Customer Care Goes Boink
I’ve worked with Contact Software most of my career, building systems on a variety of platforms and technologies in either startup or mature modes of growth. I’ve been in many contact centres whilst deploying code, watching how agents works and how calls are handled across a variety of processes and ideals.
I love the challenge of being able to develop tools that can enrich both the agent’s and the customer shared experience of trying to resolve a problem and come together to work towards some kind of solution.
When I dial into a Contact Centre and hear the prompts and menu trees, I start thinking in the back of my head why this was done over some other method and/or understand why new Music On Hold queues up versus barging me into the existing music.
The industry at large is constantly innovating at an increasing rate which is why I still keep a leg in it and follow all the changes within it today.
But, as in most things in life, it’s not always a technology problem and in Contact Centres especially it has never been the technology that has created those great shared experiences that we read about on Facebook or Twitter — it’s the agent, the person on the end of the line, handling the call, providing that first touch to the customer.
I had two separate calls this morning, two very different industries, and by the end of the second call I was exasperated with both.
The first call was a follow-up to not receiving a callback from the week before, here is the response I received when I called back.
“I can’t contact that group, so not sure what to do.”
The second call wasn’t much better when I was told I had to call in during the morning to book an appointment but their incoming trunks (that cabling that manages the calls coming in) could not handle the load and the voicemail was full when I did call in.
“You must call in the morning to book the appointment.”
I’m not going to get mad at an agent for technology problems they have on their side or problems they have to deal with. But how they convey this information to the customer, how they offload problems onto the customer in the way that it comes across as…
“The only reason you are calling is because you have a problem, we don’t have a problem, you do.”
Is exactly what is wrong with Customer Care today!
If you want to change your customer’s Customer Care experience, don’t start with the technology, start with the people and the interactions they have with your customers. When a customer calls in with a problem it shouldn’t be seen as them calling into complain but an opportunity to establish a relationship with that customer, a relationship that is starting at zero.
As Customer Care continues to evolve in the Contact Centre, it’s important for leaders to not get seduced time-reducing features by the automation of chatbots, scripts, endless menus and callbacks for the sake of that Shared Experience between Customer and Agent that can create an advocate for your organization for life.
