Frontline service teams, including customer service representatives, field technicians, and retail associates, rely heavily on digital tools to perform their duties. However, when these tools aren’t optimized, workers face significant digital friction that hampers their productivity and efficiency.
Gartner defines digital friction as any unnecessary effort an employee must exert to use data or technology to complete a task. And the problem is widespread. In fact, our latest research of knowledge workers found that 5.5 hours are lost per employee per week due to poor digital employee experiences (DEX). For frontline service teams, this wasted time impacts everything from task execution to customer satisfaction, driving customers to take their business elsewhere.
In this first blog of a two-part series, we’ll dive into three key digital friction challenges impacting frontline service teams’ task efficiency, and why they matter. Our second blog in the series will continue the conversation, revealing what can be done to prevent digital friction from impacting productivity.
- When technology fails
Research we conducted found that 47% of knowledge workers suffer from applications that repeatedly freeze, crash or load slowly. Frontline service teams, where the customer is always king, can’t afford delays in accessing customer data or issues when processing transactions – particularly during peak hours when the demand for service is high. System lags or crashes disrupt workflows, causing delays in service delivery and increasing the workload on employees who must compensate for these technological shortcomings.
When systems are slow, employees become impatient and stressed, leading to errors and a decreased quality of service. For frontline operations, this frustration often shifts to service users. Customers facing long wait times due to technological issues – or worse – being spoken to by disgruntled employees, may choose to seek services from competitors. Customer retention and the brand’s reputation are likely to suffer.
- Tangled and chaotic workflows
Elsewhere, badly designed processes in digital tools require workers to follow convoluted workflows with extra steps. For instance, employees might need to navigate through multiple extra screens to access customer information or complete a transaction. Every workflow that doesn’t follow the optimal route increases the time required to perform even the simplest of actions.
When these poorly designed workflows become a part of daily routine tasks, they can become normalized. This means employees are less likely to flag suboptimal workflows, allowing unnecessary complexity to go unnoticed by IT teams and business leaders. Workarounds then become embedded in established workflows, and across the team, the extra time required for each task accumulates, resulting in significant productivity losses over time.
- Application switching
Finally, frontline service teams execute workflows that involve multiple programs and need to access information from various systems. When these systems are not integrated, employees switch between apps to find information or must manually transfer data between them. In fact, more than a third (35%) of knowledge workers find themselves toggling between applications repeatedly to access information or complete a task.
With employees spending up to four hours a week reorienting themselves after switching apps and refocusing, there's a lot of room for lost productivity. This lack of integration leads to redundant data entry and inconsistent information across systems. Such inefficiency not only wastes time but increases the likelihood of mistakes that risk compromising service quality and eroding customer trust.
Stay tuned for part two – where we cover four more challenges that impact teams. Including how inadequate training on digital tools and resistance to change can impact frontline service teams’ employee experience, and what organizations can do to solve these challenges.
Learn how Acumen can help HR and IT teams optimize digital work environments here.
