Great customer service can be a major differentiator for an organization and bad customer experience can have serious consequences impacting the business. C-suite executives such as VPs and Customer Experience and Client Success Officers around the world are constantly striving to improve customer service with new technology, tools, and data. Most companies, however, still can’t get customer service right. In fact, I had two interactions just this week (which I will discuss later) with customer service representatives of large companies that left me tired, frustrated, and looking for another partnership.
Here are, in our opinion, the four major factors creating bad customer experiences, and no, it’s not about the accent of the customer service representative.
1. Customer Service Representative Training
The number one thing contributing to bad customer experience is a lack of training. This is often perpetuated by companies experiencing large volumes of missed calls and over correcting by bringing in full time employees, but not providing the adequate training required.
Regarding the poor experience I referenced earlier, I was attempting to transfer some money between two fortune 500 financial institutions. The experience leading up to this event wasn’t perfect but it was tolerable.
I called one of the financial institutions and I was patched to a customer service representative in an overseas call center handling their account. A friendly voice comes on the other end and introduces themselves and I explain the issue I’m having. What put me over the edge was when the customer service representative first asks whether the two financial institutions I am referring to are one in the same or are different. I couldn’t believe it. You’re providing customer service for one of the largest financial institutions in the world and don’t know that one of your largest competitors is a completely different institution? The representative goes on to put me on hold for nearly an hour, never checking in, never returning.
This has nothing to do with the customer service representative being an overseas foreign worker. It all boils down to bad training. The person on the other end of that phone call was likely never trained on the basics of the organization they were supporting. Nor were they trained on common practices of dealing with a customer.
Training is incredibly important but is almost always the first thing to get overlooked. Managers, directors, and executives don’t have the time or patience. Yet, the frustration experienced by both executives and customers after months of poor service ends up causing them more pain and frustration in the long run.
The solution: Forecast your volume and capacity needs and plan several months beforehand to prepare for when volumes are going to be high. After which, work on a recruiting, onboarding, and training plan. This way your customer support team is prepared when volumes start to spike. If companies fail to plan and just react to higher-than-normal volumes and missed calls, they will almost certainly neglect training which will in turn lead to poor outcomes.
2. Talent Management
Customer service agents are paid the least, yet they are often the ones dealing with most of the customer facing activities. My favorite airline has the best customer service, and that is one of the main reasons why I continue to fly with them. Every time you call you get ‘Ashley from Idaho’ or ‘James from Portland’ and they are incredibly knowledgeable and helpful. This organization invests a lot of time and money on customer service and it shows in how their representatives deal with customers.
As a business process outsourcing provider, we always urge clients not to cut costs on customer service. Whether that’s spending more and hiring a senior person through us or moving some back office tasks to us and creating more opportunities for local staff to support customers, the customer has to be the number one priority when making talent decisions in customer service.
For one of our clients, we support all of their live chat with outsourced staff. This allows them to outsource some of their customer service needs, but when someone in New York calls about their billing issue, they get a live person in New York. The improvement in customer experience with just a simple implementation like that has had a significant impact on their calls and overall customer experience.
My suggestion: Get creative with how you are handling customer service. Make sure to hire highly talented (and trained) people, whether in the US or somewhere else, to handle customer issues. The up front cost of spending a bit more on talented customer service representatives will pay for itself with happier customers.
3. Process
It’s easy to say the most important part about customer service is having the capacity to simply answer the phone however, that is just not the case. After picking up the call, what happens next?
How are customers routed through the call chain? Do they talk to a person first or do they go straight to an Interactive voice response (IVR)? It truly depends on your organization, your structure, your customer, and their needs. In my opinion, each potential customer interaction should be well thought out, processed, and mapped so that is designed to enable rich customer experiences. Thinking through that and executing is much more challenging than it looks.
We recently helped map out this process for a local hospital looking to solve their customer service issues. In a hospital there are many different call types, some very urgent and others not that critical.
The Solution: We analyzed the potential call types and mapped them along pathways that we thought made the most sense for client. A call to the emergency room or urgent care, for example, would be directly patched to a live, local representative with a nursing background to help them best diagnose the call. A call to the front desk or to the hospital main line on the other hand would first be directed to an Interactive voice response (IVR) which would then route their call to the proper office. At the office level the call would first ring in the office and then after two rings would be directed to an offshore call center to help with the call. If within the parameters of what the call center could handle, the call would be handled there and be done. If higher level action is required, the call center would record the call into a real-time system that the in-office staff can see and respond real-time.
Each call type deserves its own process map and resources that need to be allocated to that map to best address the customer need. Identifying and owning these processes are critical to good customer experiences.
4. Reliance On Technology
I am a huge proponent of new technologies revolutionizing the way we are serving customers. New technologies, however, are just enablers to process automation and we cannot solely rely on it. Artificial intelligence and robotic process automation are innovative, cutting-edge technologies that can be applied throughout the customer experience base but they are not a set and forget solution. Intelligent technologies still need to be managed on an ongoing basis.
Enter bad customer experience number two. My credit card company, another Fortune 500 company, had sent out a mailer describing a new promotion with their business card. Awesome! It applies directly to me and my business and can provide immediate benefit. I log in to my account and check on the promotion (as the mailer indicated) and it is not listed on the website. Luckily, there was an AI chatbot available to help.
The AI chatbot recognizes that I am having issues finding what I am looking for and prompts me to enter my issue. I enter that I couldn’t find the promotion from the mailer and that I needed assistance. The response from the chat bot: “Well have you checked the promotion page?”
Again, this shows a lack of training. Except this time, with technology, an AI chatbot. The bot had obviously been trained to respond to customer issues but had not been trained (didn’t have enough data) on this particular promotion to respond effectively.
This company may have assumed that they could plug in an expensive artificial intelligence tool and it would solve their customer experience issues. An easy fix, but not an ideal one for creating a positive customer experience. These tools, like people, still require training, clear processes, and on top of that, large sets of data and programming to be successful. They require planned selection, implementation, and testing, and can be costly initially but have the ability to provide long term benefit to both you and your customers if they work as designed.
Customer service is one of those things that seems a lot easier than it actually is. Most companies assume that adding employees or technology will immediately solve the problem however, that is almost always not the case. Organizations must take a detailed look at their customer service function and determine if they have the right training, talent, process, and technology in place to create amazing customer experiences. It takes quite a bit more work than investing in the newest AI technology or contracting customer service to an overseas call center, but in the long run yields incredible benefit for both the company and it’s customers.
At Connext, we help organizations work through these issues to build a comprehensive customer service outsourcing solution. We work with clients to identify process gaps, implement offshore staff and technology, and build out ensuing organizational and process changes for them to be successful.
Outsource Healthcare services to Connext today.
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