Contact Center Solutions: The Cure for Frustrated Employees and Customers

Keeping employees and customers happy are just two of the reasons to outsource customer service call center solutions.

Articles published November 29, 2017

What processes do you currently have in place for your customer service operations? Who answers the phones? What are your hours of operation? How are your customers contacting you? 

These questions are incredibly important, because your customer service is important. Without realizing it, you could be mentally draining your employees by having them answer customer calls, when that isn’t their actual job. You could also be angering your customers by having limited hours.

To help solve these problems, let’s take a look at some hypothetical scenarios of frustrated employees and customers and the solutions.

Scenario 1: Employee Frustration

Your employees are serving double duty as your customer service team, and they are overwhelmed with customer calls and questions. In fact, they’re so bogged down by responding to customers that they don’t have time to do their actual jobs. Projects and tasks are taking days to complete, instead of hours, and the number of customer calls continues to increase daily.

This is causing your employees to grumble, complain, and lose motivation. While they are providing adequate customer service, they aren’t trained to effectively handle the influx of customer calls all day long.

Soon, this pent-up employee frustration leads to several of your team members quitting, which only makes things worse. Now, the rest of your team has to take on even more calls and more work. Your customers are also beginning to get frustrated, because every time they call they talk to a different person. Morale drops even lower, and you begin to realize that something needs to change, or else things are going to go from bad to worse very quickly. So how do you turn around all that workplace frustration?

Outsourced Contact Center Solutions Increase Efficiency

You reach out to a contact center that specializes in providing quality customer service around the clock. After discussing your needs and challenges with them, you realize they are the right partner for your desired customer experience. With a contact center on board, now all of your customer calls are routed to the contact center to be answered by trained customer service agents, not your employees.

Now your employees can focus on their work without interruption. Employee satisfaction increases, productivity and morale rises, and your retention is strong. On top of that, you now have peace of mind that your customers are talking with trained professionals that can help them through any situation or issue.

Scenario 2: Frustrated Customers

Your customer service phone line is the only way for your customers to receive help, and those phone lines are only open from eight to five, Monday through Friday. Because of this limited time frame, your customers are starting to get annoyed. Your customers usually work eight to five every weekday, so if they call in, it has to be when they’re working. That isn’t an option for some of your customers, so they end up ignoring their question or issue and letting their frustration grow.

Eventually, the customers leave and switch to a different company where they found a better option. Why? Because they couldn’t reach you on their schedule, so they chose a company that they could call whenever they needed them. How can you retain customers and increase customer satisfaction?

Flexible Customer Service Increases Customer Satisfaction

You understand that flexible hours of operation makes it easier for customers to contact you. Instead of only being open eight to five on weekdays, you want to be available 24/7, year-round. You also understand that you need to provide more options, like email and live chat, so your customers can contact you through their preferred method of communication.

However, that comes with its own set of challenges. To be open all day, every day, with multiple channels of communication available, you need to have additional employees answering the phones, emails, and chats. This requires operational changes and additional resources to compensate those employees.

Superior Customer Service through Outsourced Contact Center Solutions

You look for another option and that’s when you decide to utilize a contact center’s services. A contact center offers 24/7 customer service to your customers, and provides their own highly-trained care team agents to handle customer inquiries, so you don’t have to pay or manage your own customer service team.

With an outsourced call center on board, your customers can receive excellent support whenever they need and through whatever communication channel they prefer.

While the above scenarios might not exactly describe your organization and situation, they provide a glimpse at just a few of the benefits outsourced contact centers can provide organizations of all sizes. 

Contact center services provide easily scalable and cost-effective customer service solutions for drained employees and frustrated customers.

When are you missing the most calls to your customer service line?