4 Tips To Make Your Call Center Worth Calling

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1000 American Consumers were asked if they would rather clean a toilet or contact customer service via an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system in a research by Aspect for the 2017 Aspect Consumer Experience Index. The survey revealed that 39% of customers would rather clean a toilet than use an IVR to resolve their complaints!

This statistic does not really come as a surprise to me, almost everyone has had their own share of a horrible call centre experience, myself inclusive. From ridiculously long queues before being connected with an agent, to long hold times or dealing with agents who have a bad attitude or are unknowledgeable. These experiences have left a bad taste in the average customer’s mouth, so much that very few people contact a call centre today with confidence that their issues will be resolved. For most, contacting call centres is a gamble – they do it with their fingers crossed.

This video below depicts the average customer experience with a call centre

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opXfjECaTIA

Do you work in a call centre or manage one? Does this video remind you of your workplace? If yes, then there’s serious work to do. Here are 4 things you can do today to make your Call Center worth calling.

#1. Go Omnichannel

Omni-channel experience is a multi-channel approach to serving customers in a way that creates an integrated and cohesive customer experience no matter what channel the customer reaches out with. This means the customers can reach you via the web, telephone, email, social media or Live chat and also easily switch between them, without any major drawbacks such as loss of information or the need to repeat or reiterate

Going Omnichannel will give your support team a sense of control and empowers them to better resolve customer complaints as they have data with all relevant history and customer contact details. This is without a doubt more seamless and user-centric and makes it easy for customers to reach out and get their issues resolved.

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#2. Keep Hold Times At A Minimum

Keeping customers on hold for too long is a sure way of giving them a nightmare experience with your call centre. I have been put on hold once for about 30 minutes, which is nothing compared to the customer who was placed on hold for 5 hours, 40 minutes and one second by an Australian Airline (Read: 10 Customer Service Facts That Would Blow Your Mind).

Nobody likes being put on hold but sometimes it is unavoidable, what’s important is keeping the hold time to a minimum. Please do not place customers on hold for more than 3 minutes. If the customers’ issue takes longer than that –

  • Offer a call-back
  • Break up the hold time – Support agents can give the customer status updates every 2 or 3 minutes.

Combining short hold times with regular updates will keep the customers happy and a lot more satisfied with the services.

#3. Promote Customer Centricity

Having a customer-centric culture in your call centre (and entire organization) will yield significant improvement in the quality of experience customers have when they make contact. This starts with a customer service vision, without a vision of what your service standards are supposed to be, your agents will not have a clear direction as to what to do for sure to ensure the service standards are met.

Hire right by recruiting the best customer support employees who have the attitude and personality to excel in service, look for those who will go out of their way to thoroughly help your customers with their concerns and encourage them to be creative and think outside the box and to resolve customer concerns rather than enforcing rigid adherence to set procedures and processes. If you hire the right people, empower them and promote a customer first mindset in your call centre, customer satisfaction rates are bound to be high.

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#4. Train Continuously

Employee training is not something that should be done once and then forgotten, especially in a contact centre. Your contact centre will receive a lot of enquiries on a wide range of issues. It is important that your agents have good knowledge of all products and service offered by the organization.

This makes it important to have periodic refresher training programs that cover product knowledge and customer service skills. Such programs will help your team refocus on the basics which most people tend to forget over time, it also ensures everyone is on the same page. The training programs should focus on improving product knowledge and the performance of your support agents.

If you aren’t meeting your customers’ needs effectively through your call centre, the customer experience will be negative. The customers won’t think it is worth the effort calling and your reputation will quickly be on the line. Your contact centre is a key player when it comes to determining customer loyalty and long-term profitability of your business. Make it worth calling!

Kelechi Okeke
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