Customer complaints are, sadly, inevitable when you’re in the inbound call center business. Even if your agents are offering top-notch service, you never know what sort of emotional baggage a customer is going to bring into a call that you will need to contend with. Or maybe a customer is perfectly patient and civil, but in the end you just can’t offer a satisfactory solution to their problem. Either way, customer complaints are going to happen. And while you likely can’t eliminate them completely, there are strategies that will drastically reduce the volume and frequency of customer complaints. Here are four such strategies.

 

Improve Agent Training

 

The only thing worse than a long wait time is when a customer finally reaches an agent only to be passed off to someone else because the first doesn’t have the knowledge, skills, and/or authority to solve the customer’s problem. The easiest way to eliminate this possibility, and the complaints that happen as a result, is to empower your agents with more skills and more thorough training. When agents have the ability to solve a wider range of the problems they are facing on a daily basis they will go into calls confident and more cordial—plus there’s the obvious benefit that there will be fewer transfers per call. Better training also improves agent retention rates, which is a boon for the company and the customer alike.

 

Streamline Your IVR

 

Your IVR menu should be built to support the customer in reaching a resolution to their inquiry as quickly as possible. If the options are confusing, too vague, or too broad, it will prevent this from happening. Likewise, if there are self-service options offered that customers are consistently passing over in favor of speaking with a live agent, those options probably aren’t serving the customers in the way you want them to. Use the data you collect on the most common customer inquiries and complaints and edit your IVR accordingly; make sure it’s clear and easy to navigate and that customers will reach the person best equipped to solve their problem on the first go.

 

Ask For Feedback

 

While complaints themselves can be beneficial and helpful in adjusting your services and offerings to fit what the customer is looking for, it’s also important to elicit feedback from both satisfied and dissatisfied customers alike. One of the best ways to strengthen the relationship between your company and your customers is to show them that you are listening to what they are saying. Use tactics like post-call surveys to collect data on what you’re doing well and what you can do better.

 

Offer Self-Service Options

 

Depending on the customer demographic you serve, your audience may be open to seeking out the answers to their problems themselves before getting on the phone with one of your agents. If this is a possibility, publishing FAQs, troubleshooting guides or how-to guides for handling the most common inquiries can help customers solve problems themselves without ever having to get on the phone and contend with potentially frustrating issues like long wait times. Plus, this will reduce the volume of calls being made to your call center, allowing agents the space to deal with the more complex issues that reach them.

In-house technical support and an easy-to-edit IVR are just two of the features of CallShaper that will help you work to reduce customer complaints. For more on how this leading call center software can help, contact us today.