The melange of emotions in customer service

Doesn’t the process of customer support remind you of being stuck in a traffic jam?

That endless wait which unleashes the primal side of the benign being, the jittery moments that test resilience and the wave of relief that emanates when it’s over. Whew! Sounds overwhelming, doesn’t it? Everyone involved in customer service – customers, managers, and agents experience the above mix of emotions every time. More than the percentiles on paper, the most important parameter of customer experience is how the people involved in it feel during the entire process.

What is the most important factor behind the customer service roller coaster? The customer. When customers contact a support center, they get hassled by multiple call transfers and unhelpful support articles. Subsequently, they vent the pent-up rage on the agents. To make things worse, they post the experience on social media and put the reputation of your company in jeopardy.

On the other hand, if they have a positive experience, they have the potential to turn into your brand evangelists. Here are some measures to ensure a positive customer experience:

• Make agents understand the importance of keeping their cool when dealing with irate customers.
• Equip agents with data from different departments so they can use it at the right time and soothe frayed nerves.
• Improve the quality of self-help articles by closely observing keywords and forums.
• Request customers to talk about how they felt during the interaction and what could be done to improve the service.

Quite a lot of aspects affect the agents, who happen to be the backbone of the customer support system. Thanks to delays caused by a paucity of customer support articles, the agent can be a victim to the ire of the customer. Also, agents get frustrated by repeating a similar set of tasks every day. When they’re working on a ticket, they get irritated by the poor coordination between different teams. In addition, ticket overflow during holidays and release events can be a thorn in the flesh for many. Tackle the long list of woes by following some simple steps:

• Draft articles immediately after an issue is spotted.
• Enable the agents to add the articles directly while responding to a ticket and save a lot of time.
• Avert collaboration catastrophes by tagging the teams directly in the tickets. Notify the progress of a ticket through comments.
• Automate redundant tasks and reduce repetition.
• Effectively handle the ticket flow by establishing appropriate workflows.

Finally, it is time to focus on the underrated emotions of the managers. Managers are vulnerable people who use their bossy facade to hide their plethora of problems. Escalated tickets, piles of data and sheer increase in trivial tickets —What can be done about these issues? Empower customers and agents with quality material that is monitored regularly, and reduce escalations and minor tickets. Keeping all the necessary metrics in a single place can reduce the time and effort taken to search for them. Thus, managers can focus on creating more action plans that can improve the quality of customer service.

Customer service can be an emotionally daunting job where all the stakeholders have to strike a fine balance between being civil and unleashing the inner devil. Hence, it is very important to boost the positive emotions and keep a check on the negative ones. After all, more than the complex metrics, it is the ability to put a smile on everyone’s faces that makes all the difference.