3CLogic's Contact Center Blog

In today’s screen-centric society, where devices are becoming increasingly complex, having all of the tools to connect with your customers is key. According to Gartner, “by 2020, the customer will manage 85% of the relationship with an enterprise without interacting with a human.” Your customers need to be able to reach you, regardless of whether they are on the go, sitting at their laptop, or sitting in an airport. The more conversations you can have with your customer, the better the relationship you can build, but you need to be able to cater to their lifestyle, and put a personality to a name and number. And it all starts by syncing your database management solution or CRM, which house limitless amounts of customer information, with your communication channels. Check-out the following benefits:

What makes a great movie? Good actors, beautiful sets? More often than not, it starts with a great script. Characters written in a specific way, with specific words in order to deliver a specific message. But without decent actors, the right setting, or even the right props, the true message meant by the author will never be conveyed. The same can be said on some level for the world of call center scripting. You can have a dynamic, polite, and informative script, but if your agents lack the skills or resources to deliver it as intended or to in a sense “read between the lines,” the overall effect will be merely a mediocre movie. So what tools can you give your agents to ensure that they are delivering the script as intended?

We have all been there – bad service, frustrating IVR systems, long holds and less than efficient reps. As something light in honor of TGIF, here are some truly terrible customer service examples collected from around the web and what we can take away from them.

1. “My father passed away.  I called a credit card company to cancel his account.  I said, “My name is Debra. My father Pat passed away and I am the Executor of the Estate. I am calling to cancel his account.”
The rep replied, “Well, I need to talk to Pat.” I said, “Listen very carefully. He’s DEAD – now if you want to talk to him, you’ll have to figure out how to. GIVE ME YOUR SUPERVISOR!”   The Supervisor got on the phone and I said, “Do you have a connection with God?”  She cracked up laughing – she had heard about the conversation.

First Call Resolution has been the subject of many recent studies, which show that a high FCR rate is vital to the success of your contact center. In fact according to ICMI, 12% of cus­tomers leave if it takes 2 or more calls to resolve their issue. But while the concept of FCR may seem simple, “properly resolve customer issues on the first call,” putting this into practice and measuring this “metric” is a lot more complicated than simply focusing on a percentage. Here are a few tips to boost FCR, and to ensure the FCR percentage you are recording is an accurate reflection of your call center.