I’ve talked before about how to improve customer service in a call center, but since I’ve not been seeing an improvement in call centers I’ve dealt with of late, I guess I am going unheard, as are countless others. Or perhaps the people who need to hear this information just haven’t noticed it. There’s nothing that can be done to combat that kind of problem beyond just a continued talk about the issue.

So, once more, I am going to talk about how to improve customer service in a call center. I’ve mentioned some of these points before, but I have some new ideas too, so I’ll actually propose some things that I can’t be sure have ever been tried before as well.

So, first of all, let’s get past the bloody obvious things. What’s the first thing that comes to your mind that you hate, when you think of calling customer service? The hold times, or the phone trees? It’s going to be one or the other, and they’re both heinous.

So, that’s the first thing to look at here. I see a lot of dependency on a technology that’s really not ready yet, that being voice recognition. It’s just not ready for complex uses like customer service. So, they double the frustration with phone trees. But, phone trees themselves are a pain too. So, they need to be simplified and more logically ordered. There’s too much nesting involved with current designs, and it is difficult to get ahold of an actual human being. So, escapes to an operator or agent need to exist in every segment you can enter.

So, we’ve got that out of the way, but there’s still the hold times. Well, in and of themselves, we have to improve other areas in order to reduce them, so for now let’s figure out how to make them painless. Here’s my first idea, and I don’t know if the technology behind this would be difficult or not, but I’d love to see it tried. Since customers would have account numbers in most cases, you could let customers customize their hold time experience, including the music and announcements. They’re no longer at the mercy of looping adverts or music they don’t like, and this goes a long way.

So, we’ve helped a lot here. Do we have good conversationalists with people person natures to work as agents? If not, then maybe you need to rethink your hiring requirements for these agents in the future.

From here, the next thing to do is to maybe offload some of the stress on your call center, by using digital mediums like help desks, live chat and other similar concepts. This takes routine load off the call center, and shortens hold times and frustration for all.

So, if you want to know how to improve customer service in a call center, these are the things to do first. Of course, there is more in depth restructuring and subtle changes that can be made, but not everyone has time for all of that. For the rest of us busy people, this should make a profound enough change in your call center to keep you satisfied for now.

Use WalkMe to encourage self-service.  www.WalkMe.com