If there is anything customers complain most about when it comes to poor customer service experiences, it’s long hold times. Along with unanswered e-mails and disconnected calls, it frustrates important customers at a critical time in their relationship with a company.

One specific area that threatens customer loyalty and brand perception is self service dead ends. This occurs when a customer has exhausted all of their options on the touch tone or IVR, and has no other option but to hang up on the call, and on the company.

For most companies today, the conversation with their customers begins with self-service portals –whether it is a mobile app or a kiosk at a retail location.  The potential for trouble with these seemingly terrific self-service offerings comes when options run out.

A customer on a website looking for answers to a question and cannot find what they need, for example, has to click the ‘CONTACT US’ page. This is a dead end. A customer surfing through their TV and finds a movie he or she would like to watch may only find a phone and dial a 1-800 number to gain access to the movie.

(Click here to see a specific way to combat this issue from VHT).

From this point, the spiral downward from calling to waiting on hold, and having to repeat account info before a live agent takes the call, further frustrates customers who just want to talk to a live person.

In fact, chances are if someone is not using the self service option offered and they are calling into a customer service line, they want to talk to a live person.

To move beyond a point where the conversation strategy is broken, companies need a plan that engages customers and helps them get tasks while keeping them satisfied with the business.

This conversation strategy must have resources like knowledge bases, CRM and communications systems and needs strategic elements like task completion, empowerment, multichannel and effective interfaces to ensure a positive experience.

Poor conversation strategies can distract customers away from their tasks including redirecting customers to other portals or sending them in circles or pushing commercials to them. Instead, an effective conversation strategy provides a positive experience so customers feel like you are helping them to get things done easily.

The solution: multichannel callback solutions help to ensure a positive experience occurs consistently across all channels.

To hear more about this topic and the specifics check out:  “Surviving Self Service Dead Ends: Building Customer Loyalty with a MultiChannel Conversation Strategy.”