Customer experience has garnered major attention in the past few years. Companies know that giving a great experience to their customers will help foster brand loyalty and lead to higher revenue. However, sometimes companies get in their own way with customer service by creating barriers. In his recent article, Jeremy Hyde provides the following five obstacles to customer experience success that companies create internally.
1) Complicated Policies and Procedures
The more complicated you make your procedures and policies, the longer the average handle time will be for customer calls. This complication leading to long calls obviously causes frustration for both customers and call center agents. Hyde recommends having product managers listen to calls to understand the experience issues, giving agents an outlet to provide feedback on procedures, and allowing agents to have control over calls.
2) Technology
As great as technology is for a company, it will inevitably have issues and if you don’t have communication on technical issues and updates/changes. Listen to agents when they have complaints about system problems and actually fix the issues because technology can negatively impact the customer experience by making it choppy or painfully dragged-on.
3) Lack of Research and Resolution Time
KPIs are important, but you also need to allow your agents to do proper research on some cases. Hyde says that giving your agents proper time to research problems will help lower handle times and decrease repeat calls.
4) Lack of Empowerment
If your contact center requires manager approval for every common, you’ll ultimately give your agents the impression that you don’t trust them to do their job and you’ll teach your customers that the first person they contact can’t handle their problem. Provide agents with proper training and resources and trust them to be able to handle the calls. If agents do have problems, they can still have supervisors available for more challenging customer complaints.
5) Unintended Consequences of KPIs
There can be unintended negative results that come from KPIs. An example of this is agents being so focused on having the fasted AHT possible that they ignore the actual needs of the customers and properly solving their problems. Hyde recommends creating a work environment that allows for open communication between employees and management so they can share genuine concerns.
This blog post is based on an article from ICMI. To read the original article, please click the link below:
5 Barriers to Agent (and Customer) Success – Jeremy Hyde
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