How to Overcome Your Customers' Frustrations When Contacting Your Organization
Published On September 4, 2019
Last autumn, my colleague and I conducted an internal survey asking ComputerTalk staff, "What is your biggest pain point when contacting an organization?" We found that many pain points can easily be solved with simple contact center features and don’t require complex solution overhauls. Your customers might have experienced some of these pain points when contacting your organization. Here are some simple and easy ways to overcome those challenges:
1. Wait times
Long wait times to speak with an agent was the most frequent pain point among our staff. Customers want to get in contact with someone fast, know how long it will be until they can interact with someone, or even have the ability to do other tasks rather than wait on the phone.
Use standard ice Contact Center queuing features to keep customers informed of the estimated wait time while on hold. Or even better, implement call back, so agents can call customers back when they are available, allowing customers to do other things rather than waiting on the phone.
2. Reaching the right person/contacting a live agent
One significant pain point for customers is going through long, overwhelming IVR systems with too many options, especially when all they have is a simple request. This pain point is caused by the design of your workflow.
At ComputerTalk we have workflow experts that can help you design and build your workflows. With ice Contact Center, you can easily customize and configure workflows to allow for easy navigation for your customers to ensure they never get lost or frustrated with your IVR again.
3. Unknowledgeable agents
Customers expect quick and accurate responses to their inquiries. When an agent is slow providing information or unknowledgeable about a subject, customers can quickly lose confidence in the agent.
By integrating your contact center with your CRM, ticketing solution, or knowledge base, your agents will have all necessary information at their figure tips, and customers never have to wait for the agent to find the correct information. Screen pop
the data with an incoming interaction or add wordspotting while a call is in progress.
4. Modalities/channels
There were a number of staff who said one of their largest pain points when contacting an organization were companies that don’t have web chat or only have voice. Many millennials have expressed that they will exhaust every communication option before picking up the phone to contact an organization: read an organization's FAQ on their site, try to find a web chat or chatbot, potentially even email them despite having a slower turnaround compared to calling.
ice Contact Center offers omnichannel capabilities, so you can allow customers to reach you on their preferred channel, whether that be web chat, email, chatbots, email, mobile app, or even voice.
5. Repeating information
There’s nothing more irritating than going through a long IVR system, selecting what your call is about or entering your account information, only to be asked for the same information from the agent you are connected with.
Rather than have the customer repeat themselves, send the IVR information directly to the agent, so they have context when interacting with the customer. Auto-insert activity records in CRM to compile customer interaction history and accelerate resolution time. This eliminates the need to ask for existing customer information.
6. Poor on-hold music
As mentioned above, our employees’ number one pain point is waiting on hold. And while waiting on hold, they have issues with the music they are forced to listen to.
Some companies such as Apple and TD Bank allow customers to choose their own on-hold music. Others customize their on-hold music with their brand. I was once on hold to book a group reservation at a recreational ax-throwing place, and they played a Guns ‘N Roses song, which went along with their branding.
Customize or change your hold music with ice Contact Center. Or even better, offer customers the option for you to call them back when the next contact center user is available.
What do you think?
Do you resonate with any of these pain points when contacting an organization?
Want to implement any of these changes to resolve these pain points with your organization’s contact center? Contact your Account Owner or request a demo today.