Call Center Management Featured Article
Complaints Could Make or Break Your Call Center
How much do you enjoy a good customer complaint? In the world of direct customer contact, the nicest individual can turn into the customer from you know where in an instant. Especially when the complaint doesn’t have to be delivered in person, it seems there is nothing that’s out of bounds. For those in call center management, this reality means you have to train accordingly so all agents can stay focused on success.
A recent post on Call Center IQ by Jason Price suggests that instead of trying to follow the latest fad when it comes to customer care, why not get to the heart of what matters in quality customer service and how you can manage complaints in the process. His first point is for call center management to properly identify what they mean by performance improvement. It’s not enough to flood the center with activity – everything needs to have a purpose and everyone involved needs to understand the destination.
Secondly, he points out that if you really want to affect change, individuals involved have to actually do things differently. We tend to be creatures of habit and unless we implement the discipline to ensure change, we’ll easily fall back into the way we’ve always done things simple because it’s the way we’ve always done things. What people tend to forget about this theory is there’s a reason why you’re in a place that requires change – sticking with the status quo will get you nowhere.
At this point, it’s time to welcome the complaints. That may sound like something completely contrary to what those in call center management would like to do with their day, but how can you really drive change that improves the customer experience if you don’t understand the customer’s experience? Price suggests there are three reasons why good complaint management can drive improvements in service delivery: you can identify the most painful or inefficient segments of the customer experience; an open and well-management process exposes true dissatisfaction; and complaints offer clear evidence for analyzing the root cause of systematic issues.
When your primary goal is to connect with customers and solve their problems, an open and honest dialogue is the only way you can ensure you’re actually meeting their needs. Yes, the dialogue is sometimes delivered in the form of complaints, but then you have the opportunity to improve upon the situation and measure perception. With a managed process in place, call center management can focus on true improvements.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi