Are you committing these four contact center mistakes?

Current statistics reveal million of dollars getting invested on call center technology, infrastructure, training and salaries. But unfortunately for most businesses, the returns are not as high as expected. According to an article by Coreen Bailor in CRM magazine, there are multiple errors committed by companies in contact center management. Although these slip-ups are not apparent to customers, they are not any less damaging to company’s service efforts.

Understanding this context in detail, let’s read what Coreen Bailor has stated in the article.

1. Zero Follow Up

While most companies invest a lot of time on training their contact center reps, what often gets overlooked is a follow-up process. In simple words, trainers need to constantly follow up with the frontline managers to assess how much and how well have they understood the lesson. Moreover it is seen that companies where there is not a proper follow-up system, customer support agents do not make the effort of practicing the tactics in a real situation. You can say that the practice of a follow-up compels them to act upon the lessons learnt.

Paraphrasing the words of Brian Cole, senior consultant at CLG, (a strategy and behavioral change consultancy) �" Trainers should ideally frame objectives before every session. Post the completion of each session, it’s important to look back at the pre-determined training objectives and take employee feedback based on it. This will make it easy for the trainers to measure the success of each training session. They can be much more specific on what they want their employees to do better, or to stop doing. 

2. Dodging Agents’ opinion

How many organizations implement procedural changes in consent with the support agents? The answer is not many. And the few who do merely invite the support agents to sit at the discussion table. In both situations, the support agents are not given the prospect to speak up. Result �" the procedural changes backfire.

Business entrepreneurs (especially the management) need to give credence to the opinion of the support agents. After all they are the end users of the systems and enterprise applications implemented at the customer service level.

In the words of Donna Fluss, (principal at DMG Consulting), ‘’Companies who have a successful contact center share one aspect in common �" a satisfied and content team of customer support agents. By attributing utmost importance to support agents’ opinion these companies comprehend their problems and implement the right enterprise app. Result �" new system implementations impact the agents well and it is easier for the agents to support the refreshed process.’’

So whether it is implementing cloud based CRM for customer support or introducing any customer service metric �" taking in the outlook of the agents is imperative. Following this tactic will ensure that the systems implemented are well defined and usable to the optimum.

 

  

3. Self-Service delusion

Self-service application is the new venture adopted by most enterprises. Why �" because of its cost-cutting nature. The very fact that customers can resolve the issues by themselves and execute a large chunk of transactional functions without the assistance of a live agent has appeared to be a too good deal.

Consequently, self service processes have been implemented assuming �" lesser calls will be routed to the customer agents. However, the reality has been different. In the opinion of Ken Landoline, (principal analyst at Saddletree Research), too often, companies do not implement service channels in line with customers and business unit needs.

Failing which, companies receive more voice calls than before. Due to a lack of synchronization between customers’ need and self-service tools, customers contact the support agents to further clarify their doubts developed during the use of self-service tools. Moreover, in the first few months of self-service tool implementation customers find it difficult to adapt to it, which inevitably increases the voice calls.

Having said this, Robert Wollan, (global managing partner of Accenture's Customer Contact Transformation Practice CRM) puts forth a different opinion �" ‘’In the lieu of automating customer service functions, companies risk frustrating customers further by making the experience more complex and lost.’’ His rule of thumb for implementing self-service tactics correctly is analyzing the different customer segments and determining what self-service options will be suitable for each. Following this strategy will make the companies receive a much higher usage of that particular self-service tool and greater satisfaction from the customer.

4. Mistaken value judgment

Contact Centers (big or small) face the constant challenge of proving themselves as an asset to the organization. In the opinion of industry experts, namely Don Van Doren, (president of Vanguard Communications) and Bob Furniss, (president and founder of CRM and contact center consultancy Touchpoint Associates) - Contact center's value as a strategic business unit, is always determined in terms of dollar signs.

Opposing to this perception held by most business managers, experts like Maggie Klenke, (founding partner at The Call Center School), have stated the actual contact centers’ evaluation parameters.

Paraphrasing their words - Rather than focusing mostly on call stats, business managers need to  look at the volume of customer information present in the contact center.  Needless to say, these customer data insights not only throw light upon customers’ likes and dislikes about product offerings, but also put the company at a better position to handle customer service.

Based on the collected information, the company can easily meet and surpass its customers' needs. Substantiating this point further, Coreen Bailor cites the example of Huntington Bank who implemented this strategy. As a result, its marketing department could access critical customer information which further helped them in their marketing endeavors.

As Klenke puts it, ‘’ to me that's a really key role for the call center. It's the role that positions the call center as a strategic asset of the company."

Author’s Bio: Patricia Jones is an experienced writer who has written several write-ups on CRM and Online CRM software. In this article, she talks about why every SME needs to be on social media? She talks about customer-centric philosophy which every company needs to adopt to gain optimum benefit from the CRM application.