Every company today has one or more ways of providing customer service. So if you are a senior customer service executive and wondering why all that investment is not yielding results – think again! In my opinion, the reasons for failure of customer service could be:
Not ‘listening' to the customer: It's very important for the agent handling the call to understand what the customer needs and not just hearing them. This will depend on the quality of the call flow diagrams and on the regular training provided to the agent. Feedback from internal quality monitoring and customer satisfaction surveys needs to get to the agents in a timely manner, so that the feedback loop and improvement cycle can work properly.
Too much emphasis on AHT: Every customer service agent has a target Average Handle Time (AHT) at the contact center, which is guided by the call flow diagram. If these are not reviewed periodically to ensure that customers are getting enough time to express their concerns and the data is being captured accurately, then customers will most likely leave dissatisfied.
It is important to put AHT in the proper perspective, as just one of the many measurements in a process. and not a measure of the true outcome you are trying to achieve when your customers call.
Lack of innovative approaches in delivering customer service: Most contact centers do not invest in innovative approaches for keeping customers happy. We believe the contrary. For instance, while managing lost baggage for a leading airline client of ours, we realized how traumatized customers who were attending some important event would be, to learn that their baggage was lost. So we began sorting information from the overall lost baggage list to identify customers who needed to be informed at regular intervals about the status of their baggage, and started sending proactive alerts to them. The fact that the airline was contacting them before they could, raised the customer satisfaction levels to newer heights.
Even if you have got all the above right, unless you are able to resolve the pain point of the customer, your customer service levels will always remain low! An article titled ‘Stop Trying to Delight Your Customers' by Harvard Business
Review, sums it up well by stating that you can create loyal customers primarily by reducing customer effort, i.e., by helping them solve their problems quickly and easily, and not by delighting them in service interactions with a robotic greeting or
thank-you!
