When it comes to winning a competition in business, the best thing you can do is to offer some exclusive options your competitors don’t provide. And even though it sounds obvious, most companies can’t even adequately address the differentiation question or rely on the quality of their customer service, which is often the same to their competitors. In our industry, it is just not enough.
Many companies focus so hard on their internal issues that they just forget about customer satisfaction and don’t even know what kind of customer experience their customers want to receive. As for today, customer satisfaction index for call center industry has reached its lowest point since the Index has been created.
While some companies are trying to do their best and adopt the best practices of multichannel customer experience strategy, others just do everything to go away from even regular standards of good customer service. Moreover, some call centers even do their best to stop agents from providing good customer service.
In the CFI group research more than 3000 users of contact center services were surveyed. There were discovered 4 most frustrating factors: contact process, internal company policies, procedures, and IVR solutions.
Contact process becomes awful when it takes too much time to resolve the customer problem. Self-service is known as a savior for such occurrences, but in most cases, it is poorly designed and provided so it can’t help. 66% of users are already frustrated when they finally contact a customer service agent – and that’s terrifying percentage.
Policies and procedures are often aimed at meeting internal KPIs and goals, which doesn’t always correlate with customer expectations and needs. In fact, most contact centers just forget that they were created to service customers and destroy the service quality in the race for internal goals, which are often meaningless.
When it comes to IVR, the study just proves that most companies use IVR for wrong purposes – to build a barrier between an agent and customer and save a few pennies on it, while the true goal of IVR is to help customers receive qualitative service. When IVR is focused on contact center benefits, not on customers – it will harm.