Workforce Management Featured Article
Kindness to Both Agents and Customers Goes a Long Way toward a Positive Customer Experience
In the pursuit of customer care excellence, most companies spend a lot of time examining and planning for the customer experience. They poll customers are about what they’d like to see, collect feedback and offer the latest and greatest options for customer support. While these are all great steps, it ignores the fact that there are two people in every customer experience: the customer and the contact center agent. If your goal is to treat your customers well, start by treating your customer support representatives well. Unhappy, stressed agents will never be able to offer the kind of service your customers want and expect.
In a recent blog post for Multi-Unit Franchising, John Tschohl, president of Service Quality Institute, emphasizes that practicing courtesy toward customers and workers can go a long way toward contact center excellence. When you’re dreaming of ways to improve life for your customers, include ways to improve life for your customer support agents.
“Employees do not go to work dreaming about how they can work exceptionally hard to make the company and the owner more money,” he wrote. “Be realistic. Many employees have personal problems. The more we can uplift the self-worth and self-image of employees, they become more productive and feel like there is a win-win relationship. In return they will deliver a higher level of excellence. Each of us has the responsibility to look after our own feelings. We need to give ourselves recognition for good work. And we need to commit ourselves to goals that are worthy of our abilities.”
Agents who are treated with kindness, courtesy and positive feedback by their managers will be more likely to hand those positive efforts to customers. Agents who are barked at, overworked and underappreciated will pass those stresses on to customers. It’s simply impossible to autocratically order an employee to “be nice” when he or she isn’t receiving the same courtesy in return. There is ample evidence that good contact center managers create good contact center agents.
“It costs you nothing but a little effort and the rewards are great,” wrote Tschohl. “Every human contact is an opportunity to give the gift of good feelings through the words you say. People can't read your mind; what you say is evidence that you care.”
Agents are, after all, under immense pressure today to deliver great experiences not only through the telephone, but through a whole host of other channels. Agents who are not prepared to engage with customers in a positive way through traditional channels won’t be able to handle crafting an ideal experience via digital channels. When you increase the number of touchpoints, you’re either increasing the opportunities to succeed or fail, and the positive message must be cohesive across channels, according to Mark Barrenechea blogging for the Web site Open Text Analytics.
“Digital technologies have introduced new customer touchpoints and increased opportunities to engage,” he wrote. “Since consumers often use more than one channel to interact with a brand (in some instances they use five or six), delivering uniform and relevant messages across all channels is crucial for return on marketing investments and customer satisfaction.”
“Uniformity” comes not only in the information passed to customers, but the tone and attitude of the agent. Putting ill-prepared and stressed out agents on multiple channels only presents the organization with more opportunities to pass on a negative message and a poor customer experience. Unify (News - Alert) the channels, unify the knowledge and unify the customer experience…but also make sure you’re unifying the positive attitude.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi
