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Eliminating The Roadblocks To Superior Customer Service

by Michael Schein - May 24, 2010

Eliminating The Roadblocks To Superior Customer Service by Michael Schein Michael.schein@resultstel.com, 954-921-2400 ext.123

Less than a decade ago the contact center sector was almost single-mindedly focused on reducing costs, but times have changed. In a recent survey of top executives from major North American firms, “customer experience strategy” was named as the biggest obstacle to success, with most respondents confessing they had little knowledge of how to fix this problem. The reason for this shift in focus comes down to profitability. During the period that most firms were fixated on reducing expenses, those few companies that managed to foster brand strength, loyalty, and retention by concentrating on strong phone service made more money than those who gave these areas short shrift.

The Challenges of Delivering Consistent Quality Performance

There are a few main challenges that prevent contact centers from effectively driving a high level of consistent customer service. These are a limited talent pool, a lack of objective standards, training shortcomings, and knowledge base/search engine drawbacks.

Limited Talent Pool

Contact centers have notoriously high levels of attrition. The costs of maintaining a call center facility are substantial, and every empty seat translates into money lost. Management often has to quickly fill seats with whatever “belly buttons” they can find, regardless of whether the new hires possess the necessary talent, voice quality, or empathy.

Shortcomings of Product Knowledge Training

Students typically only remember 20% of what they learn in the classroom, and cramming new hires’ heads full of information is often the norm in the contact center world. Unfortunately, many of the programs that representatives are hired to handle are complex, and agent error leads to poor customer experiences. Sometimes call center managers happen upon agents with superior memories, natural call handling skills, and the initiative to seek out additional training, but counting on this is not a reliable strategy.

Knowledge Base and Search Engine Problems

Many organizations invest a great deal of time and money in the creation of extensive knowledge base systems to drive customer satisfaction. While giving agents access to information is important, the recent craze for these tools has often created as many issues as it has solved. Often times organizations teach representatives to use a proprietary or client-based search engine to help them navigate the overabundance of work instructions and step actions. With these internal search engines, agents who type in a topic or question see a number of possible links to appropriate information. A search might result in anywhere from 5 to 30 pages of links, from which the agent is expected to locate the one needed to address the customer’s question.

At this point:

1) The agent can spend the time to find the best link, causing high average handle times and
unhappy customers.

2) The agent can put the customer on hold and get the answer from a supervisor, causing even
higher average handle times while waiting for an available supervisor. Furthermore, there is no
real guarantee that the supervisor has the correct information.

3) The agent can ignore the knowledge base and rely on imperfect memory to address the
customer’s issue. An agent only has to give one wrong answer for a customer to become
dissatisfied.

Lack of Objective Standards

If an agent shows disrespect or lacks empathy, the customer will immediately consider the interaction to be negative. No amount of empathy training or speech coaching can fully eliminate this problem. It is inevitable that the workforce will consist of agents with a wide range of deeply entrenched speaking styles and personalities. Additionally, on most call floors there is no objective standard by which to drive professional speech and phone behavior.

Elements of an Effective Call Handling System:

Extensive Monitoring

Providing agents with verbiage to handle key areas of a customer-agent interaction can be invaluable in driving a level of speech that ensures agents will be uniformly viewed as empathetic product experts. However, the creators of this sort of verbiage often make the mistake of basing what they write on their personal perceptions, rather than what is happening on real calls. Agents who handle calls day in and day out often resent when management requires them to use these sorts of scripted solutions, because of the disconnect between the words presented in the tool and the concepts they observe working in the real world. As a result, agents tend to disregard these sorts of aids. In the cases where management firmly enforces their use, performance can suffer and agents can become demoralized.

Every effective call handling tool is based on extensive call monitoring. Developers must create call flows and any accompanying word-for-word modules on the call handling techniques of the very best performing agents, with the pitfalls of the lowest performing agents eliminated. The more calls a development team monitors, the better the resulting call flows and verbatims will be.


Call Driver Oriented

In order for a call handling tool to allow agents to maximize the customer experience, it must deliver truly targeted product information and work instructions. It is essential that the call handling technology quickly drive agents to the specific information they need to handle the questions that matter. With a call driver oriented tool, the original knowledge base need not be discarded. Instead, the tool should integrate with the legacy or client system, to guide agents through the optimal call flow and linking them to the most appropriate piece of information in the database whenever necessary. Rather than presenting page after page of information when an agent searches a topic, the tool should lead the user to the exact paragraph or sentence of the work instruction for the applicable call driver.

Thoroughly Tested

No call handling tool can successfully manage the customer experience on a large scale without extensive testing. The development team should monitor the test group closely, conduct focus groups, and regularly update the tool with any changes based on observation and agent feedback. This process should continue until KPI goals are exceeded for a long enough period of time to prove that it works.

Hints of Change

A few companies have deployed effective technologies to address the changing tide. One example of a firm that has used call guidance technology to impact the customer experience is the Results Companies, a major service provider for Fortune 500 companies. Results agents utilize the ReadiCall system, a desktop knowledge and call flow tool that provides the structure, verbiage, guidance, and optimal call handling processes that are often not available to agents handling inbound customer service programs. This well-tested system allows agents to improve customer satisfaction, reduce handle time, increase first call resolution, decrease hold times, and improve conversion, up-sell, retention or other appropriate performance measurement results. Agents are provided with optimal questions to ask at appropriate points of every call, enabling them to unearth all the essential information needed to get to the root of a problem and ultimately solve it in the shortest time. The Results ReadiCall system can also quickly and automatically direct the agent to the exact location on the client's system or online training materials where they can find the information necessary to handle the customer's needs.

 
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