Every Call to the Call Center is a Broken Customer Experience

Each time I take on a new role as a CX leader or engage with clients on a CX consulting project, the first place I look for improvement opportunities is the call center. Those who have worked with me know that one of my go-to sayings or philosophies is that every call to the call center is a broken customer experience.

The call may have been initiated because:

· The customer had a question

· The customer didn’t understand something

· The customer had different expectations for the product or service than what you intended

· The customer had different expectations for the total charges than what the invoice shows

· The product was broken or damaged

· The project or service didn’t go as planned or expected

· Or any of a number of other reasons why the customer needs help

All of these are broken customer experiences and an expense to your business.

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Every call to the call center is a broken experience

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One of my other core CX beliefs is customer experience is a team sport and it requires all members of the team to work together. All areas of the company must be in sync to deliver the right customer experience. The marketing team sets customer expectations for a product or service with its branding and communications. Sales sets expectations of price and how the product or service should work. Manufacturing and/or operations has to deliver against the expectations that have been set. In supporting roles, HR has to recruit, hire, and train the right people in the right roles to deliver the experience, and IT has to support this with apps, websites, and other technology.

All of the reasons for calls I outlined above are a failure somewhere else in this system. Maybe the customer misunderstood and had a different expectation than what marketing and sales communicated or thought they communicated. Maybe it wasn’t clear how the pricing model worked. Maybe we didn’t have the right FAQs on the website to answer their questions without a call. Maybe the product had a manufacturing defect, or something happened in operations and delivery that day, and it just didn’t go as planned.

But my point is that the fastest way to improve your customer experience – and save money (the magical ROI) – is to start in the call center. Find out the top 5 or 10 reasons you are getting calls. And ask yourself what can be done to prevent those calls from ever happening again.

I’ll give you two examples from my days leading CX for two different car rental companies. At one of these companies, the #2 reason we were getting calls was customers needing a copy of their receipt. We emailed customers their receipt after every transaction, so this really should not have been an issue. We did a root-cause analysis to find out why so many customers were not getting these emails and fixed the source of the issues. But we also worked with the digital team to enable loyalty members – those with profiles on our digital assets – to log in and get their own receipts. This eliminated the #2 reason for getting calls and saved more than $6M annually.

The other example was much more difficult to resolve due to system issues. We were getting a significant number of calls from customers complaining that the final invoice they received after their rental did not match the expectation set on the website at the time of reservation. This took significant root-cause analysis time and effort. We ultimately found that this issue affected a sub-segment of customers that were purchasing additional products at the time of reservation, such as insurance or car seats, etc., and the website was not calculating the tax correctly on these transactions. It took significant effort, but we were eventually able to reprogram the website to resolve the issue and again save millions of dollars in calls.

So, if you are new to your CX role or have a program that is looking for wins and to prove an ROI, start with the call center and figure out what is happening upstream to cause those calls. Then figure out how many of those calls you can prevent. It improves your customer experience results and gives you an easy way to prove an ROI for your efforts. It may also shift the perception of your call center, customer care team, etc. from that of an expense that can and should be reduced to a knowledge center that can help the organization learn and deliver better results.