Prevent customer service agents from cherry-picking to create a more productive team

We all tend to prefer working on things we know and understand. It’s human nature. When faced with the choice of an easy-to-answer question or a seemingly unfathomable riddle, we’ll usually take the easy choice. It makes perfect sense.

Except when you’re dealing with customers and prospects. Then you need to be able to offer a high quality consistent service for all types of enquiries, not just the easy ones be it sales or customer care.

If difficult messages are ignored, the customer is left waiting and unlikely to have a good experience.

Allowing agents and reps to choose their favourite query type rather than the one that is highest priority is known as cherry-picking and it can have a very negative effect on the brand experience and overall satisfaction levels.

How can you tell if it’s happening in your customer service team?
  • Subject matter experts – Some agents may seek to expand their skills in one particular subject matter over others. Other members in the team may reinforce this by passing them enquiries that relate to that particular subject rather than sharing the knowledge across the team.
  • Check agent response times – Usually this should be fairly consistent across the team. If you have someone with a much faster response time, it could be that they are selecting more easy messages rather than taking the most urgent one from the queue.
  • Time to first reply – the tricky looking messages will most likely have first reply times outside your normal range, as they’ll be continually skipped over in favour of easier looking messages.
  • Tag incoming messages – then check if team members are handing a range of different types of enquiries.
Why do agents cherry-pick?

Usually it’s because people want to get more done and be more productive. Often, they genuinely believe they are helping, by clearing out ‘easy’ customer service messages quickly. Other common motivations can include:

  • System limitations – agents may feel their current customer service tool or process doesn’t allow them to be productive, so they are trying to find a ‘better way’.
  • Competitiveness – they want to the top performer and so don’t want to take up precious time on messages that take longer to solve.
  • Skillset – they may be reluctant or struggle to build the new skills needed to take on a new challenge or an area unfamiliar to them.
How can you resolve cherry-picking behaviour?

Instead of trying to mandate and control the behaviour, look at the reasons behind it.  If you can solve these, you can fix the issue and create a more productive team.  Here’s a few ways to manage customer engagement cherry-picking:

  • Last agent routing – use atechnology platform which enables you to automatically assign messages to the last agent who dealt with the customer. This removes the temptation for another team member to step in.
  • SLA distribution – some platforms such as Sentiment enable you to choose to prioritize messages which are approaching SLA or of a certain type. The system finds available agents and checks their user permissions in real-time.  It then pushes priority messages to any available agents.  This ensures agents always have to deal with the highest priority messages first and don’t get to pick whichever message they want.
  • Training – ensure agents receive regular training and are briefed on how to handle different kinds of messages. Use real life examples to help illustrate processes and make sure there is a clear escalation procedure if agents need further guidance or assistance. Encourage more experienced agents to work with newer team members so they can see how to go about resolving more complex issues and then do it for themselves. 
  • Encourage team collaboration – rewarding individual agent performance can inadvertently incentivize them to pick quick and easy messages to solve. Measuring team performance as a whole will encourage agents to work together and support each other.  It also encourages knowledge sharing and helps on-board new team members more quickly.

Find out how Sentiment’s innovative routing engine can help you improve the efficiency of your eCommerce retailer customer engagement team, increase sales and improve client retention

 

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18 X Improvement In Customer Response Time

Before

Before engaging with Sentiment.io we were struggling to respond to our online customers in a timely manor due to the sheer demand of our market leading offering. Many customers were waiting several hours or more to get a response.

After

We started working with Sentiment and targeted a consistent response time below one hour. The results were staggering we have managed to achieve an average response time of 11 minutes, with exactly the same number of team members. We are delighted as are our customers.”


CHARMAINE  //  Head of Customer Experience

1385% increase in customers responded to

Sentiment “worked tirelessly in meeting our business needs, providing guidance at every step to ensure a smooth onboarding process, always listened to feedback that resulted in faster product innovations, and promptly communicated latest developments and recommendations - all of which has led to uSwitch being able to deliver a much higher standard of customer service online than ever before, and consequently, a very happy customer care team too.

It has been a fantastic journey so far for uSwitch and Sentiment

  • 1385% increase in customer responses
  • 2709% improvement in response time
  • 463% improvement in SLA achievement

DEW  //  Former Social Media Manager, Uswitch


Award winning customer care

“With their partnership approach and knowledge in the customer care sector, we selected Sentiment due to the companies strong service reputation and the capabilities of its engagement technology. Sentiment is a valuable partner for us – helping us drive faster resolution and providing our customers with fast and convenient ways of contacting us. They have been excellent in supporting us and helping us achieve our vision”


PETER  //  Head of Operations, Caravan and Motorhome Club


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