Poor Customer Service Experience – Many Professionals Lack Engagement on Their Job

There has been a rampant representative disengagement that is leading to poor customer service experience, along with economic cost.

Customer service teams across businesses are striving to work remotely to manage essential business functionalities. Professionals have been facing various challenges with the increased customer inquiries and on-going demand for enhanced efficiencies while handling complex issues amid the pandemic.

However, only one-third of the customer service representatives are actually engaged with their work. The remaining are neutral or disengaged – reveals a recent Gartner study that surveyed more than 600 customer service representatives.

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The Gartner 2021 Customer Service Rep Role and Experience Survey indicated that disengaged representatives are about 84% more likely to look for a new job compared to engaged workers. Given the current market scenario, even the neutral professionals are roughly 43% likely to engage in job-seeking activities.

Left unchecked, this behavior is leading to poor customer service outcomes as well as economic cost. Certainly, the disengaged and neutral professionals make up almost 66% of the overall customer service workforce. This is being felt across businesses across different sectors.

The disengaged workers are engaging in behaviors that drive a high-effort customer service experience – 3X as often as their engaged counterparts. Consequently, such professionals are expected to provide a poor customer service experience, which negatively impacts the loyalty factors and customer outcomes.

As explained by Brent Adamson, Distinguished Vice President at the Gartner Customer Service and Support Practice, “These behaviors include failing to provide first-contact resolution, making customers repeat information, and failing to reduce the number of steps customers must take to resolve their issues.”

The study indicated that these high levels of disengagement are not primarily driven by the current market events, the COVID-19 pandemic, or the abrupt move to the remote work model. In fact, it is also not steered by the difficulty of the work – instead, it is due to unclear or conflicting goals and lack of clarity.

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In this context, experts from Gartner suggest the following tips to mitigate representative disengagement:

• Assessing the current level of disengagement among their service professionals with the help of rep surveys could help.
• Aligning the rep metrics with crucial business objectives can help reps understand how to prioritize while they deal with conflicting goals.
• Educating and training executives on their particular roles in order to achieve these business objectives is important. This will help them better understand what is in, as well as what’s out of scope for their position.
• The managers and team leaders need to support the well-being of professionals (not only performance) by allowing them to take a break from their work – especially in such emotionally draining situations.

Simply put, this shows how the professionals contribute to the business and individual goals and a widespread lack of support for their well-being. As a result, the customer service and business support leaders who are responsible for talent management will need to be more careful while they plan ahead.