Supporting Customer Service Departments in the Wake of the Coronavirus

It may not be surprising that customer service departments have seen a marked increase in activity in the wake of the coronavirus crisis. It makes sense, given that people are especially concerned with shipments, product return protocol, and whether or not certain services are still available. Customers simply need someone to reassure them in uncertain times.

Of course, even in normal circumstances, almost everyone has had a bad customer service experience. It’s bad enough when it happens then. But it’s especially bad for businesses already struggling, especially when people have more time on their hands to share bad reviews online. Fortunately, there are ways to ensure that customer service departments consistently provide excellent service to callers. Here are some common stumbling blocks, and their solutions.

The Problem: Unanswered Calls

Long wait times are arguably one of the biggest complaints from callers. Studies show that callers will hang up after a certain amount of time. What’s worse is that an already angry caller will either hang up and call back even angrier, or hang up and never call again. Without a way to retrieve missed calls, businesses will lose customers and potentially, new revenue.

The Solution: Missed Call Monitor Alerts

Real-time missed call monitoring alerts ensure that you never miss an unanswered call. In other words, if a caller doesn’t get through, the solution sends an automatic notification via text or email. This lets the recipient know that someone tried to call but didn’t get through. Then the proper person can quickly take action and reach out to those callers before they take their business elsewhere.

The Problem: Unprepared and Uninformed Employees

Once a caller does manage to get through to a live person, the next challenge is handling the call properly. All too often customer service agents cannot answer the caller’s questions, the agent is not helpful at all. As a result, callers have to call back more than once to find a solution – a very frustrating experience – and typically associate that company with a negative experience. All of this can be solved with proper agent training and monitoring.

The Solution: Call Recording and Speech to Text Transcriptions

Businesses can monitor agents (even WFH ones) with a call monitoring solution like call recording and call transcriptions. While recording calls for quality assurance is standard practice for most businesses, manually listening to each call is not practical or economical. Speech-to-text tools automatically transcribe all phone conversations so they’re easy to search and analyze. In addition to benchmarking agent performance, these tools can help companies identify training needs and improve training materials.

Monitoring Customer Service Departments

Customer satisfaction is more important than ever. Whether you run a small business, or you’re a QA manager in a large call center, there are many call monitoring solutions available to you. But when you give your customer service departments the right tools to provide a superior experience to callers, you will see an increase in customer loyalty. And customer loyalty is worth its weight in gold.