The workforce challenges customer service and dispatch teams face today
Shortages
Amidst the pandemic, service organizations faced myriad challenges, not the least of which was maintaining staffing levels. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the utilities sector experienced the second to highest percentage of worker resignations as of September 2021. As new employees are being hired, training and retention have become the latest workforce woes, along with staffing shortages that continue today.
Flexible work environments
The workplace also continues to evolve, and service providers will likely continue doing business in a hybrid environment. Customer service representatives and departments with more worksite flexibility will be supported by a larger percentage of teleworkers. Despite becoming more adapted to managing routine operations across this hybrid landscape, complex or unexpected incidents such as service outages are more difficult with a distributed and short-staffed workforce.
Burnout
As described in a February 2022 Forbes article, customer service representatives are experiencing unprecedented “burn-out” because of increased workplace stressors. To address this reality and retain workers, employers need to focus on supporting and empowering their people.
How technology can help
Technology can make it easier to onboard new hires in customer service or dispatch related roles. Embedding standard operating procedures related to the call answering, dispatch and information management process within a software platform makes it easy for staff to learn how to perform job duties efficiently and consistently.
Specific to response management, embedded procedures can help staff determine how to prioritize and respond to each call quickly. This enables them to manage larger call volumes and improve response efforts by dispatching the right teams faster. Training efficiencies directly translate to capacity improvements because seasoned staff are not spending as much time to onboard new hires, and new team members are fully trained in a shorter time frame.
Technology can also help organizations retain customer service and call center staff. It can make it easier for customer service employees to do their jobs and reduce frustration, especially during high-volume incidents.
Daupler RMS and workforce challenges
Daupler’s response management system, Daupler RMS makes it easy to embed operating procedures. It can also recognize and group related calls, automate notifications about known incidents, and take the guess work out of response prioritization.
When customer service and dispatch activities are streamlined, a wide range of performance benefits are realized.
- Short-staffed teams can handle more calls.
- Call wait times and event response times are improved.
- AI helps identify related calls during major service disruptions and offers callers an option to receive updates via text, alleviating pressure on call takers.
These impacts directly translate to greater customer and employee satisfaction. By empowering staff to do their jobs effectively and achieve performance goals, employees will be more likely to remain in these customer-facing roles.
Learn more about how Daupler is helping more than 100 service organizations do more by downloading our latest white paper, Address Workforce Challenges with Daupler RMS.