Know Your Customer Expectations

Knowing your customer expectations is easy.  They are high and they expect you to meet them.  Your customers are calling your call center because they need help to purchase a product, resolve an account issue, maintain a product, or ask any number of questions that they believe your call center can assist them with.

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Knowing your customer expectations is easy.  They are high and they expect you to meet them.  Your customers are calling your call center because they need help to purchase a product, resolve an account issue, maintain a product, or ask any number of questions that they believe your call center can assist them with. It may seem odd that your customer's expectations are high because many callers may be anxious, frustrated, or even short-tempered. However, if their expectations were not high, then they would probably not be a customer of your business or products. They would be someone else's.

This is a very advantageous position, but one that needs to be considered when outsourcing your call center. Even if the customer has received an error in billing or the product/service is deficient, customers will still have a high expectation that when they call, the issue will be remedied. If their expectations are not high, the odds are that this is because the customer has not been able to obtain the assistance they expected, and you are in jeopardy of losing them.

One would think that if customer expectations are high to begin with, it should be easy to provide the caller with an experience that maintains them as a good customer. Conversely, the disadvantage to this assumption is that any call center can only meet the expectation of their customers. Agents can rarely exceed them.  Worse yet, there is a high potential that call center agents may fail unless proper planning and training are in place.

The primary objective of meeting customer expectations is First Call Resolution (FCR). FCR means exactly what is says, and it is what customers expect. Customers call with the expectation that whatever problem they may have, the agent will be able to remedy it in a single call.

To help meet these expectations, agents should have:

• Access to systems with a single view of the customer data

• Training in how to engage the customer, build a relationship, and meet the customer needs

• Authority to solve the customer issues, including setting aside the rules to meet customer expectations

• An awards program that encourages First Call Resolution

Agents who are not able to service the caller during their first interaction may mean customer dissatisfaction. Moreover, if the customer requires multiple contacts, your company is at a higher risk of losing the customer relationship.

A second objective of meeting customer expectations is for the agent to build a relationship with the customer. This unique interchange between customer and agent occurs almost instantaneously with the initial salutation. It continues for the next six to ten minutes, or longer, to maintain that relationship. In that small amount of time, the agent has to gain the customer's trust, overcome any previous issues, and remedy the current problem.

To establish this relationship, agents need to present themselves as people the caller can immediately identify with. This may start with a simple greeting that sets the tone for the rest of the call. It may be an introduction from the agent having immediate access from a customer database that lets the caller know the agent understands the relationship between the caller and your company. For example, if a customer calls a bank and the agent knows the type of accounts the caller maintains, an immediate relationship is formed based on the customer feeling he is valued—which is what the customer expects.

More often than not in this era of outsourcing, this relationship is not established. What is more, there are few ways to know that the relationship has not met customer expectations.

I am sure you have experienced a customer service call in which an agent asked if you were satisfied with the services you received. If you were, you agree. Like most callers, if you were not satisfied, you say simply yes just to end the call. This may be a false signal to the company that their agents are meeting customer expectation, when in fact their agents have faltered. Moreover, your opinion of the company as one providing quality customer services may have changed without the company knowing why.

© 2011 Geoffrey Best.

Article Tags: Customer Expectations, Call Center

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