4 Most Familiar Call Center
Problems You Must Avoid
Most customers consider it a pain to contact a cal center. First of al , it takes quite a bit of time to reach the concerned person, since you have to select the right options. Moreover, things like cal transfers and cal waiting can add up to your frustration and waste your precious minutes. To top it all if the cal center representative you get to talk to, doesn’t possess good communication skil s, it could take a long time just getting your point across. If a contact center understands these problems, it might be in a better position to serve the customers.
Not all customer service representatives are bad in a cal center.
However, it is stil considered as an unpleasant task to cal a contact center because of four major problems:
#1. Language Barriers: Often customers wil have to communicate with agents who cannot speak good English. Or even if they do, it might be difficult to understand because of their accent. Communication is the main thing in contact centers and they need to understand this before hiring people. Apart from language fluency, they should also consider accent evaluation as a criterion while hiring employees.
#2. Being kept on hold: Time is the most precious thing in the life of today’s customers. No customer would like to be kept on hold for a long time. Cal centers should ensure that a cal is transferred to the concerned person immediately. One more option is to go for virtual hold where in the customer can hang up and the representative wil cal him back, as soon as he/she is free.
#3. Call transfer: Customers usual y want their queries addressed by the person who receives their cal s. Some of them just can’t accept cal transfers. As far as possible contact centers should train their employees to deal with standard queries. They can also organize their employees into universal agents and specialized agents. If the customer has a specialized query, his cal has to be attended by a specialized agent through the options that he/she selects.
#4. Repeating information: Often the customers wil have to repeat the information every time their cal gets transferred to a new agent. This can be quite frustration for anyone. Cal centers have to go for IVR solutions through which customer information can be col ected and accessed by their agents. Sometimes when cal transfers are unavoidable, IVR solutions can help the agents of a contact center to attend to the customers in a better way.
Cal centers do need to take time to train their employees and invest in solutions that wil help them handle customer engagement in a better manner. There are a lot of things they need to check for in their employees before hiring them:
•Personality: A cal center agent needs to have a pleasing personality. A smile on the face while talking to a customer can make a whole lot of difference.
•Attitude: Polite attitude is a must in Cal centers. At no point should a customer care representative be rude to any of the customers, irrespective of how he/she is treated.
•Tone of Voice: A warm and friendly voice can bring a smile on the cal er’s face, which is what cal centers need to keep in mind while hiring employees.
•Communication skills: An agent needs to have good communication skil s. He/she needs to know what to speak and how to put things across to a customer.
•Listening abilities: Unless a representative listens to customers, he/she wil not be able to understand their queries or concerns, which is why listening abilities are important
•Language fluency: Agents who are too slow in communication or those who are not fluent in the language they are supposed to communicate in cannot be assets to contact centers.
•Accent, if any: Even with excel ent language fluency and communication skil s, an agent may not be understood wel by the customers if he happens to have a heavy accent. This is something that needs to be evaluated at the time of hiring.
•Willingness to help: Attending to the customers’ queries and seeing to it that they are satisfied is a main function of a customer care representative. He/she has to possess a wil ingness to help.
•Patience: Work at cal centers involves receiving lots of phone cal s, listening to the same kind of complaints and attending to them. If a representative doesn’t have the patience to do all this, he/she just cannot fit into cal centers.