Top 5 Customer Support Issues, Part 1

“If we don’t take care of our customers, someone else will do.”

                                                                               Unknown

Human society is changing and the outcome of this transition will be a different type of civilization based mainly on knowledge, information, communication and most importantly – mobility. Contact Centers are facing new challenges, driven by high user expectations and emerging technologies that change the way we communicate.

 

Here are 5 Customer Support Challenges and the solutions based on our best practices:

 

1. Increasing Productivity (Utilization Occupancy)

59 percent of call center executives say increasing agent productivity

is their top contact center management challenge. 

Hiring the right people and empowering them with great tools is not enough for having a great customer support team. What you need to do is much more and takes far too much efforts and persistence. We encourage our agents to communicate with customers showing empathy and openness as if they are their friends. That helps our agents to be focused, and targeted, so that they manage to both fulfill the KPI and have positive attitude towards the customers. This attitude is not achieved by simply saying or suggesting it once, but with the daily work of the management team people. That’s what we do and that’s why our team achieves excellent productivity.

 

2. Technology Challenges: Keeping Up With Growing Channels

Having so many channels of communication is sometimes tough to deal with. A company must reach as many customers as it can, but then comes the problem to stay focused on your goals. What we recommend is to reduce the number of systems used and to consolidate all channels on one single platform. That gives the opportunity to see all processes and thus to truck all resources that are needed at any time. If the channels are far too much, it becomes very difficult to manage and train the agents. Also it is difficult to plan the resources needed to cover all channels if not combined on one platform.

                                                               

 

3. Deliver Service Fast, and Anticipate Future Needs

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No one likes to wait. People don’t want to waste time waiting to be served and/or helped. They don’t want to listen to IVRs, neither they want to deal with incompetent, unfriendly or bored agents. And if they know that they will get that kind of service they simply hang up and prefer to seek help online. Consumers are more tech-savvy than they were even as little as five years ago. Most are adept at going online and seeking for the solution of their problem. If you don’t have online channels, like Facebook, chat, etc., or aren’t good enough to meet customer’s expectations, there is a good chance customers come across your competition or other unsatisfied clients and spread their disappointment both on and offline. That would be very bad image for the company and we do our best to avoid this scenario.

If you find a way to anticipate future needs and deliver service that saves consumer’s time and efforts you are still in the game.

 

Author: Nelly Nedeva

 

Stay tuned for Part 2