Call Center Management Featured Article
How Call Center Management Can Keep Disputes to a Minimum
Has a customer ever called your call center with a complaint? If the answer is no, chances are pretty high that you don’t work in a call center or that you’ve just opened your doors in the last hour. One of the realities of the call center is that customers will call and complain, whether they have a sound reason to do so or not. How you handle that complaint, however, dictates whether the customer will return.
When a complaint is more than just the customer calling in with a problem, call center management may need to get involved. This is especially true when the customer can’t get what they need from the frontline agent and wants to escalate the call. At that point, dispute resolution needs to kick in so as to control the damage on the other end of the call. While you might not be able to save every customer, you can at least minimize the churn.
Putting call recording at the top of your priority list is what gives you the tools you need to mitigate the damage that can result from disputes. Consider the customer who calls in and claims an agent promised her last week that she would receive a refund on her product because it failed to meet her expectations? She even cites the agent’s name and time of the call. Without proof that the conversation ever happened, how do you satisfy the caller and still protect your margin?
Of course the answer is you don’t – you can’t have both. But, if you could access a record of the call and listen to the conversation, you’ll know what was actually promised to the customer. You can also play the recording for the customer, especially the part where she actually accepted a replacement of the product as a full refund was not an option on the table.
This particular example is not necessarily earth shattering, but it could point to problems with the way the agent handled the call that may have led the customer to believe something false. It could also point to problems with the training process if the agent didn’t handle the call properly and it escalated too quickly. Training the agent on the right way to handle the situation in the future is only possible if you know what went wrong in the first place.
If the customer decides they want to take legal action, the recorded call could be the thing that alters the outcome of a case, or even prevent it in the first place.
The point is, complaints are going to come and some will turn into disputes. Put a strategy in place to resolve disputes before call center management has to get involved and you’ll not only produce happier customers, you’ll also keep down the cost of doing business.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi