Empower CSRs to focus on customer experiences

As everyone knows, 2020 was a tough year for many parts of the manufacturing industry.

Immediately before the COVID-19 crisis, consulting and research firm Kline forecast a healthy global metalworking market through 2024. However, post-COVID-19, the outlook is highly unclear. Because of the economic turbulence caused by the pandemic, the global metalworking machinery market’s annual growth rate is expected to decline by 4.3 per cent.

Despite this reality, metalworking enterprises don’t have time to wallow in doom and gloom. Eventually things will improve. A vaccine will arrive, economies will bounce back, and demand will return. Right now the task at hand is to ride out the storm as well as possible.

Central to this task is minimizing churn by maintaining excellent customer service. Customer relationships are the backbone of the metalworking industry. Optimizing the customer experience will both mitigate the damage now and establish a basis for success beyond the pandemic.

Still, budgets are tight. Offices are closed. Call volumes are higher than ever. These are conditions in which it is all too easy to let customer service standards slip. Despite the disruptions and the economic contraction, metalworking businesses need to show their customers that they are reliable and trustworthy.

The way to do this is by empowering the customer service workforce to spend more time working with customers on their real problems.

Manual Order Processing

Even when times were good, most customer service representatives (CSRs) spent far too much time on non-value-add activities – tasks that distracted them from the pressing need to overdeliver on customer value. The CSRs’ workday was dominated by swivel-chair tasks that prevented them from truly dedicating themselves to in-depth customer service.

One of the biggest offenders is manual sales order processing. Most CSRs spend around one-third of their day manually converting purchase orders into sales orders. Last year half of all U.S. manufacturing and distribution sales were processed manually, a total of US$8.4 trillion in business-to-business sales.

In the COVID era, this manual approach is more sluggish than ever. Following the rapid transition to remote work, many CSRs are lacking their usual tools, meaning they are struggling to hit their usual levels of productivity.

The net result of this manual processing is unavoidable errors.

Purchase order backlogs sit idle overnight. Overtime processing costs escalate. The unnecessary costs often run as high as $26 per order, and revenue capture is reliably slowed down. Every minute a CSR spends on manual processing is a minute they aren’t dedicating to actual customer service, damaging retention.

Dedicating hundreds of staff hours to this time-intensive, low-value process was inefficient before the pandemic. Now it is in desperate need of modernization.

Automate and Upgrade

When CSRs are drowning in manual processing, customer service suffers. Clients need more attention than ever during the pandemic, and CSRs’ attention is splintered. How can metalworking enterprises give CSRs the time they need to focus on customer retention? Automate their sales order processing.

With the right software as a service (SaaS) platform, sales order processing can be fully automated. A company can automatically convert emailed purchase orders into sales orders in their ERP system with 100 per cent accuracy. No CSR has to touch the order.

Processing speed goes from hours to seconds. With the right supplier, onboarding this automation technology takes less than 30 days, with no IT burden.

When this automation kicks in, CSRs win back up to one-third of their entire workday. With this new bandwidth, CSRs can:

• Be readily available to speak with customers about orders, issues, or queries.
• Engage in more upselling and cross-selling.
• Proactively follow up and troubleshoot.
• Ensure prompt order deliveries, pleasing customers.

These are the activities that keep customers happy and can set enterprises apart from competitors whose CSRs are overwhelmed by manual processes. When customer service becomes best-in-class, you minimize churn and maximize retention, protecting revenue capture by proxy.

Modernize Customer Service

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, Sandy Shen, senior director analyst at Gartner, said, “This is a wakeup call for organizations that have placed too much focus on daily operational needs at the expense of investing in digital business and long-term resilience. Businesses that can shift technology capacity and investments to digital platforms will mitigate the impact of the outbreak and keep their companies running smoothly now and over the long term.”

Processing sales orders faster, more reliably, and more accurately confers huge business resiliency. At a time when the metalworking industry is facing great uncertainty, this is an enormous boost.

The COVID-19 crisis has shown that companies need to cut out inefficiencies if they want to continue satisfying customers. A digital transformation initiative like sales order automation is a high-impact, high-ROI undertaking that quickly empowers enterprises to let their CSRs focus on minimizing churn.

Though the coming months are looking unpredictable, prioritizing customer retention is a foolproof strategy. In the time of COVID, good customer service is harder than ever to deliver. During a pandemic, the companies that keep standards high will thrive. When customers see you as reliable and trustworthy, they aren’t tempted to look elsewhere for their metalworking needs. By trading dated, traditional processes for modern processes, enterprises gain resilience and keep their customers happy – now and after the crisis.

Judd Marcello is executive vice-president/CMO of Conexiom, Suite 1400, 1140 Pender St. W., Vancouver, B.C. V6E 4G1, 604-638-2300, conexiom.com.