When you’re assigned a task that is beyond your capacity or outside your job description, it’s a natural response to say that it’s not your job. But in the customer service outsourcing industry where the customer satisfaction is everyone’s ultimate purpose, you can’t simply steer clear of the duties that are tied to customer experience, whether you’re an agent or not.
It’s common knowledge that delivering customer service is mainly the duty of the phone representatives. Customer experience, however, is something that thrives on the collaboration of every role in the company. This is cultivated by the direct and indirect actions of all employees, and not just the front-liners. Since this is a shared vision and responsibility, anyone can both help improve customer experience or destroy it.
A duty beyond tasks
It’s easy to say that customer service is not your duty if it isn’t actually included in your job description. It’s completely justified to turn down a request to man the phone lines if you’re only hired to maintain your company’s e-commerce site. After all, answering customer queries is not your job, but the task of keeping the site responsive and fast for online shoppers makes their customer experience pleasant. By fulfilling these e-commerce responsibilities, you elevate your company’s overall customer service quality.
IT personnel, payroll officers, or anyone who isn’t a customer service representative aren’t expected to carry out the task of answering customer queries, but by simply fulfilling their true tasks, they also fulfill the duty of giving great customer experience.
Tracing back past transactions to explain a customer’s confusion over a transaction or redesigning a product to fit with the demand reflected in the feedback survey are seemingly small tasks that are only carried out by departments outside customer service. But put them all together, they yield great customer experiences.
Indeed, customer experience and customer service transcends tasks written on the contract. They are shared responsibilities of everyone regardless of what is technically assigned to their job title. And the lack of recognition of these shared responsibilities hint work culture issues such as poor employee encouragement, empowerment, and accountability.
So how can everyone in your company recognize their shared responsibility? We will delve on that area on a follow-up blog post.