When it comes to call center customer satisfaction, there are many ways to improve your company’s approach. However, there are perhaps just as many - or perhaps even more - ways to sabotage your own success.

Here, we’ll show you some of the things your contact center might be doing to let your customers down - and how you can fix them.

Your Self-Service is Difficult to Use

Nearly every modern call center has self-service options available to reduce caller wait time and assist with providing great service. However, it isn’t enough to simply deploy a self-service suite and never revisit it. You have to ensure that it is meeting consumer needs and working effectively. Otherwise, it’s a waste of your time and theirs.

A few complaints consumers may have about self-service suites include:

• Poor design
• Time involved in the self-service process is too long
• Tasks could be better handled another way
• Self-service is not the personal preference of the consumer in question

Addressing these concerns can help make your self-service feature more helpful and less of a waste of time.

Design can be improved. Work with your team to figure out which features aren’t working for customers and which need to be tweaked. Improving design can also improve the amount of time customers need to spend in the self-service process, which can drastically improve their overall experience.

Some tasks are best handled outside of the self-service portal. A prime example would be a subscription cancellation. For this kind of task - which can be very involved and vary from consumer to consumer - the best route would be resolving the issue with a live agent.

Lastly, it is important to note that some consumers are simply going to prefer live agent service over self-service. Whatever their reasoning is, it can be beneficial to both these customers and your call center customer satisfaction ratings to offer an opt-out option so that these customers do not have to wait through a process that they don’t enjoy.

You Don’t Offer Enough Channel Options to Yield Call Center Customer Satisfaction

How many ways can your customers contact you? In many call centers, the only answer is via phone calls. While having a solid focus on your telephony is important, it is equally important in the modern day to also extend customer service to your consumers via various alternative channels. Your agents should be trained in interactions via email, text messages, chat and instant messaging features, and social media. This way, no matter how consumers try to reach you, they can.

It Takes Too Long to Reach Your Agents

When your customers call, they likely have urgent questions, concerns they need to have addressed, or complaints they want resolved. No matter why they’re calling, they see their purpose as important - and they want you to treat it that way.

Making your callers wait too long to be connected to an agent does the opposite of this. It makes consumers feel as if their time is not valued by the business they are contacting - or as if their reason for calling is not important. This can lead to some seriously bad call center customer satisfaction ratings for your company.

This is one of the top priorities for a contact center looking to better serve consumers. Reducing wait times begins with understanding why they happen. There are generally twp primary reasons for extended waits; either your agents are too busy, or your IVR is too long or complicated. Address both by ensuring that your agents aren’t overworked or overwhelmed and that your interactive voice response system is as efficient as it can be. The faster you can connect callers to live agents, the faster their concerns can be addressed - and the sooner they’ll become satisfied customers.

You’re Not Handling Transfers Properly

Keeping transfers to a minimum is important in the successful call center. This prevents customers from feeling “passed” back and forth between your staff members. However, sometimes transfers are necessary. What’s most important is training your agents on how to handle them correctly.

Ensure that when a consumer is transferred, their information is transferred along with them. Ask them for permission to transfer them, so that they feel like an active participant in the process. Keep them informed of what is happening and minimize the number of times you have to ask them to repeat information in the process. This will make transfers easier and more productive for your agents - and also foster call center customer satisfaction in your callers.

Your Agents Provide Slow or Inefficient Service

When consumers finally reach a live agent, they expect prompt, reliable service. Unfortunately, that may not be what they are receiving when they reach your agents.

Poor connections, poor agent training, and faulty systems can lead to less-than-stellar service. Providing your agents with the training they need to tackle any problem is an important part of preparing them to adequately serve customers. However, there is no way that even the best-prepared agents can properly serve a customer that they can’t hear - or who can’t hear them. Ensuring that your connections are strong at all times will help your agents maintain meaningful conversations and provide excellent service.

Your Technology Isn’t Up to Speed

You can’t meet consumer needs or expectations with technology that doesn’t meet yours. Updating your technology regularly isn’t just a smart idea - it’s an investment in ensuring call center customer satisfaction.

For everything you need to outfit your operation for the best in customer service and ensuring call center customer satisfaction, contact the industry experts at ChaseData. Whether you’re looking for the best tools and technology or expert advice on creating a better contact center, you’ll find it all with ChaseData. Give us a call today to learn more!