Gone are the days when customers used to complaint and businesses used to ignore them. Monopoly of a handful of companies over their domain was the primary reason for their smug attitude in the past. The new age of globalization has brought with itself intense competition between brands, which has vested the power in the hands of customers. With so many companies vying for the attention of the same customer base, any disregard of consumer can have serious ramifications. This is the main reason why companies imparting contact center services have increased their focus on addressing customer complaints.
Positive Feedback vs. Customer Complaints
Positive feedback is good for any company that offers contact center services . It gives a rough idea to a company about how successful their product or services are. For a contact center outsourcing companies, be it in-house or outsourced, positive feedback serves as a benchmark for rating employees. Sometimes, on the basis of an extremely good feedback, it is a good practice to reward that contact center agent.
Appreciation in the form of verbal accolades or tangible gifts serves as a motivator for any agent. However, not many know that positive feedback can also be a result of manipulation of the system by an agent. Sometimes, customer service agents go out of their way and break policies to provide benefits to customers in one form or another. Hence, positive feedback is not always a product of good customer service.
On the other hand, customer complaints are more often than not very useful for any contact center. Customer complaints are generally about a bad product or the way a customer’s case was handled by an agent. In both cases, there is a lot that can be learnt by manufacturer/distributor or customer service provider. Unlike positive feedback that can be a result of system manipulation, complaints are mostly a consequence of a product or customer service delivery gone wrong.
Some Common Contact Center Services Complaints and How to Resolve Them
- Accent problems – A lot of customer based in English-speaking countries often complaint about their inability to understand agents. The difficulty in communication leads to utter chaos on the call, which is why, this complaint should be handled with due diligence. A great way to remove the accent barrier is by training your agents in neutral accent and making them listen to different accents. For example, if you are catering to US customers, you should make your agents listen different accents like Texan, Chicano Alabamian etc.
- Long hold times – Agents leaving callers on hold or mute can seriously anger the customers. This is also one of the most common reasons for customer complaints. To remove this problem, a contact center services outsourcing companies manager should regularly monitor calls and listen to them. If an agent is found to be misusing ‘hold’ and ‘mute’, he should be educated about its bad impact.
- Inability of agents to access Omni-channel contact center platforms – Contact center services are based on Omni-channel communication, which means customer can contact from any channel e.g. calls, chat, email, social media etc. In case, the agent receiving the query does not have access to the information shared on any other platform, it instantly has a bad impact on the customer. When a customer has to repeat the same information over and over again, it leads to customer frustration, dissatisfaction and sometimes a complaint. Making use of AI-powered CRM that can provide immediate access to agent about customer interactions, offers a great way to resolve this type of customer complaints.