9 Ways Gladly Makes Your Service Heroes More Efficient

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Here at Gladly we call agents ‘service heroes’, because that’s just what they are—the unsung heroes of any business-to-consumer (B2C) brand that often times deal with unhappy customers, aggressive SLAs, and in some cases—legacy software that makes it challenging to work efficiently. In a time where it’s pivotal to do “more with less”, we wanted to share a few ways Gladly can help your service heroes work as effectively as possible to not only increase operational efficiencies but also keep them happy.

1. Moving from tickets to conversations

Our people-first approach puts customers at the center of everything we do. Unlike ticket or cased-based systems, service heroes no longer have to work in silos and stitch together tickets to see the full picture of their customer and situation. Ticket-based systems cause duplication of work—one customer calling twice would result in two tickets—and a lack of streamlined communication and collaboration. Not to mention, having to work in multiple silos makes simple tasks take longer, resulting in long wait times and poor customer experiences.

Take fabric and crafts retailer JOANN for example. After implementing Gladly, even though they got about 1,000 inbound communications, it resulted in only 700 conversations in Gladly instead of 1,000 tickets. Some customers were just reaching out multiple times, which with their previous system, would have created additional tickets.

2. Everything anchored around your customers

Rather than tickets, cases, or incidents, what we have are Customer Profiles. Services heroes no longer have to pull information from different systems to understand who their customers are, but instead, just visit a customer’s profile to see their communication across all channels, as well as rich customer details like what their past purchases are, lifetime value, and even preferences—all in a single pane of glass.

3. Each channel interaction saved in a single, lifelong thread

Think of a time you needed to reference a past conversation with a friend and couldn’t recall if they texted you or sent an email. It might take you minutes to search all of the channels you frequently use to find what you’re looking for. That’s what happens in ticket-based software. With Gladly, every single conversation that a customer has (regardless if they speak to 1 service hero or 20), is tied to a single place: the Conversation Timeline. This yields incredible efficiencies when service heroes need to reference something that happened in the past; all they need to do is find the customer in question, scroll over to their timeline and see an entire history of every single interaction they’ve had with your brand, regardless of if they’ve called, texted, chatted in or sent an email—it’s all there.

4. Answers that scale

Knowledge bases are essentially service heroes’ lifelines. Without a single knowledge base that can scale both internally (across voice scripts, internal policies and procedures) and externally (Help Centers/FAQ pages as well as email, chat and text responses), service heroes are forced to pull information from separate systems and risk providing their customers with answers that are inconsistent, outdated and off-brand. Gladly’s Answers knowledge base allows admins to author once and publish across all channels—all from a single source. Even better, our Answers knowledge base suggests the appropriate response for through machine learning, taking off even more seconds from their daily tasks. It’s like we know exactly what they are looking for.

In addition to just the great benefits of accessing one place for all your answers, heroes can leverage keyword groups, to make sure that regardless of a word used, for example “blouse”, that answers on garment care for “shirts” still come up. You can capture as many words as possible (shirt, blouse, tee, t-shirt), to make sure that no words or phrases are left behind.

5. AI-powered automated answers that knows best

As you compose a response, Gladly can also predict what you intend to say and offer you a suggestion to complete your sentence. For example, you may try typing something like “Is there anything”, and before even completing the sentence, Gladly will suggest “I can assist you with?”. Gladly’s AI engine looks into historical conversations service heroes have had to intelligently suggest phrases as you type. Across multiple service heroes and customers per day, collectively that can save tons of time.

6. Automated messaging greetings

A little bit of automation goes a long way, especially when it’s for things you frequently type. With Gladly’s automated messaging greetings, a service hero’s most commonly used greeting will appear so they don’t need to type it out. For example, if a service hero frequently uses “Hi, how may I help you?” and another hero uses “Hi, my name is Sarah, what can I help you with today?”, both of those greetings that are unique to the them will be used. In addition, service heroes can also set their email signature and greeting so they don’t have to manually type it each time.

7. Collaborate with ease

Gladly’s Tasks feature allows service heroes to effectively collaborate with colleagues (whether they are in the warehouse department or on the billing team), ensuring they can work cross-functionally with ease. Say for example a customer was wondering the status of a dress she recently purchased. Her service hero can open a Task for her colleague in the warehouse department to check the status. The best part is, Tasks are kept inside the Customer Profile so that everything is saved in one place for future reference. In addition, Tasks gives service heroes the ability to set themselves reminders—like to follow up with a certain customer, or to send an update about a new line of jewelry they just released to another—Tasks ensures that service heroes can go above and beyond to surprise and delight.

8. Connecting the dots with Relationships

Often times someone might contact your brand on behalf of another customer—like a family member or an assistant. For example, say your wife bought you a shirt that you want to return. With Gladly, when you contact customer support, service heroes will know who you are based on your relationship and also be able to see the previous order’s details, making returns on others’ behalf a breeze. When the return is complete, your conversation will not only be saved to your profile, but your wife’s as well. All the related context between different customers will be easily accessible and allows service heroes to provide personalized service in the process.

9. Take manual activities off their plates

Gladly’s Rules can help you manage and automate frequent activities by triggering a response or action when a conversation meets just the right conditions. For example, you can:

• Send an auto-reply to customers whenever an email comes in
• Add Topic(s) to a conversation to understand what customers are inquiring about without putting the onus on agents to figure it out themselves
• Route a message with the word “returns” to a specific inbox so the right heroes handle
• Reassign a Conversation or Task that has become overdue to bring it to the top of inboxes.

By setting up various Rules with Gladly you will drive incredible efficiencies, especially when used collectively. They allow you to automate manual processes for your team and help your team be extra efficient. With the time saved, service heroes can focus on effectively solving customer needs rather than mundane, organizational tasks.

In conclusion, we live in a time where “multi-tasking”, “streamlining”, and “automation” are more than just buzzwords, they can make your business go from an engine that drives on too much manual work to an engine that drives on efficiencies.  With Gladly, not only will your service heroes appreciate working in a system that ties every request around customers rather than in multiple systems that rely on tickets and cases, they will very quickly see just how effective they can really be.

These are only some of the ways that Gladly helps your service heroes become more efficient. To learn more about boosting efficiency visit Gladly.com.