Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Every Company Makes Mistakes With Customers: It's What They Do after That Counts
Even at companies with a reputation for the best customer service, mistakes happen. A support team is only as strong as its weakest link, and inevitably the day will come when:
- A new employee makes a mistake
- An experienced employee under personal stress loses her temper
- A breakdown occurs in the contact center’s technology
- A manager with the flu is unavailable to provide guidance
Customer support centers are run by humans, and humans make mistakes. So while it’s of course critical to have a great customer support infrastructure, it’s also important to have a plan to make amends to customers who have a bad experience. Increasingly, the customer support industry is calling it “customer service recovery,” according to a recent article by Erandi Palihakkara writing for the Huffington Post. Whether you keep a dissatisfied customer or not will depend on how you handle the aftermath of the mistake.
“For a customer, there is nothing more frustrating than a company that does not take responsibility for their wrongful actions,” wrote Palihakkara. “Not only does this exhibit arrogance and lack of humility on the part of the business, it shows that they do not value the importance of the customer relationships. More often than not, employees tend to either evade blame or place blame on someone else. This can prove to be extremely harmful to the brand as it will demonstrate a lack of unification of the team.
Some companies have specially trained retention specialists, or agents who are very skilled at getting to the root of a problem, calming and placating a customer and offering some kind of reparation to that customer. With a team of specialists whose job it is to resolve problems, action can be taken faster, which is important to the customer, according to Palihakkara.
“Often, the response time for the resolution of an issue is very high due to long chains of command or lack of prioritization,” she wrote. “The longer a customer has to wait for an issue to be resolved, the more the strain on the customer-business relationship.”
With a formal incident resolution process in place, companies can ensure that customers who run into troubles are being given extra attention as soon as possible. Managers should be able to receive alerts at each step of the resolution process so that no one mistakenly believes that someone else is handling the issue. Companies can also track their restitution actions after-the-fact and analyze them to determine how they can be made better.
It’s critical that companies acknowledge the problem and offer a heart-felt apology to the customer. Simply saying “Sorry,” however, probably won’t cut it many customers. It’s a key first step, but customers also expect action from a company. A discount, a reimbursement or partial credit, priority status in future calls queues or a bump to premium status (at least for a short while) can be a great way to show customers they are valued.
Finally, managers should use the mistakes as teaching opportunities for agents. Document what happened and why it happened, and us it as a case study to avoid the mistake in the future.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi