Call centers can play a huge role in the overall customer service that a company provides. As a result, your call center customer experience (CX) can shape how potential leads and buyers perceive your brand.
Essentially, call center CX refers to how you treat customers from the moment they call you until their issue is resolved—and sometimes after, too. It covers the experience your customers have with you across all of your company’s various touch points.
Altogether, this experience plays a pivotal role in making your business stand out and breed loyalty.
But it’s not just that—because call center CX is also directly tied to the sales and revenue side of your business. After all, positive customer interactions often lead to repeat purchases and brand advocacy.
Why Some Call Centers Accidentally Make CX Worse
There are a lot of call center best practices out there, and depending on your individual business, not all of them will work.
In fact, following all of the cookie-cutter bits of advice can even cause some businesses to miss out on opportunities to provide excellent CX. To make matters worse, many businesses aren’t even aware when they do things that harm their customer’s contact center experience.
Here are some examples of call center CX mistakes that make customers grit their teeth:
1. Using IVR systems
While an Interactive Voice Response system sounds good in theory, using it poorly comes with a number of infuriating drawbacks. Keep an eye out for the following flaws:
- The system has a long menu. This forces customers to wait unnecessarily before the menu gives them a number for the department they want to connect with.
- The IVR has poor voice recognition functionality. This causes customers to repeat themselves multiple times for no reason, which can be terribly frustrating.
- There’s no personalization. This makes it difficult for the IVR to solve complex issues, calling its overall functionality into question.
Any of these issues can lead to time-wasting rather than quicker routing, ultimately doing more harm than good.
2. Having outdated or inaccurate hold messages
Sometimes, the only thing worse than waiting on hold until an agent is available is having to listen to a lengthy and repetitive hold message over and over again while you wait.
Once again, having an automated message that updates callers with an estimated hold time is something that works well in theory, but if it’s wrong, your customers will not be happy. This can do a lot of damage to your company’s reputation, as callers who feel misled won’t be as keen to do business with you again.
3. Being on too many social media channels
Another mistake many businesses make is that they spread themselves too thin by being on every social network they can. This can make it more difficult for customers to find where they’ll be assisted the best.
Additionally, maintaining a presence on a handful of social media channels is often cumbersome, as businesses struggle to:
- Post consistently on various networks
- Stay active and responsive on each
- Have the right resources to manage social media
- Maintain a unified brand message and experience
- Track and integrate performance across various platforms
In the end, rather than nailing a few core channels, businesses that have an account on each network often end up diluting the quality of their customer experience unknowingly.
4. Relying heavily on scripts
Even though it’s a good idea to have scripts and templates to maintain consistent brand messaging, relying on them too much can lead to poor customer experience.
This is because templates tend to lack personalization. They also hamper agent empathy and make agents feel helpless if they can’t deviate from the dialogue.
Lastly, scripts can also seem robotic and monotonous, leading customers to feel less personally connected with the business.
7 Call Center CX Tips That Actually Work
In lieu of all the things that don’t work, you may want to try the following techniques to turn the tides of CX in your favor.
1. Skip the IVR entirely
While IVR systems are a cost-effective way of handling a large volume of calls, 61% of customers miss the experience of talking to live agents. 71% of customers also prefer speaking to a human over self-service options.
Thus, if you’re a premium business that can afford it, you may want to throw your outdated IVR system out the window—opting instead to train more live agents to meet customer needs.
In fact, with so many other self-service options available like your knowledge base, customer portal, and chatbots, you may not even need an IVR in the first place. That’s because most customers are smart enough to solve their minor problems on their own with your self-service options—which means they only call you when they’re facing an issue they can’t solve on their own.
In these cases, it’s very unlikely that an IVR system will be able to solve them either, especially when the IVR system isn’t even equipped with the knowledge to answer their query in the first place.
2. Create a customer knowledge base
A customer knowledge base (CKB) holds all the information about a business’s products and services. Such a repository empowers customers to find answers to their concerns on their own. It also serves as a centralized information hub for agents.
Along with being an information center, a customer knowledge base also contributes to reducing the burden on agents. This happens as customers resort to finding their answers themselves which significantly reduces calls to the contact center.
Interestingly, customers also find CKBs useful enough to prefer them over other self-service options in many cases.
To be successful with this self-service option, however, make sure your knowledge base is regularly updated, easily accessible, and properly organized.
3. Examine past calls to learn about customer pain points
While gathering and analyzing customer feedback is a good approach, you should also assess customer calls to learn about common customer needs and problems.
This will help fix the root causes of customer queries as your business works to improve its products and services based on the most common customer pain points.
Once you succeed at making foundational changes, you’ll notice:
- An improvement in customer experience
- A decrease in the number of customer queries and calls
- A reduced burden on human agents
To go about assessing common customer problems, take a systematic approach.
Start by gathering call recordings from various departments and then review them to identify common themes in customer problems. Next, chalk out an action plan to fix your product/service complaints by collaborating with various departments of the company.
Keep in mind that most companies struggle in this area, as bridging the gap between different departments can be challenging. However, if department heads don’t address the root cause of issues that lead to customer calls, the feedback collected from call recordings will go nowhere.
4. Conduct team call reviews
Close to 50% of agents struggle to handle difficult customer conversations. This leads to agent frustration and also leaves customers unanswered.
To improve service agent performance, it’s important to host team call reviews and brainstorming sessions.
These don’t have to be complicated; just gather a bunch of examples of really good and really poor customer calls, and then encourage the team to assess these calls together while brainstorming ways to manage them better.
Keep in mind that you may want to come up with questions or pointers regarding the performance of the calls to guide the discussion beforehand. This will help ensure that the sessions are productive and useful.
With properly conducted team reviews, agents learn not only how to handle challenging conversations but also how to work as a team. Moreover, when each member shares their insights and supports one another’s growth, you’re able to promote a culture of continuous learning.
Once the review session is done, don’t forget to document the key learnings. Next, create and implement an action plan based on the key takeaways—and remember to track the implemented changes to measure progress.
5. Give agents autonomy
Micromanaging call center agents leaves them feeling stressed, frustrated, and helpless.
On the other hand, allowing agents to make decisions and handle customers independently leads to increased job satisfaction. It also improves customer experience as agents are able to offer personalized solutions and prompt responses without feeling restrained.
At the same time, however, it’s also crucial to set clear agent expectations and help them learn the scope of their autonomy. This way, your agents will be able to make more informed decisions while also sticking to your company policies.
In addition to providing clear guidelines, you should also train agents and offer continuous feedback to help them develop their soft skills and enhance their knowledge of the product. This will help them use their autonomy in ways that benefit themselves as well as the customers.
6. Only tap into selected communication channels
Being active on various social channels makes it convenient for customers to seek customer support wherever they want, but it’s not always realistic if you want to provide an excellent customer experience.
Since less than 25% of organizations have the means to maintain consistency and personalization across a slew of social channels, it’s probably best to tap into only a few that you have the resources to manage properly. This is key to maintaining consistent branding and support.
A good rule of thumb here is to focus on the channels where your audience is most likely already present and build a community there. With a few targeted communication avenues to work on, you’ll also be better equipped to measure the analytics on those channels.
7. Train specialized agents
Nearly 46% of customers will leave a brand if its employees aren’t knowledgeable enough to help. This makes training your agents a key factor in your call center customer experience.
However, in addition to training your agents, you should work on arming your best employees with specialized knowledge in specific areas of technical support based on their skills and interests as well.
This will help improve customer experience as agents build the know-how to solve customer problems more efficiently and promptly.
Agent specialization in core customer issues also reduces the need for bouncing customers from agent to agent, which can quickly lead to frustration.
Likewise, when specialized agents cater to complex customer concerns, call handle times can also drop while customer loyalty and satisfaction rates go up.
Improve Your Call Center CX The Right Way
Call centers are at the frontline in the customer services department, which is why it is crucial for them to offer exceptional customer experience. Unfortunately, many businesses fail to provide excellent CX despite their best intentions.
To improve your call center CX, you may need to reconsider if you are implementing some of the best practices well enough for them to be effective. Otherwise, you might be shooting yourself in the foot.