This is primarily a post asking for suggestions from agency principals or agency management relating to service and workflow related questions:
About us: 25 year Independent Agency with a fairly new/unexperienced staff due to retirements, relocations, new career paths, etc. half of service staff is in the office and half work from home.
I am a principal in our agency and due to training new staff, covering for staff that have left and overall daily management, I have realized that I have devolved into a position of being lead CSR and have succumbed to my temptation to micro-manage. I monitor most service intake and delegate service work through our management system. I have a superb handle on what is going on, but at the real cost of not focusing on sales and revenue generation. Staff is now capable of taking ownership of and working together on incoming service.
My question is how best to do this?
Service comes to us, as I'm sure it does for most of you by various means:
Inbound Phone (shared service voicemail box which broadcasts voice mails to multiple email accounts including mine).
Emails to a service email address shared by a group of us, including me.
Through our website
Through internet fax (receive via email)
CSM is handled by creating tasks in our agency management system. CSRs can task themselves or create a task for anyone else.
I need to step out of basic service related management.
What works best for you in regard to staff deciding who takes ownership of what calls, emails, voicemails, faxes, etc? I'd like to hear about some time tested proven methods.
Years ago we divided up the alphabet and assigned dedicated CSRs to clients. It certainly had its advantages. However, I found it also fostered a serious "That's not my client." attitude among staff. Customer service would often suffer as a result if the dedicated agent was out of the office, on vacation, sick, on leave, etc.
I could easily monitor service activity from our management system to quantify the number of tasks one agent may take on vs. another. Do any of you then reward staff for doing the work they are already being compensated for? Incentives for staff that take care of the most tasks?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
About us: 25 year Independent Agency with a fairly new/unexperienced staff due to retirements, relocations, new career paths, etc. half of service staff is in the office and half work from home.
I am a principal in our agency and due to training new staff, covering for staff that have left and overall daily management, I have realized that I have devolved into a position of being lead CSR and have succumbed to my temptation to micro-manage. I monitor most service intake and delegate service work through our management system. I have a superb handle on what is going on, but at the real cost of not focusing on sales and revenue generation. Staff is now capable of taking ownership of and working together on incoming service.
My question is how best to do this?
Service comes to us, as I'm sure it does for most of you by various means:
Inbound Phone (shared service voicemail box which broadcasts voice mails to multiple email accounts including mine).
Emails to a service email address shared by a group of us, including me.
Through our website
Through internet fax (receive via email)
CSM is handled by creating tasks in our agency management system. CSRs can task themselves or create a task for anyone else.
I need to step out of basic service related management.
What works best for you in regard to staff deciding who takes ownership of what calls, emails, voicemails, faxes, etc? I'd like to hear about some time tested proven methods.
Years ago we divided up the alphabet and assigned dedicated CSRs to clients. It certainly had its advantages. However, I found it also fostered a serious "That's not my client." attitude among staff. Customer service would often suffer as a result if the dedicated agent was out of the office, on vacation, sick, on leave, etc.
I could easily monitor service activity from our management system to quantify the number of tasks one agent may take on vs. another. Do any of you then reward staff for doing the work they are already being compensated for? Incentives for staff that take care of the most tasks?
Any suggestions would be appreciated.