Task One: Response Road Map

Your first task is to put together a road map for responses customers should receive when they use one of the three contact methods (phone, email, or chat). Your map should specify whether that response is part of a script you would provide a customer service representative or if it would be an automated response. For the sake of this exercise, let’s assume that customers would only contact us for one of the two following reasons: a technical issue or an issue with the investment firm’s staff.

The CTO’s Requirements

The CTO has given you some requirements to start with. Before reviewing those, let’s check out the current structure of the customer service department.

  1. There is a team for the ecommerce platform that has subteams of phone reps, email reps, and chat reps.
  2. There is a team for handling issues related the financial advising. This team also has subteams for phone, email, and chat reps.
  3. All concerns about investment portfolios for the high-profile clients with over $1,000,000 to invest should be directed back to their dedicated account manager, unless their concern is about their dedicated account manager. In this case, their concern should be directed to the department director. This is regardless of how they reach out to the firm.
  4. There is a team for the clients who have less than $1,000,000 to invest. This team answers questions about both the AI Portfolios and the trading platform. This team also has dedicated teams of phone, email, and chat reps but with each team, the reps are divided into two groups: experts on the AI portfolios and experts on the trading platform.

While there have been some issues with efficiency, there is no plan to restructure the customer service department. The CTO is hoping that you can use tools like Salesforce Service Cloud and scripts to help address the current inefficiencies and keep the firm’s customers loyal.

Here are the current issues with their setup:

  1. While the firm did set up just one email and one phone number to make it simpler for customers to reach out in case of an issue, if a customer does call or email, they will encounter long wait times getting connected to the correct department. They are also occasionally sent to the wrong department and have to wait even longer to be sent to the right team.
  2. They did a study that found that customers were likely to disconnect if it took longer than 10 seconds to get an initial response via chat. While all the chat reps have great records of getting an initial response to the customer within this timeframe, all the chat rep teams are currently short-staffed. If one chat rep has to step away from their desk, then there isn’t a system in place to re-route the chat to another rep. This leads to customers disconnecting and the chat reps feeling anxious everytime they need to step away for a break.
  3. With the high-profile clients, their concerns need to be routed automatically before the concern is sent onward to their account manager. There have been several incidents where the customer was reaching out to support to get assistance with something their account manager did and the concern was first routed to the account manager making for an awkward situation.
  4. With so many teams operating within the customer service division for clients with less than $1,000,000 to invest, client concerns are routed incorrectly approximately 60% of the time leading to confusion and frustration.

Making Response Road Maps

This is where your meeting with the CTO comes in! You are going to create maps showing how a customer’s call, email, and chat will be routed to the correct rep each time. This map should include:

  1. Responses that will be used to route the customers to the correct representatives and how these steps can be automated using the tools you have learned about in this class.
  2. Helpful scripts and phrases for how reps can handle either technical or nontechnical issues once the customer reaches a rep in a specific department.
  3. Because responses and tools may vary based on the contact method the customer is using, we encourage you to make different maps based on the contact method.

To do this, you can start with pen and paper. Eventuallly, you will need to use your computer to put together a visual. If you already have software you prefer, that is okay! If you don’t, try out draw.io . Check out this article on response road maps for more information on why these can be a valuable tool!