Your best source for customer service news, views, resources,
and best practices.
Any career that involves working with the public can be tiresome since making customers feel happy isn’t always the easiest task. You’re often relieved when they’re satisfied, while feeling helpless when they’re not. Unfortunately, 66% of customers with a problem experience rage, and agents need to know the right ways to handle these situations skillfully.
Luckily, there are some actions a CSR can take to make sure a bad conversation ends well. Here five simple steps in chronological order:
It’s no mystery that contact centers experience higher than normal call volumes during the holidays. Frantic customers, with last minute requests, are hoping to get everything done before businesses close for the New Year. It’s a stressful period for any customer service agent, and managers should always prepare for the worst and hope for the best. Having a CRM solution and a call-back option in place will certainly help during this chaotic time. On top of that, you can use the holiday season as an opportunity to engage with staff and keep them motivated. After all, if you want customers to leave with a warm and fuzzy feeling after interacting with your brand, you’ll need to have cheerful agents!
Here are 5 ways to make your call center happy for the holidays:
Understatement of the day: Working in a call center is a thankless job! Managers, who are always being told to do “more with less” are constantly putting their effort into hiring, training and maintaining an effective workforce. Meanwhile, there’s tremendous pressure on agents to meet and exceed target metrics – in an extremely high-stress environment – which often results in a high turnover rate.
For call centers, the pressure to perform is greater than ever before. A study by Mattersight found that 60% of consumers are frustrated before they even reach a customer service rep. Even worse, the same study found that 75% are still frustrated after the call – even when the problem is solved!
To make customers happy and exceed their expectations, it’s critical to choose the right kinds of agents for your contact center. Here are 3 personality traits you should look for: Continue reading
In his essay, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” David Foster Wallace discusses how un-insightful most sports autobiographies are. He explains how instead of finding “secrets to success,” he’d find only banal (one of his favorite words), obvious advice, and he had this idea that maybe sports superstars can’t explain it because it’s essentially inexplicable, a blurred firestorm of simplicity and complexity with no real easy answer. Although it sounds pessimistic, he writes the piece with a searching – slightly lost, slightly wanting – tone that is affecting without being depressing (so check it out).
I’m not necessarily saying I agree with him — heck, I think I’m actually closer to disagreeing with him especially after reading “Mastery” by Robert Greene and “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work” by Mason Currey but, regardless, DFW gives some nutritious thought-food for those hoping to get better at something, at anything.
So, to start: what is a personalized interaction? Here, honestly, I’m already tripped up because it depends whether “personalize” means more personable as in friendly, warm and welcoming or if “personalize” means being more uniquely you with the customer, to show some genuine personality. Put another way: do I offer some easy tips to help foster connection or do I focus on the “learn to like yourself and people will too” or my favorite: “learn to like yourself and more people will too but don’t forget some people are just plain grouchy” (realistic, although not too pithy). I believe my confusion in tackling this subject illuminates that there are clearly different ways to look at this, different ways to make a more meaningful, personalized interaction with a customer.
I’ll start with the surface ideas, my four favorite tips for creating better connections:
One of the easiest ways to lose a customer is through a poor call center experience. For example, a survey by YouGov showed that 76% of consumers said that “just one unpleasant contact center experience was likely to make them take their business elsewhere”. Yet, three in ten (29%) consumers think that businesses have not changed their attitude towards customer service. Today, positive experiences are even more crucial. Through social media channels, disgruntled customers have immediate access to spread the word about poor service.
With all the technology options out there, what are the best tools a contact center manager can select to deliver good customer engagement? It turns out, one of them isn’t technology at all – it’s your brand voice. Continue reading
It’s clear that it’s a multi-channel world for contact centers with 77% of consumers using more than one channel when seeking service. When your company interacts with customers over many different channels, presenting a consistent “voice” becomes a major challenge. That challenge has become acute with the rise of the millennial generation (those born between 1978 and 1996). Now that 1 in 4 people in the U.S. is in this group, their purchasing power and influence is undeniable.
Contact centers need to realize the importance of maintaining this “one customer voice” if they want to win the hearts of these critical consumers. Continue reading
