Customer Service Practices & Procedures
All companies utilizing call centers must have a set of policies in place that govern how customer service should be implemented and measured. Metrics are a major part of call center management. However, they are heavily weighted towards the quantitative rather than the qualitative. For example, agents are encouraged to process each call quickly and move on to the next one. Faster agents are singled out and rewarded. The speed is actually detrimental if it results in customers being rushed and feeling like they were not treated properly or if it means the customer service representative is not doing all that is necessary in the background to handle the call. Agents trying to beat the clock will often fail to make notes in the system to properly document the transaction; this only leads to more work for someone else in the company later on in the process and has an overall negative effect on efficiency.
There are industry "best practices" to which call center upper management strives to match. They take a look at their own companies and adopt the strategies that fit in with their operating models and their lines of business. Those that achieve the top levels of service are recognized by their peers in call center industry publications (such as the Call Center Leadership Award given by Call Center Magazine) as well as publications specific to their core businesses. The companies with the absolute best call center customer service practices are singled out to the general public when the companies win awards for quality like the Malcolm Baldridge Award and the J.D. Power & Associates Award.
In order to win these awards and to compete with the best in class companies, call center agents need proper training. Poor service in call centers can often be traced directly back to the poor training that the operators received. Due to high turnover rates, trainees are often put through a minimal training program and then put on the phones as soon as possible so the trainers can start the process all over again. Unfortunately ti is a disastrous cycle customer-service wise.
One way to help provide consistent and decent service once employees are out on the live call floor is to give them the best software available. When they answer a call for a certain company or a certain line of business coming in a particular toll free number, a "script" pops up on their screen giving them information about the call so they know how to answer. That is where many companies stop, but that is only the beginning. Watching call center agents flip through a stack of manuals to find information to answer a customer's question in this day and age is absurd, yet that happens every day at call centers across the world. The technology certainly exists to give service reps all the information they need within seconds through the customer account interfaces, but employers must be willing to invest in it.
Ongoing feedback to the agents is essential for their continued professional development. Most call centers run a message before the call is answered saying, "This call may be monitored or recorded for quality and training purposes." Usually supervisors or senior agents review the recorded calls with agents to see how they think they did and to offer helpful suggestions on how they could have handled whatever came up in the call. Some companies call this "coaching." Coaching may result in anything from a citation for doing excellent work to an order for additional training. In either case, the goal is adherence to the customer service practice policies in order to achieve customer satisfaction.
|
