Conventional wisdom in call centre services has sent many services down the rathole of poor performance or inefficiency. Here are a few of my favourite call centre issues:
1. High Service Level = Good Service. When we graph customer satisfaction against wait time for individual customers we find each community has a different peak wait time that generates the best customer satisfaction. For example, at the largest software company in the world if calls were answered within the first 20 seconds customer satisfaction lowered and until around five minutes there was no material decrease. As we know, as we lower wait times we typically need additional headcount and costs so this short analysis in your centre could save money and customer experience.
2. Chat or other technology reduce cost and increase customer satisfaction. We have seen little evidence of chat and many of the new channel technologies providing real value to clients, though, this is changing with the introduction of intelligent chatbots, robotic process automation and IoT. Recent analysis with one of Australia’s largest government service agency reviewed the total customer journey and found that when chat is involved it is both more expensive and often adds an extra step that reduces customer satisfaction. Taking time up front to independently assess the return and customer impact on the latest service technologies will remove distractive low value implementations.
3. Push customers to Digital. Forcing customers to use a digital service channel, or any channel, when it is not their preferred journey drives dissatisfaction and volume across channels. What works best is to create such a compelling, intuitive and frictionless digital experience that your customers will prefer to use this channel. One of Australia’s largest telco’s has found this out with customers who are pushed to the digital platform most often returning to the phone or other methods to get their problems resolved since the platform is not intuitive enough, causing additional cost and dissatisfaction. Well worked digital strategies overcome this problem by providing a compelling digital platform and a change program to selectively migrate customers.
Our team have decades of experience transforming call centres into award winning centres and we love to separate the fact from the fiction. Contact us for a chat and see how we can help your organisation.
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