Many small firms are missing vital clues to help them transform customer service and productivity – with some of the biggest pointers revealed by their own customer service professionals’ complaints about their job. In fact, your weary agents are probably complaining about many of them – right now.
Here are just five examples to look out for.
Clue #1: Too many calls at peak demand
If your customer service teams moan about being stretched at busy times, don’t think it’s simply a case of rising demand for your fantastic products. If it’s a regular complaint, it’s a clear sign that your team hasn’t got an effective call strategy or call plan – an essential for good customer service.
A lot of small firms still pay extra to their communications vendor to make small but vital call centre changes – adjustments that they could do themselves with a bit of expert guidance.
Today’s communications experts can help your IT manager or office manager take complete control of call schedules, putting in more suitable staff resources in place when demand is high. By doing this, you won’t just take the pressure off your staff, you will also help them better focus on your customers.
Clue #2: Customers fed up with your ‘clueless’ staff
It’s one of the oldest complaints from the call centre: customers are irate by the time they reach your representatives – because they’ve had to repeat all the details of their enquiry, time and again.
But there’s no need for your customer agents to endure this daily torment: the right communications set-up can enable your CIO or office manager to adapt the way incoming calls are routed, so specific requests or escalating complaints are directed to suitably trained agents or subject experts. As well as skills based call routing, if key staff are absent, or you hit those peaks of demand, you can tweak the call set-up and route calls according to your business needs.
Clue #3: No ‘screen pop’ facility for inbound or outbound calls
A third clue is hearing staff ask for ‘screen pops’ (the information box that automatically pops up for the call your service agents are receiving and making) for inbound or outgoing calls.
If your customer agents are ploughing through hundreds of calls without real time information on hot prospects or high value customers, that’s a giveaway that your IT team hasn’t made the most of your communications infrastructure or your customer databases – when these applications could be properly integrated with the right advice.
If there’s no screen pop or scripts for those big outbound call campaigns, you’re not giving your teams the right tools to do their job well.
Clue #4: No omni-channel response
Another frustration for call centre agents is not being able to respond to calls, chat and social media messages because these channels haven’t been joined up. Are your customers’ Tweets lying unloved, in a separate silo?
The right communications provider can get different social media and voice applications to talk to one another and move you towards a call centre that handles omni-channel interactions – just like an individual customer service team member’s smartphone does intuitively. You can rekindle the fire of great customer service for your brand.
Clue #5: Multiple complaints about the same job?
Another big clue to an inadequate customer service operation is your helpdesk team having to field a torrent of repeat calls and escalation requests – because no-one has real-time details on the jobs in question.
Companies are often slow to optimise helpdesk ticketing systems to ensure, for example, that call recordings are directly embedded into their business applications. Using this type of integration, helpdesk agents can review customer histories from an audit trail and find all the relevant call recordings, messages and conversation history notes. It avoids customers having to repeatedly chase up progress or be passed round the team to resolve their complaint.
Despite some 60 -70 per cent of contact with UK companies still made by a telephone call, particularly among older service users, we still see many small firms, even technology-savvy ones such as design and IT development companies, missing opportunities to integrate voice and data channels and CRM applications.
Many office and IT managers think it’s too difficult or costly to do, but the power of technologies like cloud and open source have changed the game on integrating today’s multiple communications channels.
Companies should listen to these complaints from your customer service team and give them the tools to do the job. With just a few measures put in place, you will transform your customer service team, increase productivity and boost efficiency.
Foehn is an award-winning provider of cloud communications technology, delivering cloud phone systems and contact centres to the private and public sectors since 2000.
By Rafael Cortes, head of marketing at Foehn.
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