Organization

Organization is one of the key skills any customer service agent (or any position above) needs to develop. It allows agents to keep their notes structured and their screen organized so they don't get lost.

Organization goes beyond a clean desk; it's also about a clean workflow. Agents are multitasking constantly: They are listening, talking, typing, reading a knowledge base article, and navigating 3 different software tools, all at the same time.

Disorganized agents tend to have higher AHT (Average Handle Time) because they spend too much time looking for things they should have had ready.

Let's review a quick example:

A customer asks three different questions at once: "When is my bill due?, can I add HBO?, and why is my internet slow?" A disorganized agent answers the last one, forgets the first two, and has to ask the customer to repeat themselves, looking unprofessional.

There are 3 key elements in which agents can work to develop their organizational skills:

• Always having a digital notepad (like OneNote or Sticky Notes) open. Agents can use this to write down the customer's name and their questions before they start answering, and check them off as the interaction goes.
• Using bookmarking to save their most used resources (pricing sheet, troubleshooting guide, outage map) and avoid searching from scratch every time.
• Cleaning up after every interaction, not leaving several tabs open, so they can start fresh for the next one.

Many clients do not allow agents to take notes on paper or devices other than the authorized ones (normally company provided equipoment), and some others restrict access to tools such as Office or Google Docs. This is done to protect sensitive customer information. In such cases, agents will be able to take side notes on the specific tool determined by the client.