Amplifying customer satisfaction in call centers while reducing costs

Human-to-human service is expensive, so call centers are trying to resolve more cases with less expensive, scalable automated or self-service solutions. But doing this while providing excellent service is difficult, because the majority (59%) of customers still prefer the phone over other channels, and most (61%) miss human interaction when using self-service. Still, if faced with a choice between a lengthy hold time or going with an automated channel, four in five consumers say they would prefer the latter.

All of these different channels can cause frustration for customers if they need to move from automated systems to an agent, or work with additional agents, because so often they have to re-educate the company about their issue every time. Agents need to have complete information about the customer journey at their fingertips when they get on the phone or enter a chat. That includes information the customer may have given via an automated interaction.

But collecting this information, associating it with an individual customer journey, and presenting it to an agent in a useful format is no simple task. Companies typically offer various channels through which customers can seek support—phone, live chat, AI chat bot, email, social media, SMS text, and more—so there are many sources of information in many different formats. Agents either need to take notes during a call or the company must have an automated, typically AI-powered means of collecting data from the audio. Chatbots, text, and email information will all be in natural language. Dumping it all in a file and including prior agent notes, won’t provide agents the information they need. They don’t have time to read an entire file while the customer is on the line! It needs to be presented so the agent can grasp the situation in a matter of seconds.

Another challenge is the lack of consistency in policy application, procedures, and tools. Especially in large companies, agents overcome inefficiencies and other issues by coming up with unique solutions and employing alternative tools that may or may not be sanctioned by IT. In some call centers, these workarounds become Standard Operating Procedure.

Certainly, many of these workarounds may turn out to be innovations from which the entire organization can benefit. And even if the workarounds themselves aren’t scalable, they likely point to areas that need improvement. Unaddressed, however, the differences in procedures and tools between call centers ultimately leads to an inconsistent experience and potential customer dissatisfaction.

Then there’s the difficulty of retaining and training agents, which just over half of customer experience (CX) leaders say is their top challenge. It’s not hard to understand why. At any given time, more than three in 10 (31%) agents are actively looking for a new position, and the cost of losing, replacing, and training a single agent costs between $10,000 and $21,000.

It’s hard to get a sense of how call centers are performing, because it’s difficult to determine which stats matter for determining success. Many popular stats aren’t actually very useful.

For instance, many organizations use Net Promoter Score (NPS), but that’s not really applicable to customer support. In a nutshell, NPS asks customers to rate on a ten-point scale how likely they would be to recommend a company’s product or service to a friend or colleague. Does anyone actually share their experience and recommend a company’s call center? It seems unlikely, so the question is artificial.

Another popular metric is the average or median call time, with the goal of reducing the amount of time spent on each call. It would seem this is a good measure, because the faster customer issues are resolved, the more calls an agent can handle, which increases productivity and lowers costs.

But reducing call duration isn’t always a good strategy. Let’s say a company successfully implants a selfservice and AI chatbot strategy to resolve simple customer issues. As a result, agents will be tackling more complex cases, which will take longer to resolve, so median call time will increase. Just looking at the stat, it would appear that the call centers are under-performing, when in fact the company is using these expensive, valuable resources to their fullest capacity to focus almost exclusively on resolving hard problems.

Every company has different business goals, so what works for one organization’s call center network may not work for another. With this in mind, we’ll look at two very different organizations we’ve worked with: a Fortune 100 telecommunications provider with tens of thousands of call center agents and a healthcare company that provides mental health and addiction services with no more than two dozen agents.

The telecommunications provider needed to cut costs, which it hoped to accomplish by empowering agents with the customer information they needed when they needed it. Complicating matters, however, the provider was segmented into many different regional divisions and each served a different demographic. This meant they all had slightly different business goals and approaches. To achieve their goals, the telecom provider partnered with us at Think Company, and we decided to form two separate, but highly collaborative teams. One team addressed the immediate needs of agents by improving navigation, adding functionality, and increasing accessibility. The other team took a long term view, designing features that would enable agents to communicate through chat and social media platforms. In this way, we could continuously improve the CMS platform for agents while creating a strategy for future enhancements that would create a more integrated view of the entire customer lifecycle. Extensive research provided insight into how the customers’ profile and needs differed from region to region, and the resulting data informed the creation of integrated resources for each agent, which decreased overall resolution time. And in 2020, when the pandemic required agents to work remotely, the telecom provider was able to rapidly build on their work to develop an interface for mobile devices.

This healthcare organization had very different needs. Certainly, the organization wanted to control costs, but their goal for customer service agents was to create relationships with patients who would often make recurring calls related to their treatment. Research was a large element of this project, because the healthcare company wanted to understand their patients and their needs. After partnering with us, the healthcare organization discovered that agents needed to be able to input information more efficiently. Further, they needed more intuitive, faster access to data that would enable them to build stronger relationships, asking about their family or pets, for example. The solution involved redesigning their Salesforce interface to streamline the patient enrollment process, improve data input, and provide agents with the right information to solve call handling pain points.