Are You Listening to Your Customers?

How scripted are your customer care agents expected to be on a given transaction? Your answer can have everything to do with the level of satisfaction your customers are experiencing. If agents have to be scripted at all times, it’s likely your customers aren’t being heard. If agents have the power to converse with customers in a way that they actually hear them, your outcomes are likely to be much better.

It’s not unusual in a workforce management environment in the call center that agents are scripted. After all, the faster the agent can get through a call, the better the metrics at the end of the day. But if the metrics are great and customer satisfaction is low, what have you achieved? Those who actually pay attention to their customers help create much better outcomes.

Workforce management solutions provider Monet Software (News - Alert) recently posted a blog on this topic, stressing that there is a difference between actual listening and hearing what customers have to say. The call centers with the best outcomes overall focus their efforts on gaining insights from every customer on every call. Even comments made in passing offer valuable insight into satisfaction with a service or product.

This kind of information is valuable for business development and marketing, eliminating the routine transaction. But are you truly paying attention to your customers? One way to find out is to know if you’re getting too many repeat calls from the same customers on the same issue. When this happens, either agents aren’t equipped to deal with the issue or there is a problem that can’t easily be solved.

Another way to determine if you’re actually listening to customers is if calls are repeatedly made asking for a particular service or product that you don’t have. This means there is a demand for it. If you haven’t investigated the potential of adding the product or service to your portfolio or studied what it would mean to the bottom line, you’re still not listening to your customers.

Finally, survey your customers to determine whether or not you’re truly listening. This is a great way to learn what customers want to be asked. While it can be tempting to let the analytics do the work for you, there are still limitations to what you can learn if you’re not truly listening. The direct approach is sometimes the best approach if you want to learn the truth.

Workforce management is designed to help you keep your agents on track and optimize employee time while managing customer interactions. The best way to do that is to truly listen to your customers so everyone involved can produce better outcomes.

Edited by Alicia Young