Call Recording Featured Article

While today’s companies spend a lot of time crowing about the excellence of their customer experience, far fewer are actually delivering, according to pretty much every customer poll taken in the last few years. Since this week was Customer Service Week, it’s worth taking a little time to examine why there is such a disconnect between the quality of the process companies think they are providing and the quality they are actually providing.

“Bad customer service happens every day, sometimes in ways that are blindingly obvious and more often in ways that are subtle,” wrote Micah Solomon for Forbes recently. “As leaders in an organization, we need to be able correct for these failures in providing service. In fact, the great leaders in the greatest customer-centric companies fill their days with responding to this constant challenge.”

Too often, customer experience plans are drafted in bits and pieces, with multiple departments contributing part of the plan. While the customer journey map looks great on paper, when it comes to execution, things begin to break down. The contact center and the marketing department may have prioritized customer needs in different ways, so a customer will be attended to quickly at first by one, but dropped to the bottom of the priority queue after transfer to the other. The company may have vastly overstated its technological capacity, leading to dropped calls, long hold times and reps repeatedly asking customers for their information in the same transaction.  According to Solomon, the causes often break down as follows:

It’s too slow or it’s too rushed. Agents that are improperly trained or using antiquated, poorly integrated technology may take forever about finding a resolution. On the flip side, they may be so under pressure to keep average handle time down that they rush customers off the phone before their issues are resolved.

Your schedules are off. Do you have the right number of agents on the phone and other communications media channels at the right time, or are you being caught understaffed during volume spikes? While no company can see into the future, having a top-notch workforce management solution in place to make and meet customer volume predictions is critical.

They’re being given incorrect answers. Nothing is more frustrating to a customer than when they receive conflicting information from a company. (A customer receives an overdue notice for a balance that doesn’t exist, but the contact center agrees that the balance doesn’t exist. So where’d the bill come from? Mars?) It’s important that customer support representatives work from the same, constantly updated and easy to access knowledge bases.

It’s impersonal or anonymous. This is important to get right. When customers call, you know who they are, so attempt to build some level of personalization into the transaction. It’s also important that reps identify themselves to customers. On the flip side, however make sure personalization doesn’t cross into the boundaries of “creepy.” A stranger on the other end of the phone using your children’s’ names for no reason can come across as stalker-ish.

It’s overly scripted. Customers want to speak with human beings when they call or initiate a chat. They’re not interested in speaking with a robot. Ensure your customer service reps are empowered to take care of the customer’s problem even if it means abandoning the script.

It’s effective and has follow-up. If you tell your customer you will take an extra charge off the bill, it’s important that you do so. Put a process in place to ensure that actions promised during customer transactions are followed up on, and that customers are sent a message after-the-fact – email is good – asking them if the transaction was resolved to their satisfaction.

Listen to the customers. Customers have information you need to perfect your support processes. Ensure that agents are listening to truly understand the problem. Consider using a call recording solution with analytics and keyword spotting to listen for trouble.

Customer experience excellence is not, and never will be, a part-time job. Agents and contact center managers are too busy to pay attention to the big picture. If you don’t have a dedicated team that works exclusively on the customer experience, chances are good you’re failing your customers.