Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Rework Your Customer Support from the Bottom Up Instead of Top Down
Every company seems to have “improve customer service” on their to-do list, yet evidence shows us regularly that only a minority of companies seem to have truly mastered customer support. So why is it such a difficult concept to get right?
For starters, customer service involves people – at both ends of the phone – and people are imperfect. Customers get hot under the collar, agents get rushed or defensive. Better training in objections and complaint resolution (and keeping cool under pressure) can help ensure that agents are doing their part, as well as improved call center scheduling to ensure that there are enough agents available when customers reach out.
Another factor that makes customer support so complex today is information: not a lack of it, but too much of it. Analytics can help improve customer support, but they can quickly overwhelm some companies, according to a recent blog post by Shaun Belding writing for Customer Think.
“Sometimes, when Big Data gets involved, things can get mired in minutia,” he wrote. “It’s hard to be innovative when there are too many seemingly competing things to consider. Paralysis by analysis. There is also a risk in relying too much on theory, best practices and modelling. This can result in trying to jam square pegs into round holes.”
Ensure you’re looking at all the data, because there may be clues to what’s going wrong in your operation that you’re unaware of. But also ensure that you’re measuring the right things. It’s also helpful to switch from a “top down” approach to customer service in which operations decisions get made from the executive layer and become a mandate for the contact center, to a “bottom up” approach that starts with real customers.
Belding recommends an approach like the following:
- Select one of your customers. Just one. Start with a smaller one to keep things simple.
- Pull together four to six people to create an “innovation committee” of sorts.
- If it is a B2B [business-to-business] client, meet with them, either in-person or over the phone, to learn as much as you can about their company and how they use your product and service. This will help you tailor your approach to that customer going forward.
- Ask yourselves, “What can we do to improve the experience of this one customer?” Watch how your employees interact with them. Are your employees friendly? Are they proactive? Are they helpful? Do they seem to genuinely care about how satisfied the customer is? Examine how easy you are to do business with. Does this customer have to jump through any hoops? What could you do to make the interaction faster or more seamless?
- Ask yourselves, “What can we do to increase the value of our product or service so that we become indispensable to this one customer, and to keep this customer loyal to us?”
If the nature of your business is to end consumers, it’s still possible to use this approach. Playact different scenarios based on real customer interactions that may not have gone well. Where were the biggest roadblocks? What can you do to remove them? What kind of follow-up is in place to ensure resolutions are carried out? How can you make it up to the customer and keep him or her?
“Repeat this with a second customer, then with a third,” wrote Belding. “After you have done this a few times, you will begin to see patterns. You will begin to see little things that can be applied on a larger scale. If you involve a lot of people in your company in this exercise, it will begin to send the message through your company of how precious individual relationships with customers are.”
Edited by Alicia Young