The true cost of poor customer service

As last month’s twinkling trees and delightful decorations now seem something of a distant memory, customer expectations show absolutely no signs of slowing down as we welcome another new year.

Well, it’s that time again. As children wait patiently for Santa Claus and our cameras become loaded with shots of happy times, the festive season is yet again upon us. While lasting memories are prevalent, frustration, disappointment and boiling tensions are also always rife at this time of year. Why oh why might you ask? Well, with stringent time, resources, and cash allocations, customers are right at this very moment scrambling to check every single item off their to-do lists before Christmas Eve!

It’s a crowded global marketplace out there, bursting at the seams with consumers who each have very different requirements, at different times, via different support channels. With that in mind, many organizations still strongly believe that it's as impossible to make a sweeping generalization about what every single customer expects than it is to sneeze with your eyes open.

We have more great news for our students!

The very prospect of working from home oozes nothing but initially positive connotations with regards to assumed, lenient working schedules and carefree surroundings. Although home agents perform many, if not all, of the exact same tasks as their office based counterparts, the fundamentals of working from home are commonly distorted and misinterpreted.

Working from home provides agents with the ability to perform the tasks they’d usually perform on a contact center floor, in the comfort of their own homes. As home agents communicate with telephone customers, respond to questions on social media, and answer email queries, many still question their focus, in their absence from the physical call floor.

We’re all customers. Yes, while it may seem like an obvious, generalized perception of everyday purchasing trends, resist the unnecessary facepalms for just a moment.

Agent training shouldn’t stop as soon as the new-hire orientation and initial training period is complete. Contact center training is an ongoing evolutionary process. The goal of any contact center’s ongoing training program is to provide training for the skills necessary to perform the job, plus training for skills necessary to enhance ongoing performance.

The rise in e-learning popularity is showing no signs of slowing any time in the near future. It’s rapidly changing the way we look at knowledge and skill acquisition and provides students with a much more impressive, and more effective, learning experience than ever before. Seems like a perfect addition to any contact center.

At some point since 1989, most of us have gazed and pondered in amazement at the futuristic expectation of 2015 depicted in the 1989 blockbuster classic Back to the Future II. While the then seemingly absurd predictions of Biometric technology, video communication, mounted flat-screen TVs, and video glasses are today a spookily accurate reality, absolutely no predictions were ever made about how users will embrace a rich e-learning experience across multiple devices. It’s time to bin any secret obsessions of hoverboards and self-tying shoelaces, because 2015 is the year of responsive e-learning design!