Saying ‘Hello, can I help you?’ – and meaning it

According to AsiaOne News:

YOU desperately need to speak to someone to check on a credit card transaction. So you call a 24-hour toll-free line shown on your bill. An automated voice at the end of the telephone line prompts you to key in the right buttons to get to the bottom of things.

Just when you think that you are finally getting to speak to a ‘live’ voice (after having answered correctly the first five questions), you accidentally press a wrong button.

Before you know it, you are back to square one, and going through the same routine again. After the fourth try, you just want to slam down the phone down or take your frustration out on the poor unsuspecting customer service officer who comes on the line.

Companies who think they can get away with a self-help automated answering system to deal with customers had better think again. A worldwide survey of over 42,000 customers commissioned by Genesys in 2007 revealed some hard truths.

Almost 66 per cent of customers surveyed say they react negatively when they feel they are being pushed to use self-service systems. As a result, 75 per cent of them feel less loyal to the company and have no qualms about taking their business elsewhere.

Read the full article at AsiaOne News:

- Yes, this article is TRUE. My personal experience (in my personal blog) is the technical support for one of the biggest telecommunication company (RED COLOR). They have zero customer service training and possibly even almost zero technical help.

Firstly, the automated voice that directs you to select which “service” relevant to your inquiry usually DON’T match your needs hence need to speak to a “live” customer service personnel instead.

Funny is why they don’t put a “live” person to redirect their calls properly right at the very beginning.

Second, the wait for a available “live” customer service officer can last from minimum 20 minutes to one full hour! Some companies even have voice recording function in case it went too long and automatically terminate the call after a “recording”.

Often you hear “advertisements” or “noisy FM radio” or “sleep inducing music” while you wait and often interrupted with automatic voice saying that your call is important to them and bla bla bla….

The worst thing is that they employ “untrained” or “rashly trained” part timers or contract workers that have no or low company benefits, low pay, work for long hours, easily replaced, low motivation, crazy expectation and finally loves to read scripts line by line in the most boring tone of voice.

Imagine the frustration of the “customers” serviced by the above mentioned “live” customer services officers.

I myself had been such workers before hence I fully understand the problems faced in today companies that uses the lowest cost to hire the maximum number of such telesales or customer service officers.

Firstly, they are not empowered to make any relevant problem solving decisions to make any impact on difficult inquiry and usually required to refer to the manager to resolve it however by the time the inquiry are passed to the manager…the issue may had been became a complain.

Solutions:

1. At least give the employee the sense of belonging by giving them company benefits similar to permanent employees.

2. Sent them for courses that teaches them how to be flexible and quick problem solving telephone skills.
3. Put a library of books relevant to telephone skills for them to borrow and read.
4. Record some of the good telephone conversation and share with the group in weekly meetings.
5. Give incentives when any employee managed to resolve any complain without going to the manager. Examples are to reward those get good “survey” points after the call. (Sometimes shopping vouchers are good but best is weekly bonus CASH)
6. Encourage feedback by encouraging anyone to ask “stupid” product related questions, if the employee are unsure of the products usually afraid of ask the manager in case of being reprimanded.
7. Put HUGE mirrors in front of the customer service officers while they chat on the phone and ensure they smile while talking. It’s been proven that when a person is smiling on the phone can be felt by the other person on the line.
8. Never read scripts to resolve questions, this requires experience and strong product knowledge.
9. Always ask questions to identify the real needs behind the inquiry and resolve them in a professional manner. This minimizes miscommunication and present fast and effective solutions (or products) to the customer.
10. Minimize work load in data entry of customer data, some companies uses “global database – some software accessible by global office” and “local database – MS Excel File” to record customer conversations. This wastes the customer officers time while data entry the conversation after the call and reduces “On the phone” time. Solution to this is to have an export function for the “global database” to export the data out in excel or text format to be shared among all the terminal in the office in shared folder.
11. Obviously hire proper “live” receptionist to redirect calls to the proper channel, this step can be replaced by many means. Possible means of MODERN customer service is “SKYPE”, “MSN”, “Yahoo”, “2nd Life”, “email” and many more. If the problems are very common, set up a twitter account for all customer service officers to pose the solutions online for the public to refer to.