Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Build Customer Loyalty in the Contact Center with Every Task
While contact centers are expected to accomplish a lot of tasks – not only supporting customers but selling, providing technical support, keeping up with changes in company policy or new products and services, training and more – it’s maintaining customer loyalty that should be job number one. After all, the oft-cited statistic is true: it costs far more to acquire new customers than it does to keep existing ones.
For this reason, most tasks undertaken by the contact center should be seen through the customer loyalty lens: how will this improve the experience for customers? What can we do to make transactions easier and faster? Are we connecting customers with certain issues to the right agents? Do agents have all the materials they need to service the customers properly?
According to a recent blog post by Chuck Ciarlo, CEO of Monet Software, building a strong customer loyalty platform relies on a number of processes, including quality assurance, listening, going off the script and courtesy and manners. The latter is critical, particularly in an era when one of customers’ top five complaints is rude contact center agents.
Quality assurance helps ensure that calls and other contacts are keeping up to the standards expected each day, every day. By introducing a “grading” element into the call monitoring process, contact center management can select random calls and measure them against the facility’s established guidelines.
“Many of these are defined as key performance indicators (KPIs), such as how quickly the caller can reach a call center, how quickly they can reach an agent, how quickly their issue can be resolved and the call closed, and how long they wait on hold during a call,” wrote Ciarlo. “Additional quality issues include agent courtesy, empathy with a dissatisfied customer, and the ability to follow procedures. While these will be more subjective than numbers-based KPIs, they are just as important to a successful operation.”
Listening is another critical element that helps build customer loyalty. Customers don’t want to be “talked at,” they don’t want to repeat themselves and they don’t want to be treated like a transaction or a customer record. Agents with good listening skills come across as empathetic – important from the “etiquette” perspective – and save time and eliminate mistakes.
“The job of an agent is not to listen to a customer until he or she hears a key word (order, return, complaint) that triggers a pre-scripted response. It is to actively listen to what is being said, and respond within the framework of call center policy, but in a way that acknowledges each customer individually by giving them the respect of the agent’s full attention,” wrote Ciarlo.
Just as listening is critical, so too is speaking like a human being and not a robot. Agents required to follow strict scripts cannot respond to customers the way they expect: with a customized plan of action designed to solve the customer’s issue quickly. Agents constrained by rigid scripts will likely hate their jobs, and employee engagement will be low…leading to poor customer engagement. Consider empowering agents by giving them some autonomy with which to do their jobs.
Finally, scheduling becomes critical to ensure that the techniques to bring about customer loyalty can be applied to customers in the most effective way. The best trained agents in the world can’t help customers if the customers are waiting on hold, and poor skill matches between agents and customers with lead to transfers, callbacks and other frustrating roadblocks. Ensure your schedule is flexible, robust and built on a mix of historical call data, exception planning and insight into the company’s current events.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi