If you’ve worked in a call center long enough, you’ll learn that customer complaint are among the least enjoyable to take. While complaints are simply part of the call center experience, there are four ideas you can put to good use to both reduce the number of customer complaints you receive and boost your quality monitoring capabilities.
1. Resolve the Issue on the First Call
There are a few things that customers hate more than having to be put on hold, transferred, and made to call back before an issue is fully resolved. While you can’t prevent complaint calls, you can change the way customers feel about calling your company with an issue. Make sure your agents have the skill, authority, and knowledge they need to offer refunds, make promises that can be kept, and make it so customers don’t have to contact your business with the same complaint.
2. Implement the Right System
You should also consider implementing a quality assurance system that gathers information on calls to provide you with valuable information you can put to good use improving your call center and your agents. The way QA technology works is it examines keywords used by your agents and callers so you can get a firm understanding of why customers are complaining and why your complaint resolution skills might not be as great as you’d like for them to be.
3. Keep the Lines of Communication Wide Open
Not only do your agents need to maintain clear and constant communication with your customers, you also need to ensure your managers and agents can easily communicate with each other. You can take this one step further and see to it that your managers relate to other necessary departments and company personnel to allow them to be better.
In addition to implementing quality monitoring solutions to help with this tip, it’s also a good idea to hold meetings to review past complaints, how they were resolved and how they can be better resolved in the future for even better results and happier customers. To make meetings more efficient, it’s a good idea to implement a complaint-logging system.
4. Stay Consistent
Your agents should be consistent in their problem-resolution skills. If the same customer calls about two different issues and has two different experiences, that customer might feel you aren’t consistent or aren’t properly training your employees. Again, this is a good reason to hold regular meetings, to make sure your training efforts are the same across the line, and to see if any changes need to be made to your training.
Make it so that when your customers have to call with a complaint, they know they’re going to be taken care of by your agents and fellow call center leaders. While you can’t please everyone, there’s most certainly no harm in trying. Put these tips to good use, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at Etech if you need more assistance or guidance in your quest to reduce customer complaints.
This blog was first published on LinkedIn.
