Problem-solving in Contact Center Work
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Every contact center sticks to the old fashioned way of reacting approach in
problem-solving. It means that they do not try to foresee possible problems in bottleneck situations. If you realize that this or that situation may be interpreted in different ways and may provoke misunderstanding, then you have to make some steps to prevent this misunderstanding or teach your agents how to deal in this situation. As an example, we may describe the situation, when the mobile operator starts a promotion campaign for a new service that is supposed to start in a few months. The clients are not informed about the launch time and the employees are not yet informed about all the details and do not know how to start that service for a customer. In this case, the call center receives a great number of calls, employees are overloaded with the work that cannot be done at this very moment, and they even do not have all the information about future services.
Though this confusing situation may be easily avoided if the company provided info for its agents or added a special point to a bot voice menu. Unfortunately, call centers used to deal with existing problems, and do not strive to make any steps in advance. One of the most problematic things in contact center work is that agents are made responsible for somebody’s else promises. No matter who made a promise, a company or an employee, you as a call center manager have to realize it otherwise the company or another employee will have to explain why the obligations are not performed. And dealing with every other situation looks like putting out fires. As it is very difficult to follow up every promise made within the
company, especially if you depend on other people to keep it. If somebody didn’t call a client, the other didn’t prepare a letter or report, and the third one couldn’t find a good helper for a client, etc. All these issues teach the staff to solve the arising problems but not the root of it. Sinking in everyday routing it is very difficult to change the scheme.
The customer satisfaction and the actual decision of the problem
If we are talking about contact centers, we should realize that it reminds the top of an iceberg, and except the contact center, itself company has a number of other departments rather disconnected one from the other. Disconnection may also outcome from customers’ expectations and companies’ potencies.
For example, customers get used to certain standards within the industry or to the services they had in the previous place, and if your company fails in the competition, your task as a manager would be to analyze the reason than curing the symptoms. Analyzing the gap and broken promises we may improve the contact center performance by eliminating the cause rather than fighting the consequences. The gaps may be different but understanding the root of the problem will help you to escape from the everyday routine of repeated actions.
Very often advisors come to the office with the only idea in their mind how to spend the day with calls, problems, scores and metrics, and so on, and the customer satisfaction and the actual decision of the problem would be far behind the above-mentioned stuff. That is why you as an owner or a manager have to stop for a while and evaluate call center work from different points of view – customers, workers, and owners. So you should focus on elevating customer experience before facing a problem.
As they say – the best service is no service at all. So the more attractive your company is for customers and workers, the better outcome you’ll get!
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