Worldwide, 96% of consumers say that customer service is an important factor in their choice of loyalty to companies and their brands. For this reason, in the face of such expressive numbers, companies must concentrate on devising strategies and finding tools to achieve the goal of fully satisfying their customers, with all that this concept entails.
Comprehensive customer satisfaction ranges from when a prospect approaches a company with the intention of satisfying a need through a product or service that it offers, to after-sales service in the event that said prospect becomes a customer.
Each potential or current customer contact is important to safeguard or enhance the reputation of the company that provides the products or services. That is, each contact with them exposes their reputation and that of the products or services. If any of the customer contact instances fails, it will affect reputation. Such is the case of the ineffable call centers, to which companies increasingly allocate a greater number of orders in contact with customers or potential customers.
From requesting reports, through hiring services, monitoring their provision, category changes, to post-sale service and many others, and so on, companies entrust the call centers. They assign the most delicate thing to them, which is contact with prospects and customers. In most cases, they do not measure the importance that this entails or the risk associated with reputation, appointing inefficient or misinformed people to answer calls.
As if this were not enough, due to the urgency of optimizing resources, there is a marked tendency to entrust this task to third parties, that is to “specialist” companies in the field, which are dedicated to answering telephone calls, many times without the context or the necessary preparation for it.
How many times, dear reader, have you had a bad experience with a call center? I can guess the answers. In the best of cases, the attention of a call center wastes half an hour of their valuable time to long-suffering applicants. On countless occasions, after the eternal wait, against the background of horrendous music in a distorted tone, communication is surprisingly cut off and you have to communicate again and go through the usual and indiscreet interrogations again, worthy of a television game show .
The result? Angry and dissatisfied customers, but, above all, with a bad attitude towards the companies represented by the arrogant one who answered the call, with the impact on the reputation of the company and its products or services. The bad attitude they provoke is not towards the company that answers the calls (one does not even know if the voice on the other end of the phone line belongs to an employee of the call center, of the company, or of a passive and indifferent bureaucrat only interested in ending the call.
Call centers tend to be, in the best of cases, bottlenecks for the efficient response to customer requests.
According to experts, there are critical areas to review, to improve or optimize the operation of call centers, since companies increasingly use them for contact with customers, all of them associated with their satisfaction and with the potential damage to the reputation of companies and their products or services:
- Knowledge of the company and the products or services it offers to the market and the processes involved in it.
- Clear processes to solve common problems.
- Training for continuous improvement.
- Work routes based on the skills of the personnel answering the calls.
- Live call monitoring and training.
- Chat between agents to share experiences and customer demands.
- Listen to those who have telephone contact with customers.
- All this, coupled with the hiring and updating of the technology that corresponds to the expectations of adequate attention to customers and prospects in the growing assignments that are entrusted to the call centers every day.
- Knowledge of the company and its processes.
Efficiency is not the same as effectiveness. A call center may be efficient in handling a large number of calls, but not effective in meeting customer needs or expectations. The first indicator will satisfy the administrative director of the company, in order to optimize the use of resources, but the second is the most important to increase or safeguard the reputation of the company and the brands associated with it, because the satisfied customer is the most powerful source of good reputation for a company. Failure to do so will be of little use to advertising, salespeople’s efforts to attract customers, impeccable facilities, luxurious product packaging, or lavish new-product launch events.