Call Center Blog

Enhancing the online customer experience is the focal point for thousands of retail and ecommerce executives and hundreds of exhibitors at the Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition (IRCE) in Chicago, McCormick Place (West Building), June 2-4.

Retention of call center customer service and lead generation representatives is a critical corporate function and top management priority. 

Your Call Center Should Be Growing Brand Loyalty. Is It? 

What is Brand Loyalty?

Brand loyalty is what keeps your customers coming back regardless of price. It means they’ve come to believe you deliver a superior product or service and level of customer service that is worth whatever amount you’re charging. Which means consumers who are loyal to your brand will most likely remain loyal even if they encounter a few bumps in the road. Brand loyalty is basically the holy grail of consumerism, and is worth striving for in every dimension of your business. And more and more one of the leading dimensions for deepening brand loyalty is your call center. 

Looking to Add Live Chat Software to your Retail or E-Commerce Site?

December 5, 2014 - For retailers and e-commerce companies, maximizing the value of live chat customer service involves several basic principles that make all the difference when you add chatting capability to your retail site.

Email response and live chat produced by call center services providers is a valuable capability because customers have a variety of customer service media preferences.  "Go where the customer is" is an old marketing maxim.  But email and chat is a different breed of customer service from conventional telephone based services.  It’s important to understand that difference.

Sure, the information imparted is the same. But there are many significant differences between the effective delivery of written and verbal customer support.  
Here’s the main difference: When call center services representatives talk with a customer they get multiple “do-overs.” They can amplify, reiterate, clarify and expand upon their answer. “I hope I’m making myself clear, please feel free to ask me any questions, let me go through this again step by step.” 

When talking to a customer, a good call center services representative can sense customer confusion or lack of understanding and will review and repeat customer service input until the customer has grasped the feedback.

But with written communications – particularly email – you get one opportunity to make yourself clear and to comprehensively provide information the customer needs. It is common in the call center services business to answer customer email questions in batch mode, often during non-business hours, so there is no opportunity to ask the customer for clarification on their question or for the representatives to sense whether they are being understood.  

Another challenge with written communications: grammatical and spelling errors permanently remain on the page or the computer screen for all the world to see, and they leave an indelible, bad impression.

Bottom line: You have to get it right the first time.  This takes hard work, review and editing.  As the saying goes, “writing is re-writing.”

Or, to quote Maya Angelou, “Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it's right, it's easy. It's the other way round, too. If it's slovenly written, then it's hard to read. It doesn't give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.”

So extra measures and training need to be put in place in order for the customer service call center to produce quality emails and chat sessions, and it starts with agent selection.  Obviously, agents handling email response and live chat programs must have proven written communication skills. They should be tested on their writing – for both quality and for speed – and only those meeting the highest standards should be put in the role of call center email response and live chat.

In addition, call center services managers must take the time to review all written communications before it goes to the customer until the representative has proven him or herself a consistent producer of quality written communications.

Another important component, one that aids both quality and productivity, is the continual building of an email response template library. This should be organized by subject matter and written in such a way that call center services agents can re-use an existing answer with minimal changes.  A comprehensive template library will ensure rapid and high quality response to customers’ needs.

Outsourced call center services providers should provide their clients, via blind copying, with the ability to see all email being sent on their behalf. In turn, agents and program supervisors should be aware that the client reviews their emails.  This reassures clients that quality written communications is taking place and it motivates call center staff to write well.

Call center services program supervisors should collect both good and sub-par customer service emails and chat transcripts and hold regular training sessions with agents to review examples of good and bad quality work.  Agents who produce lower-quality communications should be given remedial training.

Anger happens. But it’s what we in the call center do in response to customer anger that matters.  Handled incorrectly, the anger only worsens and the customer may be lost forever.  Handled right, customer loyalty can be preserved and strengthened.

A product delivery is late, a refund is not credited to a credit card, a product is defective, an online business service malfunctions, a customer is treated rudely. The customer grabs the telephone and, in the mindset of one who has been victimized and mistreated, calls customer service.

Most angry customers realize, rationally, that the person at the other end of the telephone is not responsible for the problem.  But they also may think that if they create a big enough stir that word will get to those who are responsible.  Either way, there definitely is a right way and wrong way for the call center customer service representative to handle the situation.

The first thing the call center services provider should do with an angry customer happens long before the angry phone call happens.  It starts with training, including both classroom instruction and role playing. Call center customer support workers need to embrace the concept that the angry customer is not making a personal attack on them. They need to distance themselves from the anger.  To do this, the customer service representative must understand the psychology of the angry customer and understanding how to defuse the anger.

This begins with the basic, empathetic act of listening.  The customer service specialist should be trained to allow the angry customer to blow off steam, to make his or her case without interruption.  Once that’s completed, the first words from the customer service agent’s should be, “I’m sorry to hear about this and I understand how frustrated you must be. I’m going to do everything I can to fix this problem for you.”  Or words to that effect.

The next thing: Repeat back to the customer what s/he just said (“So let me state my understanding of the problem here…”).  This proves to the customer that the customer service representative has done a good job of listening and truly understands the problem at hand.  It also is a very effective way to reduce the customer’s level of anger.  It is only after the customer says that the problem is correctly understood that the agent should begin to take action to remedy the situation.

Then comes problem resolution. Smart companies continually build knowledge and expertise about the problems their customers tend to run into – and put in place solutions to those problems.  If it’s a technical issue, they train call center customer service personnel to recognize the problem and, if possible, help the customer fix it.  If fixing the problem requires greater technical expertise, the call center customer service representative is trained to escalate the call to the technical service desk, which has protocols in place to fix the customer’s problem efficiently. This, in turn, allows the representative to tell the customer that the problem can be expected to be resolved within a given number of days or hours.

If the customer complaint has to do with product delivery then the smart company gives call center agents – both in-house and outsourced – access to live shipping information.  This enables the agent to give fresh updates on the status of their delivery.

If the complaint has to do with poor or rude service from someone else at the company then the smart company has policies that the customer service call center can follow: gathering data about the employee in question, incident details, date, time of day and other details. And the call center representative can explain to the angry customer the procedure that will be followed to address the complaint.  It’s also a good idea for a manager to follow-up within three days to inform the customer of the steps the company has taken.

Put another way, it takes both empathy and information to pacify an angry customer.  Call center services employees need to be trained on exhibiting empathy, and they need to be given the access and the tools to delivery high quality information. Together, the angry customer can be converted into one who is willing to give their vendor another chance.

There’s an art and a science to appointment setting that we admit to being somewhat OCD about.   B2B lead generation requires obsessiveness.  And that’s because it’s difficult.  

You have to be obsessive about a range of appointment setting challenges: about the pitch you develop; about quickly engaging your prospect in a spontaneous, comfortable conversation; and about “getting to yes” – that is, closing the deal and scheduling the sales appointment.