Beware: Callers Are Becoming Defensive About Sales Tactics
December 1, 2015
This past summer, the International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) and inContact, a cloud-based call center innovator, surveyed call center leaders, asking them the same set of questions they had posed to consumers in an earlier study. The results were, to say the least, startling, and those results have now been made public.
In a new report, “Smarter Service for the Connected Customer”, the findings show that what contact center leaders believe about their business and customers’ perceptions of those same beliefs differ widely.
For example, it appears that customers perceive call centers as being more interested in selling than in providing service. When both sides were asked whether they believed contact centers put more effort into selling, 80 percent of customers said “yes,” while only 12 percent of contact centers agreed.
It was also noted that poor service can have a huge financial impact on the bottom line. When managers were asked if they thought customers might leave after a bad call center experience, only 19 percent said yes. But when asked the same question, a staggering 80 percent of customers said they would, in fact, take their business elsewhere. But that’s not just some random finding.
A recent infographic from the Temkin Group highlighted a number of key areas where a poor experience can hurt the bottom line, including the following:
- Customers buy more from companies that provide good service;
- Customers are more forgiving when companies generally provide good service; and
- Customers trust companies more when they provide good service.
Are we seeing a pattern here?
Finally, customers were also asked about their relationship with a company. One survey question asked customers whether they expected to continue speaking with the same agent when they switched from online chat to the phone. Not surprisingly, 64 percent of customers essentially said, “Of course.” Yet only 20 percent of contact center managers felt the same way. Of those same customers, 67 percent wanted to speak with the same representative if they had to call back, but only 24 percent of managers felt that was “feasible.”
Obviously, there’s a lot of gray area here, but the bottom line is this: While the line between the two sides is clear, the question remains: Who’s going to fix it? You can purchase the report and draw your own conclusions.