Bad Customer Experience is not because of the accent.
Great customer experience can be a major differentiator for an organization and bad customer experience can leave it scrambling, in ruin. VPs and CXOs of customer experience and success around the world are constantly striving to improve customer service with new technology, tools, and data however, most companies still can’t get it right. In fact, I had two interactions just this week with customer service representatives of large companies that left me tired, frustrated, and looking for another partnership. I will get into those a little bit later. The purpose of this article is to dig in to four trends that are creating bad customer experiences, and no, the accent is not one of them.
- 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 training. That 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. This particular moment however, put me over the edge. I called one of the financial institutions and was immediately transferred to an overseas call center. A friendly voice comes on the other end and introduces themselves and I explain the issue I’m having. The first question is whether the two financial institutions I am referring to are one in the same or different? Seriously? 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. What created this? If you say overseas foreign worker, you are wrong. It’s 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 go overlooked. Mostly because 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 is easy. Forecast your volume and capacity needs out several months to plan for when volumes are going to be high. Then work in a recruiting, onboarding, and training plan so that your customer support team is ready to go 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.
- Talent Management
Isn’t it ironic that customer service agents are paid the least, yet 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. It is obvious that this organization invests a lot of time and money in their customer service representatives and it shows.
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. Either way 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 service some of their customer service needs but when someone in New York calls about their billing issue, they are getting 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 overall customer experience and missed calls.
My suggestion: get creative with how your are handling customer service and make sure that you have highly talented (and trained) folks, whether they are in the US or somewhere else, handling your customer issues.
- Process
It’s easy to say the hardest part about customer service is having the capacity to simply answer the phone however, that is just not the case. The answer is, what happens next. How are customers routed through the call chain? Do they talk to a person first or do they go straight to a 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. As you can imagine, at a hospital there are many different call types, some very urgent and others not. 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 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 to in real time.
Each call type deserves it’s own process map and resources need to be allocated to that map to best address the customer need. Identifying and owning these processes are critical to good customer experience.
- Reliance on Technology
I am a huge proponent of new technologies revolutionizing the way we are serving customers, but we can’t rely on it. Artificial intelligence and robot process automation are awesome, cutting edge technologies that can be applied throughout the customer experience base but they are not a set and forget solution. 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 was in need of assistance. The response from the chat bot: Well have you checked the promotion page?
Well yes, I just said that. Again, lack of training. Except this time with an AI chat bot. 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 probably assumed that they could plug in an expensive aritificial intelligence tool and it would solve their customer experience issues. Easy fix, but not ideal for creating a positive customer experience. These tools, like people, still require training, clear processes, and loads of data 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