Are your agents saying the right thing? If you are like most call center leaders, quality assurance requires a lot of your attention and time. How many times have you revamped your program in the last few years?
Are your agents using the customer’s name, confirming their account number, repeating back the customers problem? It’s important to look for those words that they need to say to improve the customer experience, increase first call resolution, and diffuse an upset customer. And that’s not even considering the spectrum of the tone related elements of their customer interactions.
What about the flipside?
But how often do you consider things they should not be saying? How many times have you made a call into a call center and said to yourself, “This agent should not have said that”? I would say that, for me, if I were to stop and tally it up, it possibly occurs in half of the interactions I have.
You might just say that I’m an insider and I’m more critical than the average customer. I might say that, too, but when I look at the industry dissatisfaction statistics with call center interactions, I begin to suspect that I might not be all that different than everyone else. We can do better.
Common mistakes
We are creatures of habit. And in the call center industry, we create call centers of habit. We call it benchmarking. I have witnessed more customer pain being dealt out because of benchmarking in our industry than I care to think about. We also learn to say many of the same things from center to center. This causes customer pain, too.
There is one word that you probably use everyday. And I guarantee your agents do, too. We’ve scripted their brain to use it as a protection mechanism, fear avoidance and call control tool. This word probably is a contributing factor to those low industry satisfaction rates, as well.
What is it? Watch the video…
Would you like to see more video quick tips from Jim? Connect with him on Linkedin, let him know what topics interest you, and we’ll post them on the blog.
