Call Center Scheduling Featured Article
Presenting a United Face to the Customer: Solutions Integration Helps Avoid Fiascos
Most customers – if not all – have had at least a few customer support fiascos during their life. They’re hard to forget: they involve multiple calls and contacts to a company that can’t seem to find any answers, or offers conflicting information. Snippy customer support personnel put the call on hold repeatedly, transfer it multiple times and still can’t find an answer. Retailers ship the wrong products, or provide defective products and make it difficult to get a return or resolution.
Though these experiences are common, the damage they can do a brand cannot be underestimated. Curt Barry of F. Curtis Barry & Company, writing for Multichannel Merchant, recently recounted a nightmarish scenario with a new washer and a highly incompetent appliance retailer. He noted that often what happens to bring these situations about is a complete disconnect between the retailer, the sales organization and the contact center. The contact center or salesperson is often “left out to dry” to handle angry customer calls that are the result of incompetence elsewhere in the organization. As a result, they go off script to try and please customers, but their organization won’t back them up.
“No one with any customer service, sales and marketing smarts can be listening to this nonsense,” wrote Barry. “You have to feel sorry for the salesman who wasn’t trained or guided by a supervisor or a lead. And the contact center people are hung out to dry; just hoping you’ll hang up or the line will get disconnected.”
Beyond that, however, a lack of training to handle difficult customer calls is also hurting the contact center. Agents are given a modicum of training and told to follow a script. When customers call with real problems, they are powerless to help.
“Are you working every week to train and coach your employees as they serve your customers?” asked Barry. “Their performance is what completes the sales process and books the sale in the bank.”
But one of the biggest sources of the problem is siloed customer information in multiple systems that don’t work across departments, so the different functions of a company – contact center, sales, delivery, warehouse and service – cannot communicate with one another and collaborate. This is the result of a piecemeal customer support system incapable of smooth interaction with its different components.
By putting into place solutions for scheduling, CRM, knowledge bases, analytics, reporting and more that work across multiple customer-facing departments in the company, companies can avoid a lot of the pitfalls that can sink them and cause them to lose customers for life.
Edited by Stefania Viscusi