How to improve contact centre service in 3 easy steps

Phil Stewart, customer service director at Virgin Media Business, shares three practical tips to improve the contact centre customer experience without increasing costs.

Contact centres have invested heavily in technology, people and processes over the last few years, yet many are still dogged by the same old service problems. A YouGov study recently revealed that four out of five customers are frustrated by long waiting times and poor communication from contact centre agents. Rather than continuing to throw money at this problem, it’s time we took a new approach. Here are my top three tactics for improving the customer’s experience.

1. Know your customer

Building relationships with customers remotely will always be a big challenge for contact centres, but that doesn’t mean that we should stop trying. If you want to provide customers with a quality service that exceeds their expectations it’s important that you have a good understanding of your customer base. A really simple way to find out what your customers want is to ask them straight out. It may sound painfully obvious, but it works.

Gaining this feedback will allow you to view your service from your customer’s eyes, making it easy to spot where you can make improvements. For example, if you find that customers are frustrated about speaking to a different person each time they give you a ring, you could respond to this by using call routing technology to automatically direct enquiries straight through to a dedicated person or team. We’ve seen an increase in customer retention as a direct result of adopting this approach at Virgin Media Business.

2. Avoid using superfluous words

All too often the acronyms and terminology we use on a daily basis at work can creep into company policies, making them indecipherable to the uninitiated. Good customer service is dependent on having clear policies and procedures in place that agents are able to follow to deliver a consistent service. Yet the rules of customer engagement are frequently communicated poorly or made far too complex. To ensure that new processes or policies are up to the job it’s a good idea to trial them on people working in another part of your business. Gaining this feedback gives you the chance to identify any jargon that may not make sense to some workers and make it clearer, before rolling the policy out across the company.

Virgin Media Business redesigned their website so that all information was phrased in a customer friendly way

3. Speed up response times

The way that we communicate has changed drastically over the last few years. We’re now sending emails, typing text messages and chatting with colleagues on Instant Messenger on a daily basis. So it’s no surprise that these communication tools are becoming increasingly popular, if not essential in the contact centre. They’re fantastic for giving customers a fast and convenient way to engage. But if you are going to give your customers a positive experience you must make certain that they will receive the same speed and quality of response from your agents in return.

In many cases the traditional performance metrics, which mostly relate to call response time, are fast becoming outdated and irrelevant. We need to find new metrics to gauge this digital customer service. One of the best ways that I think managers can evaluate service levels is to compare what you are providing with what you’d like to receive as a consumer, and then try to beat this expectation.

At Virgin Media Business we’ve taken a three-pronged approach to improving response times. We carried out a full review of the tasks that our agents are carrying out and scheduled time during off-peak hours, so that they can do non-time-sensitive administrative work. This means that more people are available to take calls during peak-hours, which is helping us to significantly improve call response times.

Secondly, we’ve offered many of our customers PIN numbers so that they’re able to speak to the same service teams each time they call. This is helping us to offer a more personalised service, making our response times much faster. And finally, we regularly review our call tree options to ensure that they’re easy to understand and let customers get through to the person they want as quickly as possible.

Whether you like it or not, social networking sites such as Twitter seem to be becoming the new sounding boards for complaints about companies. I’d recommend staying on top of any public communications online. Although a message by a disgruntled customer might seem trivial it’s worth taking note as your very lack of a response is public and could be viewed by millions of people, including some of your customers.

We monitor Twitter for mentions of our company name during work hours and regularly interact with customers using our account. Why not see us in action.