Customer satisfaction is increasingly important thanks to the Internet and social media. If a customer is not happy, he can easily go elsewhere. Similarly, a bad customer service experience can have a ripple effect on sales thanks to social media and the ease with which customers now can communicate their dissatisfaction.
While much of the battle for good customer satisfaction scores takes place in the contact center, it isn’t always contact center agents who are to blame. Often, according to a recent blog post by contact center solutions provider LiveLook, the problem of poor customer service leads back to upper management.
“Corporate culture is established in a top-to-bottom approach, which means managers and executives need to set the tone for quality service,” noted the LiveLook blog post. “This is easier said than done, and many business leaders might be unaware of some of the mistakes they are making that lead to a poor dedication to helping consumers.”
LiveLook highlights three such mistakes: a lack of standardized hiring practices, weak oversight, and a failure to innovate.
The customer service problems start with bad hiring practices. While the agent ultimately fails to deliver for the customer, the problem can begin as early as the hiring process if management does not have a proper hiring procedure in place.
Investing in the right human capital to deliver good customer service means having a robust, systematic hiring process that is not led by hunches or used to train up employees for other departments. The hiring of agents needs to be more than haphazard, and it needs to focus on the core competencies agents need to deliver on good customer care.
Organization also helps, and again this goes back to management. For any department or initiative to succeed, there needs to be good leadership. But far too often when there is a problem there is no process to ensure good leadership to resolve the challenges. It is just hoped that someone will step up, and sometimes this doesn’t happen.
So upper management needs to monitor contact center performance more closely, and have a process to clearly assign accountability and ensure the contact center is firing on all cylinders.
Third, LiveLook suggests that a lack of innovation also is hampering the delivery of good customer service. With the rise of smartphones and social media, consumer expectations are changing. Businesses need to keep up, and this calls for constant adaptation and innovation to meet the changing expectations of customers.
One technology that firms should consider is co-browsing technology, which enables agents to screen-share with consumers to help them solve their issues. This can be on-device like Amazon’s Mayday button, or it can be in-browser to help customers complete their orders or find the information they need.
Far too many contact centers are living in the past, and this leads to poor customer service.
Edited by Alisen Downey