3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

As the world becomes more digital today, more customers than ever are seeking support via digital channels such as email, Web, mobile app, social media and text messaging. Contact center agents have been perfecting their telephone manner for decades, and now they’re facing a new challenge: effective communication with the written word. An agent who does well on the telephone may need to brush up on written skills. We’ve gotten used to communicating via text, for example, with friends and family members. What works for personal communications won’t work for business communications.

For in-person customer support, workers are told to smile and keep their facial expressions pleasant. For telephone calls, workers are instructed to avoid using negative language, speaking too loudly or using an aggressive tone of voice. But what should we be telling customer support agents who spend the day communicating largely via text?

For starters, they’ll need to formalize their language a bit. “I will ship 2U next week” isn’t acceptable. Not everyone is aware of text messaging abbreviations, and some customers might find that the extreme informality is disrespectful and unprofessional. Companies should be sure to use spell checking in their communications platforms for text messaging, and provide some canned material in the form of scripting. Agents with very poor grammar and spelling skills may simply not be suited for customer support via written channels.

Secondly, agents need to be sure they get the full story out of customers up front and that they are actively listening to what customers are saying, according to a recent blog post by Olga writing for Provide Support.

“Before you start asking questions, ensure your customer has finished his story and you analyzed all the information provided,” she wrote. “Only after this you can ask for additional details or clarifications. Interrupting customers and not listening to them is the most frequent mistake customer service agents make. And unfortunately, in most cases it leads to poor customer experience and dissatisfied customers.”

Rather than letting agents loose to chat in any way they see fit, it might be worth creating a formal roadmap with scripting elements to help them be effective text message communicators. It might urge agents to check a customers’ history before they begin asking questions, or even conduct a simple Web search.

“Before you start asking your customer questions ensure you have all needed information about the issue to avoid dumb and unnecessary questions,” wrote Olga. “If you do not know something you can use Google (News - Alert) to get some general information for better understanding. If a search engine can clear your doubts and give you an answer it is better to use it instead of asking your customers and showing you are not as technically savvy as you are expected to be.”

When it is time for agents to begin asking questions, help them avoid any aggressive tones or phrases. Responses like “Why would you do that?” in response to a customer relating a step he or she took in using a product, for example, come across as unnecessarily aggressive. Keep questions simple and avoid crowding the communication with unnecessary information.

Most importantly, keep an eye on the quality of written communications like text with rigorous quality monitoring so you can spot problems before they grow.