One of the hardest things to be is a call center manager. You track and measure a slew of call center metrics and spend a huge amount of your time analyzing them. You find trouble spots and fix them. You identify pockets for improvement and lead process change to increase first call resolution.
Call centers may not be where relationships start with your brand, but it is certainly where they are built. Brands cannot shift focus to emerging channels of communication at the expense of the tried and true ones. Customer interactions must be multi-faceted, fully-integrated and include the human touch. This includes talking to customers the right way, at the right time, based on real-time context. It includes the call center.
Here are 5 reasons why your call center reps are more important now than ever before:
1. Reps Listen Better Than Robots
While some humans listen better than others, it is a learned skill. Your reps can understand, empathize, sincerely apologize and show genuine appreciation for your customers in a way that no virtual assistant or self-service system can. It’s because they can listen, interpret, then act. Robots follow a script and this angers customers because whatever emotion that is attempted to be expressed is clearly phony and this can be borderline insulting.
2. Empowered Reps Solve Real Problems
Your reps can think and you should allow them to. While the tendency is even for humans to stick to the script, in certain situations, allow for their customer service instincts to kick-in and go the extra mile. Customers love it when you show a little hustle. This will improve customer acquisition and customer retention at critical moments of truth.
3. Knowledgeable Reps are Faster and More Efficient
By the time a customer has reached a real person, they have most likely snaked their way through an elaborate maze of self-service options. This process may have started online and continued in an IVR. At a certain point in the customer journey, the clicking, listening, waiting and wondering is over. Customers want service. They want their issue resolved. Only a living, breathing representative can help a customer cut through all the “bull” and get to the point.
4. Reps Can Follow Up
Some issues are complicated and require follow up work. The assurances from a web page just aren’t the same as the assurances from a real person who commits to following up and closing the loop with a phone call or an email. People who commit are generally accountable and can be depended upon. This is human nature, not robot nature.
5. Reps Have Names and So Do Customers
Dale Carnegie said, “there is nothing more sweet than the sound of your own name.” Customers are not faceless sources of revenue. They are real people, just like you, and they have names. Call center reps have names too and when two people know each other’s names, we have the beginning of a relationship.
