Let’s take a hypothetical situation wherein you’ve just purchased a new tablet. As soon as you try to access it, it shows an error. You can’t find how to insert the sim card and the tablet is working on its own wish. What would you do? Most certainly, you will try to contact the company. You might drop them an email or directly connect with their service centre. You have a lot of options available at your disposal to reach out to the company. But more importantly, how would you judge a successful customer service interaction? For sure you wouldn’t like it if someone brushed past your concerns, did the bare minimum to resolve your queries, and then got you off the phone as soon as possible, without ensuring if in reality your problem was solved or not.
To put it simply: call centres across the world are changing, because both the business working behind it and the customers functioning in front of it are changing at a steady pace. In order to acquaint you with these changes, there are four trends mentioned below which will make sure that you don’t get left behind.
1. More ways to communicate
Customers tend to contact companies through various mediums like calls, email, Facebook message, tweets and what not! It is almost impossible for the company to keep a track of all the channels through which millions of customers are contacting them. And it’s not just a problem with volume, in fact, each communication technology carries its own set of positives and negatives. Definitely, companies are coming up with different ways to manage all of their communication channels but the challenges and benefits being offered by each one of them are stealing the spark. Integration of all of these channels is the key to success. Customer’s would ring up at your call centres and send you emails, while trying to contact you through social media platforms (like twitter and Facebook). The different platforms and ways to communicate are catching up pace and are surely one of the sizzling trends of the future.
2. Increasing complexity of products
As companies are increasing the level of personalisation of their products, the complexities arising out of them are also rising simultaneously. There is a lot of information for call centre employees to keep a track of. Additionally, if they want to resolve customer complaints quickly and effectively, they need a huge knowledge bank.
So how do you plan to resolve this issue of complexity? Certainly, by the help of your employees. One factor which holds immense importance is the ability and willingness to collaborate. If the agents working in reliable call centres vow to come together and join hands, it would get easier to manage the complexities of business. Finally it is the people working with the company who would be delivering the services. It is extremely crucial for them to have a steady and collaborative approach. No matter what the specifications of the product are, agents need to be empowered in a way that they can act and deliver services while having a flexible approach.
3. A flood of metrics
There are no two doubts about it that companies are coming up with various ways to measure their performance. However, there is a big problem. The issue doesn’t lie with the metrics, but the main cause of concern is that companies are using too many metrics. To state it clearly, more time and energy is being spent on improving measures –that have little to no significance– than actually working on aspects which demand immediate attention. Companies need to cut down immensely on the number of metrics being used by them. Metrics are good, but it needs to be ascertained that which one is suitable for the business and till what extent.
A question which arises now is what does the future look like? You can most certainly expect these trends to accelerate. For sure, the risk of information overload isn’t reducing in the coming times. Luckily, the tools which help in dealing with data in an effective manner are going to multiply in the coming times, and this in turn would rapidly increase the number of customer touchpoints.
In a quest to perform all of these functions, one must not forget that the real intention behind interacting with customers is: to offer them a truly memorable customer experience. Keeping this goal in mind can be extremely helpful in separating the wheat from the chaff.
