How Can Your Customer Service Agents Achieve Inbox Zero?

If you’re not familiar with the concept of Inbox Zero by now, then here’s a quick refresher: it’s the practice of keeping your inbox empty or as close to empty as possible by employing a range of message management techniques. Ultimately, the goal is to increase productivity and avoid obsessive, sporadic email checking and spurious responses.

But what if you could do the same for your customer service agents? Reducing time spent on repetitive questions and helping them spend their time more profitably are all excellent goals to aim for. That’s not to mention the effects that can have on team morale and customer satisfaction, removing friction from the customer service process and giving you a more efficient customer service team. 

After all, a happier workforce is a more productive one. That’s a fact, as proven by research from Oxford University's Saïd Business School: a happier workforce is 13% more productive. With that in mind, here are some of the challenges your customer service team face and how you can remedy them to get your team to Inbox Zero…

Inbox Management

Spending time marking conversations as ‘in-progress’ or ‘complete’ is a time-consuming task. Being able to manage your inbox is a key element of Inbox Zero. Smart management solutions allow you to focus on resolving issues while they handle the grind of filing messages in the appropriate place.

Too many channels

Often customer service teams are held back by the sheer volume of channels they have to manage. The solution is an omnichannel dashboard that allows your team to have a view of every message they receive regardless of channel in one place. Removing the need to log in to multiple channels and use a wide variety of platforms means your agents can focus on providing great service and can easily track how close to Inbox Zero they are. 

Conversations Everywhere

Often customers will use different platforms to communicate with you depending on a variety of factors, such as where they are, what time of day it is, or which device they're using. A conversational view across channels means your team can pick through conversational threads easily and won’t miss a vital piece of the customer service puzzle. 

Who Am I Speaking To?

With so many channels and conversations, it can be impossible to keep track of customer information. That’s why you need a Customer Data Platform to pull all of that information into one place so that your team can access it from one dashboard. With all your customer data in one place, your team can get to the route of the problem faster, see patterns emerging with specific customers and reach Inbox Zero faster and more effectively. 

Getting To The Right Agent Quickly

Being passed around by multiple customer service agents can be a frustrating experience for customers. But you can help them get to the right place faster using skills-based routing. Skills-based routing determines the most effective way to route a message based on what it discovers from initial interaction with the customer. If, for example, your customer posts a complaint about a delivery delay, you can route that query directly to a specific agent trained to deal with customer complaints. 

Faster Internal Management

If an agent does need extra assistance, a robust internal messaging system is the key to resolving issues and ensuring the query is managed quickly and effectively. Allowing your team to share skills and knowledge across the business from your customer service platform means you do away with off-platform messaging which further complicates the process and can be difficult to track. 

Need A Snooze?

On occasion, queries that don’t need an immediate response can sit unanswered for some time. In a standard messaging platform, that means they can easily be forgotten about. The ability to ‘snooze’ a query for a set length of time allows customer service agents to clear their backlog without having to worry about missing a vital query. Once the time is up, the relevant person will be notified that they need to respond to the customer. 

Inbox Zero In Action

Compare Guru implemented our Mobile Service Cloud solution to deal with the massive volume of customer service messages they were receiving. Mobile Service Cloud displays conversations under one customer profile, regardless of which channel they’re sent on. This enables Compare Guru’s customer service team to get a full picture of each customer’s issue and resolve it seamlessly. 

Read the customer story

Make Inbox Zero A Reality For Your Team

Mobile Service Cloud offers all the tools you’ll need to help your customer service team reach Inbox Zero, with Agent Inbox – our omnichannel messaging platform – as part of the package. With an omnichannel dashboard, conversational view, skills-based routing, customer data platform, and much more; Mobile Service Cloud is a one-stop solution for effective customer service.