Understanding The Importance Of Good Customer Interaction

In today’s economy it is important to keep customers happy. An unhappy customer can make any call center agent miserable with their furious rants and demands. It is not that the call center is in the right or the customer is in the wrong. Many customers are fed up with the customer interaction they receive from the call centers that they must deal with. There is any number of reasons why customers will migrate to another company but the number one reason is poor customer service.

Let’s use the cell phone industry as an example of how customer interaction can begin to go downhill. A customer receives a bill and there is an obvious error on said bill. They call the customer service number expecting to talk to a call center agent. They are immediately put on hold. To make matters worse, the customer may be shuffled around to different departments in search of someone who can help them with their problem.

The business phone system is set up to help customers arrive in the appropriate department. But many customers get lost in the shuffle. By the time they reach someone who can actually help them they are frustrated and angry at the loss of time from their busy schedules. Being on hold for over thirty minutes can definitely shorten one’s temper and quickly turn a peaceful customer into a furious one.

The second biggest problem with customer service agents is lack of training. Many are given a short course on how to operate the call center software and then put on the lines to take calls. This lack of training quickly manifests itself in the inability to handle customer’s questions and problems. This is a serious issue with many of the top companies in the world and it shows when the annual lists are published naming the worst companies for customer service.

The key to solving the problems with customer interaction is to provide more effective call center training. It takes more than a week to learn how to navigate through the business software and know how to handle the basic and complex problems. Another solution is to stop the endless series of transfers and wait time. Customers do not mind having some wait time, it is expected, but to spend thirty minutes or more on hold is far too long. Businesses must address these issues if they want to keep their customers happy.