May 28, 2015
Despite your best efforts to make your customer contact center the best it can be, if your customer service agents aren't as up to speed as your technology is, you may be headed for failure.
That’s the gist of the idea from a recent blog post by Chris Lawson, a regular contributor to the inContact blog and managing partner at Lawson Concepts, a company that provides market-leading technology solutions and services for contact centers.
“Those of us who manage contact centers tend to think of the customer experience as something like a short car trip: You drive from point A to point B, usually taking the shortest route to get there as quickly as possible,” Lawson says.
But he goes on to explain that, just like a road trip, a call center experience can involve all sorts of bumps, detours, and unexpected surprises. Having a plan always helps, but even the best plans can go awry. A military strategist once said, “No battle plan survives contact with the enemy because even the most brilliant plan loses touch with reality.” It’s the same with the customer experience, Lawson says.
Studies show that putting customers on hold is what really drives down customer satisfaction scores, which may mean your customer journey is already behind schedule within the first 60 seconds of the interaction while an agent frantically searches for a document that addresses the caller’s specific request. “In all likelihood, the legacy applications that agents use are not integrated,” Lawson explains. “After searching, agents are forced to cut, copy, and paste data or, worse yet, ask the customer to repeat the information.”
The challenge is this: As you add and modify documents—something that happens daily in most contact centers—agents must try to memorize more and more locations. They search shared network drives, websites, help systems, SharePoint sites, emails, and more. “When (if!) they find the right location, they must then search within it for the right document and skim its content to determine if it contains the answer they need,” he says. “If not, it’s back to square one. This process may repeat again and again, all while the customer is on hold.” And that is what leads to customer dissatisfaction.
Lawson recommends examining the various touchpoints in the flow of information in order to identify bottlenecks and better serve customers. “You’ll begin to understand how contact center and back-office agents arrive at their answers—what they go through and whether, in fact, the answers are what they should be. As an objective third party, we can bypass organizational barriers that often obscure both the symptoms and the root causes.”
For contact centers trying to prevent customer churn, this is an issue worth examining and addressing.