Could some of your clients be frustrated by the customer service they receive? Customers today have higher expectations than ever and no business is immune from customer service complaints. As professionals our aspiration is to turn complaints into compliments. In this article, we will examine what our research has determined to be the top 5 customer service complaints and what can be done about them. Following these tips will help your business and the customer service you provide to standout.
The top 5 customer service complaints?
- The customer representative was not able to help me
- The agent was unprofessional
- Only automation – I couldn’t reach a human
- I experienced a long wait on hold
- What should have been a quick and easy call became complicated
Nobody likes to get through to a representative to find that he/she doesn’t understand the problem or is simply unable to help. Transferring the request just adds to clients’ frustration and perception of disconnect with your organization.
Solution: Implement a strong interaction routing strategy. Bulls-eye routing or skills based routing can be used to perfectly match an agent’s specific attributes and ensure that calls are assigned only to the agents best equipped for handling a specific interaction.
Map your customer’s journey and provide agents with actionable information based on your client’s previous experiences and experiences and interactions with your brand across all channels.
It happens! Anyone can have a bad day. But sometimes this is not the root of the issue. Most often, lack of training and fatigue leads to undesirable and uncomfortable situations.
Solution: A systematic quality assurance process with scheduled reviews of agents’ recordings and interaction scorecards, which allow supervisors to provide each agent with essential feedback.
Automated customer satisfaction surveys are also a great tool that offer callers an opportunity to give their input on the service they received. Finally, gamification of agent performance – a great tool for bringing some friendly competition to the workplace and breaking up the monotony and fatigue.
I’m sure we have all had those calls where we have found ourselves almost screaming ‘representative’ while trying to navigate a poorly designed automated system that cannot comprehend what we want. However, with the number of requests that come into a customer service center it usually isn’t possible to personally handle every interaction that comes in.
Solution: This is where it is important to ensure a proper design and strategy for self-service. Speech-enabled IVR and Natural Language Understanding (NLU) allow customers to communicate with systems in a way that can feel completely natural but they are only efficient if built with a strong inbound interaction architecture. For calls, our study has found that clients will have educated themselves on the issue they’re calling about before they pick up the phone. Voice self-service can become redundant and frustrating if not tied to clients’ Journeys. A Journey Mapping tool can link to an IVR and create value for clients.
Sometimes it isn’t possible to reach a person within a short period of time when calling a business. Regardless, clients shouldn’t be expected to put their lives on hold while waiting in a queue for an unspecified amount of time.
Solution: Callback requests offer clients an option to disconnect while allowing them to maintain their position in the queue or to schedule a callback.
In order to provide top-level service to clients, we need to have access to the proper tools. Agents can’t provide assistance quickly and with ease if the system they are working with doesn’t do the same for them.
Solution: Our studies have found that average handle time can be reduced by 20% – 30% with a well-designed and functional user interface.
Implementing a unified desktop consolidates existing and new customer engagement tools. New AI technology such as “Agent Assist Bots” simplifies and streamlines your users activities.
Tip: Don’t forget about keyboard shortcuts for navigation purposes