How do your agents handle complaints?

Do they take them personally? Do complaining customers ruin their day? Do they think complaining customers are at fault?

Complaining customers must feel that their feedback is welcome and valued and will be used to eliminate the problem at the root. In a recent study, the amount of time agents spent on the phone, and their encouragement of customers to call again if they had additional needs increased customer satisfaction. These finding suggest that agents should make customers feel that their feedback and their business is appreciated. Showing appreciation for feedback can be as simple as saying, “Thank you. We appreciate customers to take the time to let us know when things are not right.”

Do you have structured training to help agents understand the true position of a complaining customer?

Do you know how to build rapport between your customers and your agents? Organizations create rapport when their agents know how to:
1.allow customers to vent;
2.engage in active listening;
3.demonstrate a sense of urgency in problem resolution; and
4.convey a helpful, willing attitude.

Don’t downplay these soft skills thinking they do not have a lasting affect on lifetime value. Psychologists tell us that when people have rapport they are more forgiving of mistakes. And everyone makes mistakes.

Most centers interact with hundreds or thousands of customers each day—but what do they do with the intelligence they capture? They brag about their reams of data, but if they do not have a use for them, they have no business collecting them. They listen to an avalanche of customer noises, but their ears are not finely tuned to hear the voice of the customer.

If you have codified intelligence so that others can use it, we salute you. If you share usable intelligence with other departments and track the impact that your center has on customers, you are rare in this field.

I know there are not many like you because service level remains a dominant customer satisfaction metric even though a specific customer satisfaction research proves other performance elements may have a far greater impact on satisfaction.

If you are just beginning to listen to customers with the intention of capturing actionable data, remember to use all customer channels to gather data including the IVR, the Web, and e-mail messages. Hearing does not occur only through the telephone.