Call Center Mistakes to Avoid
A call center can make or break a company. It must be a well-oiled machine in order to keep customers satisfied and coming back for more – regardless of if it’s sales or customer service. If your company’s call center is making some, or all, of the below mistakes, it’s best to correct them as soon as possible or risk losing a significant amount of business.
Making Customers Wait / Keeping Them on Hold
This is the most obvious mistake call centers make over and over again, and it’s the direst to correct. Research suggests that, when asking about a product or service, 66% of customers expect a response to their query on the same day. Additionally, 40% of them expect a reply within the hour. If these expectations aren’t met, it’s likely these customers will take their business elsewhere. In fact, 47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within one day of experiencing poor customer service, and 79% would do the same within a week. The people have spoken, and they are constantly saying not to keep them waiting for what they want.
Playing Customer Hot Potato
Piggy-backing off making customers wait, another mistake to avoid is keeping customers waiting by passing them off from one representative to another. When customers contact a call center, they want to be connected to one person that can resolve their problems with as little issue as possible. They don’t want to be placed on hold while the person they’re talking to goes off to find a manager or someone in another department who can resolve their problems. Even worse, they don’t want to be given a separate phone number to call to speak to someone else. The best way to avoid this is to ensure representatives receive training in all possible situations a customer may present while on the phone.
Lack of Personalization
With all the technology available to call centers these days, it is absolutely inexcusable for there to be a lack of personalization on the phone. When a customer calls, everything about that customer should be available to the representative speaking to them – regardless of if that representative has spoken to them or not. Customers dislike repeating information over and over again to different representatives and dislike even more repeating that info to the same person. Having to do so suggests the call center’s information-sharing system needs work or, simply, the representatives don’t care enough to record the information and share it with others.
“Head to our Website”
One final mistake to be sure your call center isn’t making is telling customers to head to the website. While the caller is on hold or at some point during the call, a representative or an automated recording might tell the customer to head to the website for faster service. The caller called you for a reason, and they probably already tried the website. The customer might have a unique question the website can’t answer or prefers using the phone. Either way, telling them to go to the website can be repetitive and supremely unnecessary.
Mistakes happen; everyone knows that. What makes or breaks a call center is their ability to recognize when mistakes are being made and correct them as soon as possible. If your call center is making one, or all, of the aforementioned mistakes, it’s best to do some evaluating and tighten it up quickly.
