7 Ways to Improve Customer Experience on the Voice Channel

While digital communication channels are everywhere in today’s customer service, most people still prefer to call brands, writes Caroline Leonard, Senior Marketing Manager at Spearline.

According to Kaye Chapman of Comm100, “Poor customer service is costing businesses across all industries more than 75 billion dollars a year.”

As many studies have shown, digital channels are preferred only when they work seamlessly. If a self-service channel fails to work, your customers are likely to pick up the phone for further support.

What’s more, the quality your customers experience when they do pick up the phone to you is as important as ever. This is why you need to ensure your agents and your call centre are at the top of their game.

Spearline has compiled the following seven suggestions to help you and your organization improve your customers’ experience on your voice channel.

1. Speak like a human!

It sounds obvious, but your customers are humans too!

Given the amount of information we’re exposed to on a daily basis, it’s more important than ever to connect with your customers and prospects in a real way.

It’s likely that someone is calling you because they have had a frustration with one of your digital channels, so it’s important that your agents are empathetic and understanding while on the phone.

2. Have shorter waiting times

No one likes to have to be put on hold for longer than they have to.

While eliminating on-hold time is virtually impossible, it is best practice to shorten the length of time someone is on hold to avoid them feeling frustrated and losing patience with your organization.

3. Regularly monitor your calls

Live call monitoring and instant feedback can be very useful to identify human and emotional factors that factual data alone cannot communicate.

Plan to capture enough samples of calls, interactions, and different agents, so that you can make meaningful decisions.

Monitor a mix of calls, including non-problematic agents and calls. Learn from successful calls.

4. Make feedback and coaching routine

Rather than giving your agents feedback sporadically, why not make it part of your daily or weekly operations?

Identify low-volume times at your contact centre and put this time to good use and remember that feedback can be positive or negative and can come in many forms – surveys, scorecards, KPIs etc.

Genuinely coaching an agent will prove that you are invested in him or her, improving both motivation and attrition rates in your organization.

Role-playing and refresher training sessions are just some of the ways you can support your agents and build company culture.

5. Display real-time call data prominently

Giving your agents a real-time snapshot of how the entire centre is working together can motivate individual agents to contribute value the team.

Consider investing in a projection area that is highly visible to agents which displays data that give a glimpse of customer satisfaction and agent productivity.

6. Make call centre QA regular and timely

According to Leaddesk, learn and share best practices with your agents. Highlight the best calls and the best problem-solving solutions. Don’t ignore unspectacular cases.

There’s a lot to learn from agents that perform consistently and how they stay aligned with scripts. Analyse regularly. Set aside time and resources. Keep moving the goalposts. Keep tracking consistent but adjust your KPIs as your business changes.

7. Monitor all channels

Customers don’t see your organization in terms of different departments and communication channels.

Technological developments and digital channels can play a major role to reduce customer service issues, but systems that aren’t integrated can cause more problems than they solve.

For more information, visit www.spearline.com