What Grade Would Your Customer Experience Get?

Companies work hand-in-hand with contact centers to provide their clients exceptional customer service. They work hard to ensure that their clients are satisfied with what they offer so that they can ask for loyalty in return.

Do all companies succeed in meeting this goal? Some do, and some, unfortunately, don’t. What could have happened? Can these instances be avoided and result in a better customer experience?

Amazon: A Customer-Centric Company

One company known for their excellent customer service is Amazon. The company often ranks high in customer satisfaction surveys, and their clients themselves don’t hesitate to sing their praises with regard to the company.

Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, and founder has always stated how the company has been customer-centric. Employees are trained to not just talk to the customer, but to listen to them. They take note of the simple things: providing 24/7 support, not placing customers on hold as much as possible, even connecting Amazon Fire clients with tech advisors. Personal interactions are highlighted and given when necessary.

AT&T: Notorious for Poor Customer Service

AT&T is one of the biggest telecommunications companies in the United States, but it also perhaps owns the biggest issues regarding customer service. You’d hear concerns about its policies and services; sometimes even the smallest issues get escalated to higher management.

AT&T Customers complain about various issues — replacing modems, poor coverage, billing confusions, and other related concerns. These issues could have been fixed in just a phone call but instead resulted to multiple conversations, each not leading to the proper resolution. These unfortunate incidents gave AT&T a bad reputation — a company that’s known for bad customer service.

What Can Companies Do?

So, what can companies do to make sure they’ll be receiving positive customer experience scores every time?

Have less wait times. Imagine being upset about an issue, and you can’t wait to have it fixed by the company. You pick up the phone, dial their number… and wait for no one knows how long. You feel worse — and you haven’t even started.

Be true to your word. If you promised something to your customers, then make sure to follow through. Set the right expectations so you won’t end up disappointing anyone. Doing so will strengthen the trust between you and your clients, and result in a better relationship.

Value your employees. It’s true that your business thrives because of your customers, but your employees are also as important. The employees are the company’s representatives to your customers. Make them happy by giving them incentives, benefits — basically anything that will make them feel valued — and you’ll see this happiness passed on to your customers.

Be consistent. To achieve positive customer experience, consistency is the key. Everyone should be treated well — from the first to the last client of the day. Customers love consistency; if they’ve experienced proper assistance once, they’d expect to have it again.

The Scores Don’t Tell the Whole Story

You’d think seeing a “dissatisfied” score on a survey would mean putting the blame on the agent, but that’s not always the case.

Case in point: there are instances when agents receive bad scores for things beyond their control. Sometimes clients are just upset about the situation in general, and the agents take the blame for that. There are instances of agents still getting low scores even though they solved the clients’ concerns. On those cases, it’s not fair to blame the agent, don’t you think?

Conclusions shouldn’t be drawn based on the scores alone. The scores don’t tell the whole story — there’s more to the “satisfied” and the “dissatisfied” rating that you see. The ratings may not always be totally accurate, but as long as your customers are happy, then you’ll be just fine.

Do you want your customers and clients to sing praises about your contact center? How can you be more customer-centric and truly aspire for the best in class status? We have helped contact centers big and small operating in diverse industries achieve beyond what they thought was possible. We can help you too. All you need to do is contact me now and we can discuss how you can take the best step forward.