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Over-Scripting Can Turn Call Center Agents into Parrots

By Tracey E. Schelmetic, TMCnet Contributor

It has been estimated that about 90 percent of the service interactions in the call center are routine, often-repeated questions. To ensure that the information they hand out is uniform and the language is positive and engaging, many call centers respond to these routine calls with scripted responses that are essentially read or memorized by agents. This way, call centers keep average handle time (AHT) under control and ensure that all calls are answered in a timely manner.

So this means scripts are good for contact centers, right?

Well, yes and no. While scripts are certainly suitable for many types of interactions – most notably outbound calling – when it comes to inbound calling, scripts can be rather limiting and force agents to sound more like robots and less like real human beings.

“Employee engagement can suffer when agents are restricted in how they interact with customers, leaving them feeling like parrots only able to read from a script,” writes 1to1media's Cynthia Clark.

This can lead to job dissatisfaction, which turns quickly to burnout and then transforms into high agent turnover, which is never good news for a contact center. On the customer side, it can leave customers feeling patronized and unsatisfied, confirming his or her suspicion that to your company, one customer is much like another one. Most importantly, it can often leave the customer's question unanswered or issue unaddressed.

Shanakaran Nair, president for strategy, consulting, and delivery at Servion, told 1to1media that for more complex calls – those that don't involve asking for a balance or paying a bill – scripts put customer relationships at risk.

“Nearly all poor customer experience comes in from this kind of interaction – and almost by definition it is very difficult to script an agent for the non-routine calls,” said Nair.

So where do you use scripts and where do you avoid them? Finding the right balance could be one of the keys to setting the right tone with customers. Nair recommends one approach, which is classifying agents by their skills for more routine calls or more complex calls.

“Perhaps companies should try to have a set of agents who have better interpersonal skills are able to deal with customers without being scripted for the non-routine calls and set some rules where such calls are moved to this 'elite' team whenever they occur,” he said.

While it's tempting to want to account for your agents' every word in order to keep calls short and convey information in the fastest way possible, it can do more harm than good. No agent wants to feel like a parrot, and no customer wants to discuss his or her account with a parrot.