April 1st 2020 was my first day in the Esker UK Customer Experience (CX) team, (this was not an April fools!).
I had been mentally preparing to get myself out of the office and into a really customer facing role. With almost immediate effect lockdown #1 took place, the prospect of customer visits quickly faded and the shadow of the steep remote learning curve loomed over.
When I defected from the Sales Team to CX it was almost like a whole new Esker I was dealing with, and all of this was remote. This situation, however, was not unique, and many of our customers were facing exactly this situation. Whether it was restructures, job shares, job swaps, or roles changing in the circumstances, many of our customers were met with a completely different Esker than they were used to, and the only difference between us was that I was lucky enough to have an established department of colleagues to help me chip away at the learning curve.
We needed to find a way to channel the support of the wider CX community in Esker in a way that was accessible to customers who now work at home. To begin with, we started a series of webinars on “How To…” designed to give busy people short bursts of useful information. This has proved to be very successful so far, and overall our customers loved the idea that we would be investing in educational resources that only took 10 minutes of their time to see! Perfect for those end users of our solutions whereby time is limited each day for viewing longer training resources.
This then gave the UK CX Team the confidence that there was appetite for further educational content, and alongside the “How To” series we wanted to create content that was even more flexible.
We (the CX Team) and the customer are in the same boat, where our workspace is coupled with managing families, home learning, pets and all too frequent courier parcel deliveries to name a few. So we understood that not all customers can spare 10 mins at 11:00 – 11:10, and some customers may not even have 10 mins to spare!
With all of this in mind we began to create a library of 2 – 3 minute videos designed to very quickly show you how to perform very specific tasks like request teaching, grant service user access, access reports, etc. This is all currently in development and will shortly be available on the new Esker All Access Community Hub, an Esker customer dedicated space, where ideas, experiences and resources can be shared. It is our hope that over time we will build up a repository of videos that can provide on-demand educational content to our busy users!
One year on and I am still learning but I hope that this experience will help us to better understand our customers and bring support to them in ways that are accessible and flexible with the ever changing conditions of the workspace.
