from your ‘big fish’ customers to the front of the line or even take care of the more urgent requests first. The prioritization might even be on the basis of the category of request.

Make sure they’re meeting their SLAs

After checking the requests assigned to them, they’ll check whether there are any issues that are nearing, or have gone past, the deadline for resolution as specified in the service level agreement (SLA).

The SLA is a commitment that your company makes to your customers regarding the level and quality of service that will be delivered, so your customer support agents need to be on top of this and make sure that they’re meeting their SLAs.

Have a meeting with their manager

This is usually the first meeting that your customer service reps have during their day. They go over important metrics like average response time, average resolution time, etc. and even look at other things like the volume of queries coming in across different channels (chat, email, social media, phone, etc.).

They would even discuss the types of queries that have been coming from customers frequently over the past few days and may consider automating these repetitive queries (maybe by adding them as FAQs on the company’s chatbot or mentioning them in the knowledge base). They might even highlight unexpected issues faced by customers and talk about complex queries so that the team can suggest better (and easier) ways to solve them.

During this meeting, the manager might even bring up goals that the team is working towards (like improving the CSAT score) and put forth ideas on how the team could work towards achieving those goals.

‍

‍

Deal with customer issues

This is the core aspect of their job. Your support agents will be looking at the queries raised by your customers, but they won’t be looking at these queries in isolation. They’ll be looking at past conversations and interactions with these customers so that they have context and are able to address these issues in the best way possible. Ideally, you’d want them to be looking at conversations that your team has had with these customers across all your touchpoints and channels so that you have a more comprehensive understanding of your customers and the issues they are facing.

Escalating queries when required

There are some issues that your agents won’t be able to handle themselves. You do want to empower your agents to handle as many issues as possible on their own, but it’s very possible that they’d come across some issues that could only be handled by your product or tech team. Some queries might even require the attention of your management team. It is vital that your support reps are able to identify the right person and escalate the query to them as quickly as possible, without forcing your customers to wait on hold too long.

‍

Collaborating with and offering feedback to your internal teams

While making sure that customers’ issues are resolved quickly is a major part of your support team’s job, they also need to do everything in their power to ensure that these issues do not arise again.

Your reps will be collaborating with your product and tech teams to share feedback from your customers and highlight issues that your customers faced so that you can make all the fixes needed to ensure that no other customer has to deal with these issues.

They’ll also have interactions with your sales and marketing teams to share insights on what your customers are looking for and the types of issues that they are facing.

‍

Training sessions

If your product team is launching new features, updates, or all-new products, your customer support team needs to be updated and trained on these new roll-outs. These training sessions and usually scheduled towards the end of the shift, or after the shift ends. 

‍

What slows your customer service agents down?

‍

Most businesses see that a set of questions keep coming in repetitively and make up a major chunk of the total volume customer support queries. Having to answer the same queries several times a day is a waste of your customer service team’s time.

How do you work around that? Just deploy an AI-powered chatbot to deal with the majority of your queries, so that your agents can focus on solving the complex ones.

‍

Offering multichannel support can be tough, and going omnichannel can be even harder when your agents have to keep jumping across support channels in order to engage with your customers. It becomes even more of a task when your agents have to hunt for past conversations across these channels so that they have context from historical interactions.

The solution? A OneView inbox that shows you all the conversations in one place and even stitches these conversations together so that your customer service agents always have context.

‍

If your customers have to go through 5 agents before reaching the one who can actually help them, you’re wasting your customers’ time as well as your agents’.

You need a system that can intelligently route these queries to the agent equipped to handle them the very first time, instead of needing to transfer the conversation to another agent. Also, you will want to make sure that your system can cope with the influx of calls without experiencing call dropping issues as this will affect your team's efficiency and the customer's satisfaction levels.

The perfect solution

Engati has everything you need and more - intelligent chatbots, a OneView inbox for 15+ channels, intelligent context-based conversation routing, and even 50+ language options.

Engati Live Chat even has two-way auto-translations, so that you can serve your customers in their language, even if your agents aren’t fluent in that language.