Workforce Management Featured Article
Solving Customers' Biggest Headaches in the Contact Center
If you were to make a list of all your customers’ complaints, you’d probably find that a large majority of them are the same few complaints repeatedly. While you’re bound to get some weird outliers – the color of your Web site text or an obscure product complaint – it’s likely that the most strident complaints fall into the following categories.
The Problem: It’s Taking Forever to Resolve the Customers’ Problem
Often, contact center agents lack the information they require to solve a problem, so they’re relying on some other department, such as IT, billing or tech support, for an answer, in which case, the call seems to go on forever. Unfortunately in these cases, the contact center takes the brunt of the customer’s displeasure even though the fault doesn’t lie with them.
What You Can Do: Ensure that all company departments that touch the customer experience are properly integrated into call center processes so workers in IT, billing and tech support are trained to know the company’s customer support mission, and the information and knowledgebases are readily available to solve the problems. Alternatively, schedule a time to call the customer back if it seems like it’s going to take more than a few minutes and be certain that the call appointments are kept.
The Problem: The Customers’ Call Has Been Transferred Too Many Times
There is no bigger way to broadcast the unwelcome news that the contact center is in disarray than multiple transfers. It’s one of the prime reasons that customers lose their cool on calls.
What You Can Do: To solve the problem, use your company’s quality monitoring and recording solution to identify calls that are being transferred more than once, and begin categorizing them so you can solve the problems that are causing calls to be transferred. It might be a training issue: the agents simply don’t have the expertise for certain types of calls, or don’t have the right information available. It could even be a fault with your company’s automated call routing system.
The Problem: Customers Are Getting Different Answers from the Contact Center
There’s nothing more frustrating than to call a company and be given conflicting information. In many cases, agents may be handing out wrong information because they don’t have a real answer and they’re guessing.
What You Can Do: For starters, identify the biggest knowledge gaps for agents and fill them with training and better knowledgebases. Also, tell agents that it’s better to admit they don’t know the answer to a question than to make something up or guess. Have them use positive language such as, “I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m going to bring in an expert to help find out.”
Edited by Maurice Nagle
