Call Center Management Featured Article
Poor Call Center Management & Customer Support Horror Stories
Every company likes to save money. Increasingly, American companies are mandating energy savings by shutting off lights and computers when they’re not in use, for example, or installing telecommunications accounting solutions to ensure that company and networks aren’t being used improperly. While these are great ideas, there are some not-so-great ideas making their way into organizations today: saving money at the expense of the customer relationship.
When an agent picks up a customer call, that agent has just become the company’s ambassador representing its most valuable asset: a customer. When agents are poorly trained, apathetic, or incapable of doing the work, their employers might as well be lighting hundreds (or thousands) of dollars on fire. In a recent blog post, Monet Software (News - Alert) CEO Chuck Ciarlo highlighted some of the shocking (but all too probable) horror stories happening in customer service today.
“A corporate customer called a computer company to report that the 12 laptops he had purchased were not working,” wrote Ciarlo. “The agent’s response: ‘What do you want me to do about it?’”
The question that should be asked of that agent’s manager (just before he or she is fired) is, “How could you let this happen? How could a person so incompetent be permitted to pick up a call from such an important customer?"
In many cases, agents are hired at low cost, but hiring managers never attempt to determine if that person has the smarts or common sense to speak to customers, as Ciarlo outlines in another cringe-worthy example.
“Another cable TV customer called to cancel service that had originally been ordered in her husband’s name,” he wrote. “Her husband had recently died. When she explained this to the agent, the agent responded that he would still have to contact them to cancel.”
Of course, it’s important to remember that most agents are competent and properly trained. Quality management, however, is absolutely needed today to ensure that the wrong people aren’t handling your customer calls. Poor attitudes, apathy or malicious behavior, angry responses or basic incompetence (consider the Comcast (News - Alert) customer who was infamously put on hold for three hours) can not only damage a single customer relationship, their tales can be spread far and wide on social media for the rest of the country to shake their heads at.
Many companies today believe they provide better customer service than they actually do. Research from customer survey company ForeSee found that most businesses today achieved customer satisfaction scores around 70 on a possible scale of 100. While this isn’t awful, it isn’t great, either.
Saving money is great, but if it’s leading to poor quality contact center agent candidates and hires, then the organization hasn’t saved any money. If the turnover in the contact center is so high that most agents are still new or even trainees, it’s actually costing the company more in hiring and training costs and lost opportunities with customers than the company thinks it’s saving.
All agents will have a bad day now and then – it’s human nature, and contact center work is stressful – but good managers need to spot the warning signs of poor performance and take action before that agent is permitted to speak with customers. It’s a common sense idea, but still not widely observed in contact centers today: you cannot begin to succeed with customer engagement until you have mastered employee engagement.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi