Proper staffing and preparation will help your agents transition from traditional support systems to messaging’s asynchronous conversational model. There are a few ways you can ensure your team is set up to become successful messaging users.

First, consider taking a phased approach to development and deployment. Start with a live chat-like setup that your agents might be more familiar with. You can introduce more messaging functionality over time, as they become comfortable with each newer communication style messaging offers.

Equally as important is agent training. Don’t leave them to figure things out on their own. With each update to your messaging configuration, ensure your agents have undergoneZendesk messaging trainingto understand the conversation workflow with customers.

Remember that this transition can take time, and slow down even the best agents. Success metrics may be impacted during the initial shift. On average, organizations get back to – and exceed – their historical performance indicators 30 to 60 days after moving to messaging.

另一个成功的人力资源战略的重要组成部分is designing a support request workflow that helps agents keep up with ticket volume. Let’s discuss some of the aspects of workflow design our customers have taken into consideration.

Keep your ticket triage process simple to maximize agent time and improve your service level. Think about youroptions for routing tickets, and choose the style that will work best for your team:

• Broadcast routing:All agents are notified of all relevant conversations. An agent can clickServe Requestto start working on the message.
• Assigned routing:Messages are evenly distributed among online agents, so only one agent is notified of each incoming message at any given time.
• Omnichannel routing: Lets you route tickets from multiple channels, based on agent availability and capacity.

Other ways you can help agents manage their workflows successfully include:

After agents are up to speed, support request deflection rates will likely change for the better. With fewer customers needing live support, a lot of the statistics you use to evaluate agent success and requirements will change as well. Account for these changes and apply them to your volume and staffing forecasts. This will require working with the team that manages your bot on an ongoing basis.

Expect an adjustment period while you learn to compare messaging volume to the volumes you previously had from email, chat, voice, etc.

此外,预测一个临时increas体积e in messaging as customers and agents familiarize themselves with the new support experience. This might mean hiring or training more agents to prevent customer frustration with increased wait times. And remember, messaging volume per channel should ultimately be lower compared to chat due to the higher incidence of self-solved tickets and the removal of disconnected support requests from the numbers. Remove abandoned conversations from your forecast because messaging sessions can’t be ended.

By removing customer support requests that are easily self-solved, you’re likely to see an increase in the average per-ticket handle time as agents focus on more complex issues. When your agents have settled into the new processes, you can focus on optimizing your bot and performing root cause analysis of tickets, which should lead to a long-term decrease in ticket volume.

You can set new workload and productivity expectations to avoid idle time, and adjust these as agents become better at handling messaging requests. For example, you’ll probably need to set some limits for the maximum number of conversations or inactive conversations.

Note how your tickets are handled, and how they change after adopting messaging. There might be more ticket touches, but they might be shorter and over a longer period of time.

Remember, you will likely need to reconfigure the workforce management tools you connect to your Zendesk account as you configure messaging. This will normally happen due to introducing new skills, groups, and metadata you use to build your forecast.

Carefully planning your staffing and operations requirements for messaging can help you realize its full potential for engaging with your customers.