Customers and their needs are changing all the time, so it’s increasingly important to keep your contact center at the forefront of these changes, in order to better serve your customers to the best of your ability. Unfortunately, many contact centers today fall short and lose customers because of it. To help avoid some of the common pitfalls here are five things your contact center should stop doing right now:
1. Not paying attention to your employees’ satisfaction
Attrition is a big problem faced by many contact centers, and it’s one that can be solved by putting the proper emphasis on employee satisfaction. Your agents are ultimately the line of contact your customers have with your company. It’s silly to think that you could leave one end of that connection satisfied without having the other feel the same. Bottom line: improve the satisfaction of your employees, and it will improve the satisfaction of your customers.
2. Leaving your customers on hold
Customers abandon calls when they’re on hold. That sentence alone should make you frantic about decreasing the amount of time you make customers wait to speak with you. A fairly large portion of callers who hang up won’t ever call back. Those are customers that are likely to leave you with a bad taste in their mouth. Whatever you need to do to decrease hold times, do it.
3. Transferring customers
Ideally, each of your employees will be able to answer even the most difficult questions. If you provide them with the right tools to find all the information needed, it’s simply a matter of them using them. However, if transfers are still needed, at the VERY least, make sure the customer doesn’t have to repeat themselves over and over.
4. Operating in a non-cloud environment
In a time when technology is advancing rapidly, you must embrace the digital transformation. From disaster recovery, to increased flexibility and collaboration, you simply need to be on the cloud going forward.
5. Relying on tacit knowledge of agents.
Imagine you have an amazing agent, who seems to handle calls and resolve issues better than most other agents in your center. You have the power to make EVERY agent just like this one, except you have no way to capture this agent’s tacit knowledge. This is the knowledge that he has that is unique to him, but it doesn’t have to be.
With a proper knowledge management system in place, you can take the sequences and actions taken by your best agent, and empower other agents to follow suit. In other words, when you know something works, you have a way to make it repeatable, and not just for one agent but across your entire contact center.
