I was recently a victim of identity fraud. Upon finding out, my initial feeling was one of dread as I realised I would have to call my bank.
After explaining my situation to the call agent, I was routed to the ‘fraud’ team. So far, so good.
“Why did you ring US?”
“No, I didn’t ring, I was transferred by your colleague because I’ve been a victim of identity fraud.”
Then I have to explain the entire situation again…
“Sorry, we can’t deal with that here. I need to transfer you.”
Then the line goes dead.
This encounter and others much like it are the reason I avoid calling them. If a situations arises again in the future and I’m forced to call once more, I’ll probably consider switching banks as that might be less painful.
Sadly, we’ve all been there. Trying to get through to customer service with a seemingly simple issue or request, only to be told after a long wait time that you need to call a different number, or the department you need is now closed, or some other frustrating reason why your request cannot be actioned.
I’ve often wondered what the ratio between wasteful vs. productive time would look like if we (honestly) calculated this for each person engaging in these types of conversations.
Of course, not all companies are the same, and not every call centre is broken. But the majority still are.
So the question is, how do we fix it?
Here are a few tips derived from an insightful discussion (more here) with a true expert who has managed many award-winning call centre teams, Dave D'Arcy.
Tip 1: Forgiveness is easier than permission.
Tim Ferris in his “The Four Hour Work Week” speaks about the power of giving your team authority to make decisions that don’t cost more than a set budget. For Tim, doing this freed up valuable time to handle more important tasks and gave his team a feeling of empowerment.
Dave goes a step further to remove any set monetary constraints directly, but requests his team simply act as if they were the business owners - hence taking more reasonable decisions and potentially offering a better outcome for the business long term.
The idea being that if you go to your supervisor asking for permission, for one reason or another they might try and talk you out of it. But if the team have authority to solve problems by behaving as if they were the business owner, whilst they may make mistakes you can forgive, more often than not they will find a solution that works well for the customer and the business.
In summary, give your team authority and they will go out of their way to help the customer, taking full responsibility for immediate resolution.
Tip 2: Doing what is right
Most of the time, customer-facing staff are under a lot of pressure to hit targets, while at the same time exceed customer expectations and be compliant. However, often what is right for the customer, is in conflict with company procedures or systems.
How do you ensure your staff does what is right when there is a possible conflict with the process?
If the process is wrong for what the customer requires, consider that it is probably wrong for the business, and the protocol should be challenged. In allowing something to be handled differently, you will likely improve it. The challenge here is creating the right environment for front line staff to feel confident amending rules for exceptional cases, and then having an easy way to send these requirements back to the business so that the procedures can be updated.
Today, you can gather very sophisticated insights using AI and conversational analytics to not only understand communication skills and training needs for your call agents, but for this particular case, a sophisticated AI solution could help bridge the gap between the front line and business.
Tip 3: Happy staff means happy customers
Most companies are understandably focussed on improving service in order to increase CSAT and/or NPS. These same companies would likely also agree that happy staff make happy customers.
But if that’s the case, why don’t we start with staff happiness when trying to improve customer service? Their engagement, morale, motivation, mental health - particularly in the wake of a global pandemic.
“If the general mood of my team is dipping, I’ll see a dip in outputs such as CSAT” says Dave D’Arcy.
Dave encourages shifting focus to the inputs, but how do you measure these? By doing what Dave calls “regular temperature checks”. Reaching out to people to say “how are you?”, making them feel human and valued.
You cannot simply tell call agents to be happy or to use positive words and hope this will be enough. As a leader, it is your responsibility to give your agents a reason to smile on the phone.
If you’re able to achieve this, the next step is monitoring it at scale because anything that cannot be measured cannot be improved.
With the right speech analytics solution, you can be very efficient in understanding whether your staff exude genuine happiness through their tone of voice, or whether they are just reading ‘amazing’ words from a script.
Sentient Machines platform uses more than 25 AI algorithms to assess each agent’s ability to listen, show respect, be helpful and friendly to the customer, and focus on solving their problem.
Tip 4: Know what your AI is for and be honest about it
How do you go about choosing technology such as chatbots, voice bots/automated IVR, or conversational analytics? How do you decide which tech to use for your team?
There are many use cases where AI can be useful when it comes to supporting customer care teams, but as we know, it can also be overkill and lead to customer frustration if they can't speak with a human when needed.
While changing the input is going to impact the output, it’s always important to know the outcomes and measure them thoroughly. To convince management that staff happiness is the way to go, you will undoubtedly need to prove that the outcomes are in your favour. Is your business gradually becoming more profitable with AI? Are your CX measures going up? NPS, CSAT, CES?
When implementing any new technology, it is always important to ask “What do you want it for?”. Is Customer Effort going to be less with AI? Great. If the requirement is to improve CSAT, make that the focus. Similarly, if its only purpose is to reduce costs, that’s also fine, so long as you are clear about it from the start and don’t expect the AI to solve a problem you never intended for it to solve when you adopted it.
Tip 5: Work smarter, rather than harder
For a long time, call centres have been measuring their team’s performance based on very dry metrics. The number of calls, the handling time, number of calls per day. We can all agree these are two-dimensional and ineffective if we want to improve the performance of call agents.
With speech analytics, you are able to go very granular on a large scale in understanding the impact of your agents’ performance such as soft skills, upselling, and much more, rather than simply counting the number of calls they took.
It’s about working smarter rather than harder. And gathering insights from a sophisticated speech analytics platform can be priceless in this context.
Tip 6: Understand your team’s desires
Covid taught us many lessons. Above all: How to facilitate working from home effectively.
In many call centres pre-pandemic, working from home wasn’t even an option. The pandemic has forced everyone to revisit that, and companies have become more flexible and more open to this idea.
Perhaps again the way to start is by asking your staff what their desires are. If working from home helps an individual with their well-being, then finding a way to accommodate that will have a far-reaching positive impact on the agent, their performance, and ultimately your customers.
Tip 7: Bridge the gap between the front line and back end team
Engineers and R&D teams are often not very excited about fixing customer bugs, as they’d rather work on more exciting new features. However, the only way to improve CX is to create an alignment between the two.
I’ve often seen the two departments completely separated and it always seems a waste of resources not to connect the dots.
While analysing customer interactions with our advanced speech analytics platform, we’ve discovered topics that emerged directly from a customer’s experiment of using a product, and they call or write about it in such a detail that it is a missed opportunity not to be able to close this loop. Some customers even call solely to offer feedback on a product and service.
It reminds me of when, while being pregnant, I managed to get Covid. So I was keen to share this with the hospital managing my pregnancy because I thought it would be a really valuable piece of information, as at the time there was little evidence of how Covid affected pregnancy. They just stared at me before saying: “I don’t have anywhere to input that information”.
And it’s the same with call centres: they’ve nowhere to input the information that can go to relevant teams and help improve products and services.
But if you have speech analytics analysing every customer interaction, the insights can go directly to their inbox. It’s as simple as that.