Customer Service Five Barriers &Nbsp; Improve Staff Efficiency

Improving the efficiency of knowledge workers in enterprises is a simple problem, but few executives can give satisfactory answers.

Improving knowledge type

To enhance the efficiency of these employees, these employees represent the main development opportunities for enterprises and those countries with low birth rate but want to maintain GDP growth.

However, many executives are vague about how to help knowledge-based employees to improve their efficiency.

The lack of a clear understanding of this problem is partly due to the fact that the tasks involved in knowledge work are more varied and uncertain. Compared with that, productive or pactional work mainly involves relatively clear and predictable activities, making them easier to implement or simplify.

Knowledge work is difficult to measure with performance indicators, making the effort to improve management quite challenging.

Against this background, it is no wonder that many enterprises are satisfied with investing aimlessly in training and IT systems.

Because knowledge workers spend half their time on interaction, enterprises should first explore the obstacles that impede these interactions.

Having a more thorough understanding of these constraints, corporate executives can get twice the result with half the effort by identifying efforts to increase productivity and improving the efficiency and effectiveness of interaction among employees.

At least half of the interactions in most enterprises are subject to one of the following 5 obstacles: physical barriers, technical barriers, social or cultural barriers, background barriers and time barriers.

Although individual enterprises will encounter more obstacles than other enterprises, these methods of overcoming obstacles are widely applicable.

Physical obstacles, including geographical distance and time zone differences, often go hand in hand with technical barriers. This is because when people are far away, effective tools for locating and collaborate with suitable people will make the problem more obvious.

Although the availability of various software tools is increasing, these obstacles are being overcome in many enterprises, but some large organizations scattered around the world continue to be trapped.

A remedy adopted by some organizations is to create "practice communities" for employees who can benefit from each other's opinions.

These communities use online tools to help members of different geographical locations search basic information, and sometimes use the latest social networking tools to provide more complex information, including who their members work with or train with.

By adding electronic tools with video conferencing functions, and occasionally attending meetings with members, these communities can make up for space distance and establish links between members.

Social or cultural barriers include strict hierarchy or inefficient incentive systems that do not motivate suitable employees to devote themselves to their work.

To avoid this problem, we should encourage an enterprise culture that shares knowledge and collaboratively solves problems.

In order to further benefit from these practices, enterprises should incorporate knowledge sharing into performance evaluation indicators, and ensure that team leaders clearly communicate the time allowed for obtaining information requests.

The above practice community may have another advantage: employees are more likely to give timely and useful responses to their own network users.

It is difficult for employees with background obstacles to share and pform knowledge gained from colleagues in different business areas.

Complex interactions often require contacts with other departments or units, but it is difficult for employees to judge a colleague's professional knowledge or adopt suggestions they may receive from colleagues.

Think about it. It often happens that the customer data between the Sales Department of the enterprise and the product development team is out of touch.

The two teams often have communication difficulties because they are so different about the idea and argument of customers. Salespeople focus on customer insights, while developers focus on the technical specifications of products.

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In order to overcome the background obstacles, organizations can perform cross team and inter departmental staff rotation, or create various forums. Experts from different fields can understand each other's work in these forums.

The last obstacle is time, or rather lack of interaction time.

If time constraints are damaging valuable interactions, executives can use positions and responsibilities to help identify employees and interactive themes that knowledge workers should interact with.

In some cases, enterprises may need to make clear the decision-making power and redefine their responsibilities so as to reduce the interaction burden of some employees while increasing the interactive responsibilities of other employees.

This approach, combined with other initiatives, can improve the success rate of research projects and shorten the time needed to make important decisions.