Dealing with angry or unsatisfied customers is, unfortunately, simply part of the job for contact center agents. Whether a service isn’t working as it should, a product arrived damaged, or the customer was surprised by a fee they didn’t expect, every industry has its own share of customer problems - and often, it’s the contact agents’ job to fix them.
Making sure your agents are equipped to handle these customers is a vital part of being a good manager. Not only does your customer’s satisfaction depend on it - your employee’s job satisfaction does too.
So what can you do to empower your contact center agents to deal with angry customers in a professional, helpful way, while still maintaining their morale? Here are a few tips.
Scripts have long been a standard part of contact center procedure. With a script, it’s true that you’ve got an ironclad way of protecting your company from a variety of things: issues with compliance, confidentiality breaches, lost revenue from unauthorized refunds, and more.
However, depending on your industry, you can also be frustrating both your agents and callers by enforcing a strict adherence to scripts. On the caller side, a script can make her feel like she’s talking to a robot that doesn’t understand her problem. On the agent side, having to spout out the same scripted language can make them feel stymied in their ability to provide real solutions to your customers.
While you may always need scripts for certain thorny issues, consider allowing your agents to consult a knowledge base to find answers to customers’ problems rather than forcing them to always go with a script.
This will require that your agents are well-trained in listening and problem-solving, which will take a bit more time and effort. However, it can pay huge dividends when it comes to customer satisfaction.
Consider how many of your customers have been placed on yet another hold because an agent has had to confer with a supervisor about a relatively minor issue - getting a credit for an item that arrived damaged, for example. If that customer hasn’t experienced something like that with your company, they definitely have with another.
It’s true, of course, that agents need some guidelines when it comes to what sort of solutions they’re able to offer upset customers.
But requiring them to run everything by a supervisor just makes the already upset customer even more frustrated, and forces the agent have to jump through another hoop before arriving at a satisfactory solution. You can see it’s not an ideal situation.
So to avoid this, consider putting certain guidelines into place about what agents are and aren’t able to offer customers all on their own. Your customers will be pleasantly surprised when the agent they speak to is able to offer them a satisfactory solution, with no additional hold time required.
While truly abusive callers are relatively few, every agent will probably experience that one person who rants uncontrollably, swears at them repeatedly, or even threatens violence. It’s important to protect your agents from these people by allowing them to disengage from the call once the abuse reaches an unacceptable level.
One way to do this is to instruct agents to offer one verbal warning to the customer before simply hanging up. No one deserves to be spoken to in such a manner, and your agents have to know that the company they work for won’t tolerate that behavior. Otherwise, you’ll have a serious employee morale issue on your hands.
If you’re interested in implementing some of these tactics and need to improve your training and coaching offerings, look into our Verint Media Recorder Workforce Management software. This workforce optimization solution can help you free up time in your busy schedule for employee coaching, so your agents can fulfill their greatest potential as customer service professionals.
