You have spent a ton of money on your call center. Yet you are getting horrible feedback from your customers. Your agents complains that most of your customers are angry when they talk to them. Irrespective of what they do their customers are still unhappy. Your agents are getting burned out dealing with angry customers. Most likely your customer is angry and frustrated by the time they reach an agent.
You may have invested in the best call center solution. But you may be missing out simple things that can change the customer experience. Below are few things we have seen that can make the customer feel important. None of this will cost the company a fortune.
Fix Your IVR
- Get a real person to record the IVR messages. If not, use a good AI based tool do the text to speech. A horrible text to speech gives a bad impression when a user call. It gives the feeling of a cheap company.
- Get rid of “Please listen to the entire message as our options have changed” from your IVR. Your customer has better things to do than remembering your IVR options.
- Don’t start your IVR saying that you are experiencing higher than usual call volume. When you say that every time your customers call, you lose your credibility. They know you are not staffed well or lying.
- Don’t give options that most people don’t need. For example, I never called my bank to find out the balance. I can see it on my phone without any effort. So why make your customers go through listening unwanted messages. There may be users who may call to get the balance.
- Use the right pace for your IVR so that it is a good balance for all generations.
- Give an option to reach a human being. Nothing beats talking to a human being.
Play Some Good Music
If you are planning to put your customers on hold for a long time, please get some good soothing music. It is not fun listening to horribly recorded low quality music (aka noise) for 45 minutes straight. Also, every few minutes let them know that your business is still alive, and the system is not broken.
Stop Advertising While on Hold
The last thing your customer want is hearing your advertisement when they need help. Instead focus on how to get them the help they need. You give them great support and they will come back and buy more without having you advertise.
Give Call Back Option
This is great way to save some money for your business and bring down your customer frustration. Every minute your customer is waiting, you are paying your service provider. It may be pennies, but it can add up over the time when your call center is big enough. Give the customer a call back option. Let them focus on something more important like feeding the kid or their cat. Listening to horrible music or advertisement for 45 minutes is not going to give you good scores.
Give Them a Text Message Before Call Back
It is frustrating when the support calls you back and you are on another important call. In these days of non-stop spam calls, you may end up not answering the call because you did not recognize the number. I was pleasantly surprised when I called California DMV and got that option. They will send you a text you before you receive the call back so that you can be prepared.
Use a Smart Authentication Mechanism
Cut down the time your agent has to spent asking mothers maiden name and SSN. Sign up with some of the smart authentication mechanisms available today. It can save your company money and improve customer satisfaction.
Give Your Agents a Desk Phone and Good Headset
You waited in the queue for 30 minutes, finally got an agent and now you can barely hear your agent speaking. Your support agent could be working from home with a laptop connected to a poor wireless network. Other applications are straining your wireless network and your voice quality is suffering. Your windows laptop decided to give you a blue screen or did a mandatory reboot in the middle of a call. A desk phone with a good headset can solve that problem.
Take The Customer Number for Call Back
You finally managed to get a live human after listening to horrible music for 45 minutes. Then, there is dead air. You cannot hear anything. You realized that your call got disconnected. You are debating whether to call and wait for another 45 minutes. Get a call back number from your customer so that if you get disconnected you have a way to reach them back.
Do a Warm Hand-Off
Often times you will have to transfer the call to another department. Make sure someone is available before you transfer. It is frustrating for customers to narrate entire story multiple times.
Summary
A lot of small things can add up to improve your customer experience. It doesn’t need any groundbreaking technology. It’s how you make your customers feel from the time they decided to dial your support number.
Don’t make it hard to reach an agent or put so many frustrating things before they reach the customer. It will only make the life of your agents horrible. A happy customer brings you more business than any advertisement.
