Customers are the purest form of quality assurance. Your company will not be able to expand and flourish without their approval. When consumers have a complaint, it’s critical to listen to them since they are opportunities to enhance the customer experience and avoid churn.
You’ll have to deal with client complaints no matter what sector you’re in. Even if your company never makes a mistake, one of your customers may eventually run into a problem that requires the assistance of your customer care department.
Data from Awaken Intelligence consists of information they derived from a survey of 750 customers of UK contact centres. The report shows the industries with the best and worst customer service and the commonest customer complaints about contact centres. Understanding the most common contact centre customer complaints and the techniques used by successful industries can improve customer service efficiency.Â
Common Complaints
Not Being Able to Speak With a Real Person
In a technologically driven world, contact centres must preserve human engagement to provide a positive customer experience. Contact centre technology, without a doubt, offers excellent opportunities for easy call handling, including first-point-of-contact, self-service choices, and automated services.
Using reliable technology can give a professional customer call handling experience while also allowing businesses to utilize their personnel better and save money. However, customers often want and need to talk with a live person. Consumers are emotional creatures, and each encounter must elicit good feelings in them to generate loyalty.
Lack of First-Call Resolution
After a single poor encounter, 32% of customers will abandon a brand. When you solve a customer’s problem on the initial interaction, your support team will receive fewer repeat requests. Customers will have shorter wait times as a consequence, and support personnel will have more time to focus on more complicated inquiries.
When your agents start a client engagement, they should inquire into the urgency of the situation. If the customer has a pressing need, try to fix the first call rather than waste time repeating processes or looking up unnecessary information. If your agents don’t know the answer, respectfully request a follow-up and explain why that procedure will result in a speedier resolution.
Being Transferred from One Rep to Another
This is possibly one of the most infuriating things you can do to a consumer. So that they don’t have to tell their tale to various agents over and again, make sure your contact information is widely distributed. This reduces the odds of their reaching the incorrect department.
Focus on educating your agents to take full responsibility for every enquiry and make the first-contact resolution a high priority metric.
Long Hold Times
Customers who are placed on hold become brand critics. They’re the folks who aren’t only dissatisfied with your firm and tell their friends and relatives about it. They frequently post bad encounters on social media as well. Long hold times point to two issues:
- Your client demand may exceed the capacity of your customer care personnel. In this scenario, you might consider employing extra representatives to satisfy your call centre’s requirements.
- Another issue might be a lack of automation in your call centre. Your support staff can benefit from capabilities in call centre software that streamline operations and automate activities.
In the meantime, representatives should apologize for the excessive wait periods and guarantee that all calls are resolved on the first try.
Inexperienced Agents
You can imagine a customer’s annoyance when they present a question to an agent who is just as ignorant about the subject as they are. Before contact centres can recruit agents to provide customer care, they must understand the service or product.
The organization is in charge of informing newly employed agents about the best ways to deal with clients and the ins and outs of service delivery. When required, experienced agents should be on hand to assist the newcomers.
Industries with the Best Customer Services
According to the research from Awaken, 23% of respondents say customer service providers in Finance and Banking offer the best support in the UK. However, this opinion is age-dependent. The youngest and oldest age groups, i.e. 18-24 and 54+, said that the consumer goods industry were the best customer service. Consumer goods do come in as a close second, with 20% of all respondents declaring them the best.
13% of the surveyed say they got the best service from entertainment and Hospitality, placing the industry at third. Utilities and Technology & Electrical share the fourth spot.
Pandemic’s Effects on Customer Service Levels
Companies and consumers have had to develop new ways to remain in touch following the epidemic, which posed several challenges. Online interaction has become the mainstay of customer-business communication, putting additional strain on contact centres. Many consumers believe the general quality of customer service has decreased since the pandemic.
In Conclusion
There is no such thing as a flawless contact centre or customer support staff. Customer service is a human endeavour, and humans are flawed. Mistakes are bound to occur. Learn from them and use what you’ve learned to create better client experiences. Though you may never completely eradicate customer service issues, you can improve the lives of people by demonstrating that you care about them.
Also Read: New Survey Showcases What Employees Value the Most During the COVID19 Pandemic
