Call Center Management Featured Article
Knowing the Preferences of the Customer Base is Critical for Call Center Management Success
Does your company ever get stuck in the past? It’s not uncommon to develop strategies and stick with them to the point of hurting progress or even putting off the customer. It’s also not uncommon to look at industry research and accept it at face value instead of evaluating the source and the impact. For call center management, doing so could greatly affect your outcomes.
For instance, a recent Business2Community post highlighted that most customer service divisions base their operations on the preferences of the average 77-year old customer. Why? This is the age where the customer prefers a live phone interaction 2.5 times more than self-service. The same ratio is believed by executives to be the number of times customers prefer to interact with a company.
Now take a step back and ask yourself how many of those 77-year old customers are placing a call to your center after they were on your website trying to solve an issue. We know that 60 percent of phone volume today is the customer following up after a visit to the website and that the core website users are a tad bit younger than 77-years old. And, these customers want to be able to self-serve; they don’t want to have to switch channels simply because your self-service channels are inefficient or fail to meet their needs.
When this happens and the customer has to place a call to your center, they don’t want to have to repeat all of the steps they just completed online, but this is a common experience. Not only are channels lacking integration, even routing calls between agents can fail to produce a seamless experience for the customer. Whether the caller is 22 or 77, this is a frustrating outcome. It also demonstrates that your company has failed to make the proper investments in the customer experience, which doesn’t bode well for loyalty or residual revenue opportunities.
If this represents your approach to call center management, you’re catering to the wrong generation and it’s time to reevaluate your strategy. Customers not only want access to self-service, they also want demonstrated integration and competency across all channels. If a live agent is needed on a call, that agent needs to know the journey the customer took to that point and provide resolution quickly.
To that end, you not only need to be able to evolve along with changing customer needs, you also need to train your workforce to do the same. The proper way to handle live calls is still important training, but your agents also need to be efficient at multi-channel management to optimize the customer experience.
Unless your target audience is truly the 77-year old consumer, it’s time for call center management to take a step back and reevaluate your approach to customer care.
Edited by Maurice Nagle