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Why Your Call Center is Only Getting Noisier (mckinsey.com)
From a report by research firm McKinsey & Company: Organizations have been investing in all manner of customer-facing technology solutions to replace live calls. Of all operational call-center technologies, digital solutions were ranked as one of the most important over the next five years by four out of five executives. Only agent desktop tools ranked higher. These technologies begin with websites, chat bots, and apps and extend to artificial-intelligence robots that simulate human conversations -- redefining the way organizations interact with customers -- as well as more tried-and-tested functionalities such as improved web, app, or self-service capabilities in interactive voice-response (IVR) systems. And yet, despite this plethora of technology solutions, we see that calls are not going away and instead are catching call-center executives off guard in their efforts to reduce volumes. It's not that a spike in call volumes is necessarily a bad thing. On the contrary, the proliferation of digital tools can awaken previously dormant customers, sparking new inquiries from an engaged customer base. But in many instances, we've also observed that the volumes of unwanted calls exceed what would be expected during a learning period, or remain constant or rise over time, defeating strategic goals and leaving managers bewildered and unable to tie tech investments to improved operational outcomes. Why are so many organizations struggling with reaping the full benefits from these investments? In our experience, the answer often lies in two core areas. First, as companies turn to technology to address call-center volumes, they allow customer experience to take a back seat to digital technology in their operations, creating dissonance in direct customer interaction, where the objective is harmony and efficiency. Second, by counting on technology to solve their call-center issues, executives lose focus on core operations and upset the balance between human interaction and automation in an era of evolved customer service.
I'm not sure I understand what the problem / issue is.
It solves one thing: It makes the customer go away.
This is a primary goal for many businesses - provide the facade of providing customer service, while actually telling them to go frak themselves.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
The best customers are the ones who never call.
Why bother keeping your worst customers?
That's good because chat bots aren't there to solve your problem either.
They're all there to make you go away; you gave them your money, and they want to keep as much as possible. That's only possible if you piss off.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
ISP jerked me around for weeks reseting my modem which showed noisy / lossy line. Then they made me drive to an office of theirs to switch modems, new modem had same problem as old modem of course. Finally I posted on newly created twitter account with just the right hashtag to put my tweet in stream with their marketing spew, and presto, tech came and ran a new line (old one chewed up by squirrels) within 48 hours.
So now you know what to do.....
How about when you direct people to your web page to try and solve their issue, you give them useful information.
One can use Microsoft as a prime example of the hoops one has to jump through to find a simple solution. If the question is, "How do I add a mailbox to Outlook?", the page should not start with:
A shared mailbox can be a practical solution for any business with groups of people working from different locations. With the right permissions, any person in a group can access a shared mailbox that appears in their address book. The shared mailbox is automatically available in the Folder pane in Outlook. (taken directly from the Microsoft page)
No one cares about a "practical solution". They want to know how to add a mailbox to Outlook. Nor do they care about why one should use a shared mailbox. They asked how to add a mailbox. In fact, nowhere on the page does it tell you how to add a mailbox. It does everything but that.
If you want your call center volume to go down, provide useful information, information which is not buried ten menus deep or stuck in some corner with an obscure name.
You know why people keep calling you? Because your information pages technology sucks. That's why.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
Thanks to those modern cost saving measures, most now know to try solving the problem themselves first, with web searches and trial by error. As a result, by the time they call, they are desperate and no automated chatbot or menu will help them. In fact they increase frustration because the goal at that point is to talk to a more knowledgeable human.
We do the same once they reach a high enough level where I work.
It's pretty much if there is nothing we can do, then there really is nothing we can do.
The problem is that so many companies put people that are not empowered on the front lines that customers expect to be able to hear a yes after being told no if they climb high enough. If there weren't so many fake no's being told, this wouldn't happen but I imagine it does weed out probably 8-90 percent of complainers.
(I apologise if this comes off as a slashvertisment - I don't work for Google, and I'm only just starting out as a customer of theirs, so I've yet to see how good/bad they really are)
I had a chat with some Google folk about their cloud services. They told me that to them, the need for a support call was a 'bug'. They want to keep support as expensive for them as possible so that they're motivated to avoid it. They only staff with pretty senior people, and of course those people are able to (programatically) solve the problems customers call them with.
It may all have been sales chatter, but it was quite refreshing to hear that someone was actually treating support as something other than a cost centre. They're using it as a feedback mechanism to improve their products and the documentation - which is what support always should be, its just that very few companies actually do that, and most of them end up doing the things you're talking about, as if making the support job as shit as possible would somehow make their customers happier or more productive.