For any business with a call center, improving customer satisfaction is the call center’s number one job. It’s what call centers are built and designed to do.
What a call center customer is looking for when he or she calls into a call center are a few key things. When a customer contacts your organization, usually they are calling with a question or inquiry about an issue they want to get resolved.
The customer’s perspective and expectations would be focused around these four items:
1.) Answer my interaction quickly so I don’t feel like I’m waiting forever. We’ve all experienced this, haven’t we? You’ve sat on hold for a ridiculous amount of time, listening to the comfort message loop around, reminding you of how important your call is to the company. But, does it feel like you are important when you are on hold that long?
With a good call center technology solution, you have visibility into your queues and wait times and can adjust your staffing levels and manage your levels of customer satisfaction accordingly.
2.) Have it answered by somebody who’s a knowledgeable, friendly person that can help me, empathize with me, and give me accurate information and answers. Often times, a caller is already frustrated and stressed out before they even dial the number. They want the person who answers their call to be empathetic, and be equipped to help them get a resolution to their issue.
3.) Resolve my inquiry on the very first interaction, and don’t send me to fourteen other departments so that I have to tell my story over and over again. Here’s another one we’ve all dealt with. That first tier call center agent is only capable of reading from their script and giving basic, frontline information. Once you identify they can’t help you reach a resolution, they send you to another department. Now, you have to start from the beginning and explain the history of your issue all over again. This person can’t help you either, and you get transferred again. The third person tells you that first department you spoke with is the one to handle this, and now you are back at the beginning. And starting to lose your mind from the frustration and incompetence. You’ve now wasted a half an hour or more and are no further in getting a resolution than you were on the first call.
There are many tools available to the call center to help improve in this area, such as skills-based routing, IVR and tracking first call resolution (FCR) via disposition codes in your call center software solution.
4.) If there’s follow-up required, follow through on those actions, make them happen, and don’t me make promises that don’t get delivered upon and make me feel like I just fell through the cracks and wasted my time. Any professional contact center will have well-trained agents who are prepared to handle all of the most common issues, questions and concerns they experience on a regular basis. But, once in a while, an anomaly will occur that can’t be resolved immediately and will require time to look into the issue more deeply, or need to be escalated to the appropriate person in the organization. What’s important here is to take measures to ensure that there is regular communication with the customer, and that that the party responsible for following up on their issue does so in as timely a manner as possible.
This is the time to utilize your CRM to set reminders for follow up steps and keep detailed notes in your records.
Now You’re in Business
If a call center can focus and deliver on those four key things, than that’s how they’re going to improve on customer satisfaction. Having the right technology solution definitely helps enable improved customer satisfaction, as well. If you’d like information about improving customer satisfaction in your organization’s call center, click here to download Evolve IP’s Ultimate Guide to the Call Center Metrics That Matter Most.
Categories: Contact Center
About Rich Fox
At Evolve IP, I'm the Contact Center Director, which means I help organizations use cloud technology to provide enterprise class telephony, network, and security solutions. While my experiences vary from IT strategy to technology infrastructure and project management, I have a special talent for call center development. After so many diverse experiences, I can spot an organization that doesn't even know it's a contact center but needs to operate like one. For example, at PHH Mortgage I helped transform the sales division into a contact center. From concepts to workforce management to reporting, this approach helped our teams more effectively answer calls and increase revenue. We saved money just by getting the phone answered by the right person. When I'm not helping call centers optimize their performance, I'm either enjoying time with my family -- I have three kids -- or swimming laps, cycling, and running as I train for my next triathlon.
