How Tech Is Transforming Entry-Level, Customer-Facing Jobs

A survey of almost 900 customer service reps revealed that while some employees outperformed others, it wasn’t because of their level of experience. Instead, what mattered was if their technology connected them to the information needed to complete their tasks.

Leaders have long focused on traditional talent management strategies. But as they make progress on their automation efforts and face a competitive labor market, these strategies are no longer sufficient. Leaders must shift their focus towards enabling customer-facing employees with technology, allowing them to broaden their talent pool and better support the employees they are able to attract. And, because a dollar invested in technology stays even as a dollar invested in people can leave, leaders can retain more of their investment in the face of high attrition. Therefore, technology must sit at the heart of future talent strategies — doing so will reset the bar for entry level talent.

From sales and customer service, to retail and hospitality, employers in customer-facing functions are facing a challenging labor market. In fact, there are more job openings than candidates, so high-quality talent is in high demand but short supply. High inflation is also leading to higher wage expectations, making it harder for employers to make competitive offers to job seekers.

Employer’s increasing expectations around skills are compounding this problem. In pursuit of cost savings, employers have automated many of the simple, repetitive tasks associated with entry-level customer-facing roles — think checking the status of a shipment, issuing a refund, or performing a password reset. This means employees are being asked to handle more complex work, which in turn demands a new set of knowledge and skills that existing employees may not have.

Organizations that are already struggling to hire the talent required are faced with a difficult choice: continue to compete for talent better equipped to handle the growing demands of the role, or develop the talent they already have, with the knowledge that these employees could walk out the door at any point.

Solely doubling down on recruiting, development, and retention strategies is a losing proposition: Instead, leaders must reset the starting point for entry-level, customer-facing work by tapping into technology that provides employees with both context and guidance.

  • Context enriches employees’ understanding of customer interactions, helping support their judgment when resolving issues.
  • Meanwhile, guidance aids employees’ decision making and supports them as they tackle more complex tasks.

To better explore these forces in action, let’s take a look at one of the largest — but also one of the most overlooked — groups of customer-facing employees: customer service.

Customer service roles make up a large portion of the workforce (in 2021 alone, they represented 2.9 million U.S. jobs) and are undergoing a transformation. Recent Gartner survey data revealed almost half of customer service reps report that the customer questions and issues they are fielding are more complex than in the past.

To make matters more challenging, high levels of customer service rep turnover means leaders can’t rely on employee experience and institutional knowledge to manage this increased complexity: In fact, Gartner benchmarks show that the median attrition rate for customer service reps is 25%.

But there’s good news. Our survey of almost 900 customer service reps and support specialists revealed that while some employees outperformed others, it wasn’t because of their level of experience. Instead, what mattered was if their technology connected them to the information needed to complete their tasks.

Unpacking Context and Guidance

To understand the relationship between technology and performance, Gartner asked reps whether they had access to a number of technology capabilities. That is, what specific pieces of information the system presented to the rep, and which actions the system performed on behalf of the rep.

We also gathered information about reps’ years of experience, level of education, and other personal characteristics to be able to isolate the impact of tech capabilities on rep performance.

Gartner found that the number of capabilities reps reported having access to varied substantially. But more access to technology capabilities was not always synonymous with strong customer service outcomes. Instead, it was whether these capabilities provided context or guidance that had a greater impact.

For example, did the system provide the rep with context around the customer’s product suite, or past interactions with the organization? Or did it offer guidance by predicting the reason the customer contacted the organization, or suggesting an intelligent “next best action” (NBA) to the rep? While both context and guidance drive improved performance among reps, they do so in different ways.

Guidance Helps Employees Navigate Complexity

First, guidance capabilities enable customer-facing employees to perform the complex work that’s increasingly being asked of them, regardless of their level of experience or education.

Employees from retail, hospitality, sales, or service operate in a dynamic environment, where the products and services that are sold and require support are constantly evolving. Remembering, filtering, and letting go of information is hard for any employee.

For example, a leader at a large technical support center noticed that a rep with 12 years of experience was counterintuitively taking 50% longer on calls than the newer reps. When she asked him why, he stated that the system — which guided employees through the troubleshooting process for hardware issues — was for the new employees, and he knew what the customer needed better than the system did. But with so many new and evolving products, and internal changes happening to processes and policies, his institutional knowledge meant nothing, and he was actually performing worse than his newbie counterparts.

We found that reps who have access to (and use) guidance capabilities are anywhere from 41% to 146% more likely to undertake complex work than those without. What this means is that having access to guidance capabilities matters far more than education or experience when it comes to dealing with complex work, as the ability to perform complex work comes from the capabilities deployed, not from the rep.

While our data shows the impact of guidance on customer service reps, all customer-facing employees could benefit from a little guidance. Helping a salesperson understand which products are delayed or out-of-stock in real-time, and providing suggestions for what next best offer (NBO) to make, helps them meet customer needs and maintain sales targets, even while facing supply chain shortages. Providing a new hospitality worker with dynamic recommendations on the best-fit venue for their customer’s needs helps them instill confidence in the customer’s decision to partner with the organization, especially in light of financial pressures from inflation.

Guidance levels the playing field by reducing the need for entry-level, customer-facing employees to rely solely on their own judgment or institutional knowledge, especially in light of more nuanced, specialized tasks and changing policies. What’s more, it also frees up employee bandwidth to listen to and connect with customers, instead of trying to find a solution on the fly.

Better Customer Experience through Context

Second, context supports customer service reps’ main job — issue resolution — enabling stronger CX and more cost-effective customer service.

A common measure of job performance for customer service and support reps is first contact resolution (FCR). As before, we found that individual characteristics — experience, education level — were insignificant. Instead, capabilities that provide context drive strong performance.

Customer interactions don’t take place in a vacuum. Customers typically have some kind of baggage that they bring to interactions with organizations, whether it be their past service experiences, their relationship with the organization, good or bad experiences with the product. All of these factors impact the customer’s present experience.

Context prepares the customer-facing employee to understand and account for that customer baggage. Having all the facts required to resolve the customer’s issue at their disposal allows the employee to provide a more holistic issue resolution experience.

Reps whose technology provides them with high levels of context are anywhere from 30% to 80% more likely to agree that their systems help with FCR. This has massive cost savings implications. According to Gartner benchmarks, the median cost of a phone call or chat message to customer service is just shy of $11. That’s a significant chunk of change for a busy contact center.

By improving a rep’s ability to resolve issues on the first try, making second or even third contacts unnecessary, organizations can save millions of dollars.

And it’s not just customer service reps. Their peers in hospitality could also benefit from context to help quickly serve customer needs on the first try. Customers may get really upset if their favorite vacation spot is booked. Automatically providing hospitality workers with information about past vacations the customer has taken would allow the employee to suggest new resorts and hotels that fit the customer’s needs.

Recruit for Skills, Not Experience

Technology that provides context and guidance, when properly deployed, is the great equalizer. Context and guidance capabilities allow an inexperienced employee to perform at the same level as an experienced one, and better than an employee with limited context or guidance.

Today, organizations are faced with a rapidly revolving door of customer-facing talent and limited supply. But by equipping employees with context and guidance, organizations can broaden their talent pool. They can switch their recruiting focus away from experience, and more towards the communication and relationship-building skills required to deliver a good customer experience.

While context and guidance can enable employees to handle more complex issues and support issue resolution, these capabilities can’t substitute for soft skills. Employees need to be able to build rapport with customers, to adjust their communication styles, and to instill confidence in the customer.

After establishing solid guidance and context capabilities, leaders should audit their job descriptions and remove requirements that don’t meaningfully impact performance, such as college degrees or excessive years of experience. In doing so, organizations can consider traditionally underrepresented candidates, improving not only the diversity of their workforce but also the size of their talent pool.

Leaders can also use that newly freed-up space in the job description to provide realistic job previews to candidates and proactively address their attrition issues by ensuring candidates fully understand the job duties and employee experience.

When Technology Drives Reps Away

It’s important to not overlook the possibility that technology intended to help employees can actually worsen attrition when not done with care.

Conventional wisdom suggests that providing enablement technology capabilities to your customer-facing employees would leave them satisfied in their role. But we found that in most cases, reps with low and high levels of technology support are equally likely to be looking for a new opportunity — it’s just the nature of customer-facing roles.

Yet, while guidance allows a rep to better handle complex customer calls, failure to support that guidance with context is a recipe for disaster: Reps in this situation are more than twice as likely to be actively looking for a new job compared to all other reps.

And it’s because the technology their organization is providing them is falling short of what the rep actually needs.

Imagine a customer calls customer service to troubleshoot a broken product. She is a high-spender who also enrolled in the brand’s loyalty program. While it’s the first time the given rep spoke to her, it’s actually the fourth time she contacted customer service in an attempt to resolve her issue. The rep’s system is not providing any of this relevant context to the rep, leading to a disgruntled customer, a demoralized employee and a strike against the brand’s health. The angry review she left on the company website — along with the many others in the queue — could have been avoided in its entirety with the proper guidance and context.

Ideally, guidance reduces the need to exercise judgment. But unless these capabilities are paired with context, reps cannot make informed decisions. The fact that technology can actually worsen attrition issues drives home the importance of a tech strategy that places the employee at the center and emphasizes enablement, not replacement.

Leaders have long focused on traditional talent management strategies. But as they make progress on their automation efforts and face a competitive labor market, these strategies are no longer sufficient. Leaders must shift their focus towards enabling customer-facing employees with technology, allowing them to broaden their talent pool and better support the employees they are able to attract. And, because a dollar invested in technology stays even as a dollar invested in people can leave, leaders can retain more of their investment in the face of high attrition. Therefore, technology must sit at the heart of future talent strategies — doing so will reset the bar for entry level talent.

Read More