3rd Party Remote Call Monitoring Feature

Most companies would like to improve the state of their customer support, but with so many ways to go about it, many organizations get lost in the weeds. Should we buy new software? Should we change our employee training? Should we offer new returns policies? The possibilities are endless, and rather than spend money with no clear return on investment, companies are paralyzed and do nothing.

There is some evidence that what customer support agents say to customers – and how they say it – is critical to positive customer engagement. Many contact centers engage in some form of scripting, but after that, they often cross their fingers and hope it works. Third party remote call monitoring for quality can help organizations understand how exchanges between agents and customers are building up or detracting from the customer relationship.

Increasingly, there is a place for psychology when it comes to customer support. Research by the University of British Columbia and published recently in the Journal of Applied Psychology has yielded some important clues in how language can change the customer experience. Researchers analyzed 36 hours of calls and over 100,000 words between a Canadian contact center’s agents and customers using transcripts and computerized text analysis.

They found that aggressive language in customer-agent calls was common. More than 80 percent of the calls contained aggressive customer language or interruptions. When customers were not aggressive towards employees, fewer than five per cent of calls had customer service problems, such as an employee making a blunt comment or using a raised voice. When customers used personal language to customers such as “Your product is terrible” rather than “The product is terrible,” the calls were far less successful. When customers used the pronouns “you” and “your,” or interrupted agents, customer service worsened in more than 35 percent of calls. The researchers also found that these problematic effects were significantly reduced when customers used positive words like “great” and “fine,” suggesting that customers might be able to help employees provide better service by using more positive words.

On the flip side, agents who are schooled to diffuse situations in which customers are using personal or aggressive language could potential turn a significant number of bad calls into good calls. “Don’t take it personally” is good advice, but better advice involves helping agents understand how they can encourage an angry customer to alter his or her own language.

"In general, when customers use aggressive words or phrases to personally target customer service employees, or when they interrupt the person they are talking to, we found that the employee's negative reaction is much stronger," said study co-author Danielle van Jaarsveld, associate professor at the UBC Sauder School of Business.

Contact center managers should consider a formal call monitoring program using quality monitoring solutions or third-party remote call monitoring services to ensure that agents encountering negative customer language are taking the recommended steps of preventing their own language from becoming negative.