It’s become quite evident that customer experience is a top priority for the majority of organisations, and the reason is simple: better customer experiences increases revenue — resulting in higher profits.

Find out how to improve your customer experience with the latest industry trends.

So, when there’s a noticeable dip in NPS and customer experience goes right down, so too, does revenue. At this point, contact centre leader’s spider senses are tingly, there’s a problem somewhere in my contact operations, but where?

One of the biggest challenges faced by most contact centre leaders is identifying the root cause of a problem. How do you identify what you don’t know? The second biggest challenge is knowing what to prioritise. And of course, implementing change and delivering operational excellence.

To help transform your CX strategy, we’ve listed 5 common customer support problems that may be affecting your customer experience and how to overcome them.

5 Common Customer Support Problems That Affect CX

Serving the needs of the business, not the customer

Customers want to contact you on their terms, not yours. The reality is that the average customer will use 10 to 11 channels to communicate with companies, which includes self-service, voice assistant, FAQs and so on. Not providing customers with these options creates friction, making it harder for the customer to get the support they need.

When the time comes where they are able to speak to an agent— they are already frustrated, cranky and unpleasant to deal with. This in turn, results in longer handling time, impacting service level and resourcing requirements, and therefore costs. As it continues to trickle down further, it can reduce NPS, customer satisfaction score, brand loyalty and customer churn.

But it doesn’t stop there. You now have to think about how it’s affecting your staff — unhappy/low engagement, increasing absenteeisms and staff turnover. Further impacting service delivery, there is now pressure on your workforce planning team and team leaders.

While you may need to invest in technology and process improvements to reduce friction and add the channels your customers are asking for, it will save you money in the long run, as all these customer support problems lead to increased costs.

2. Measuring for all the wrong reasons

I’m sure we all know the saying ‘what gets measured gets done’, because as humans we’re extrinsically motivated by carrots and sticks. This has never been more true with the rise of millennials entering the workforce & gamification in everything from your GPS app to your Uber Eats purchases. How does this apply to a contact centre?

If you measure handling time, your team will find a way to meet that measurement at any cost. If you measure customer experience, they’ll find a way to meet that too. But any measure has both an upside and a downside, for example:

Target all your focus on CX and your handling times might go up, but your goodwill refund budgets might be blown, and all focus on productivity goes out the window.

Depending on how you measure customer experience, a customer can be really happy with an immediate outcome and only end up more disengaged later on when they discover that their problem was only fixed temporarily.

To get the best CX outcome:

Find a balance of measurements that support the needs of the customer and the business (there is no one-size-fits-all anymore and these are not static results)
Develop metrics based on a deeper understanding of your customer and business needs (there are no ‘best practice’ metrics all contact centres should target anymore)
Empower agents to deliver a great outcome without rewarding them for unhelpful behaviour

Questions to consider:

What is the waiting threshold of your customer?
What is the intrinsic motivator for each of your agents?
What is the profitability point for your business?

It’s through understanding and continually measuring the answers to questions like these that we can design an evolving set of measurements that drive great CX in our contact centres.

3. Poor access to knowledge

Nothing is more frustrating than not getting an answer after calling a contact centre. Wait, no I lied. Being put on hold for 15minutes+ and being forced to listen to terribly loud music on repeat (seriously, how have we not found a solution to this yet?) while the agent frantically searches for an answer.

With customer expectations rising and their queries getting more complex it has put an immense amount of pressure on frontline staff to perform. They are expected to hold all the answers in their heads, or at least be able to answer them in a time that suits the customer.

In order to keep up with customer demands and expectations, agents must be equipped with the right tools and technology that empowers them to become masterful problem solvers. Getting this right for your contact centre requires 2 things:

a) A tool/technology that supports the rapid finding and searching of information

The agent should be able to find the information the customer requires and respond to the customer at conversational speeds. In other words, the customer should never know that the agent needed to look up the question in the first place.

b) A well-designed knowledge strategy

Great knowledge strategies are contextual. Whether it’s guiding the agent with “next most likely questions” or through a series of diagnostic questions to help uncover the root cause of the customer's issue. It should then lay out a pathway of answers or steps they need to provide the customer to resolve the issue.

4. Disorganised workforce planning

Workforce Planners are the Yoda’s of the contact centre world. At least, the good ones are. If I had to pick one thing that underpinned the success (or lack thereof) of all aspects of the contact centre, this would be it.

A contact centre truly suffers when you don’t have the right people in the right place at the right time. You could argue lack of numbers, but simply throwing bodies on the line doesn’t guarantee customers are getting answers they want.

As a result, remaining team members are fatigued and overworked. They begin to take shortcuts, team meetings and training that help them serve customers better are cancelled. And thus a vicious cycle is born —

Employee engagement declines > absenteeism rises > attrition increases > customer satisfaction declines > customer churn increases > complaints rise > repeat traffic increases

With more work to do and less people and time to do it in, revenue and profitability takes a hit, budgets shrink and projects get cancelled — along with any hopes of funds for technological improvements that would help you do more with less. And so the downward spiral continues.

Top qualities of a workforce planner:

The ability to build a forecast and resourcing plan from a blank excel spreadsheet
Mastery of knowing what technology is doing in the background and the ability to easily pinpoint where/when things went wrong
The ability to tell a convincing story using data: identify how it will impact; when it will impact; and how you can harness/overcome the impacts that will result from the decision.

If you don’t have a good workforce planner on your team, get one. Give them great tools and they will be the catalyst that lifts the performance of your contact centre in every single area.

The truth is, if you ever have trouble getting your executives over the line with a decision or project, it’s your workforce planners who will tell a convincing, data-driven story in a language they can understand and turn that up-hill battle into a no-brainer.

5. Poor communication and change management

Let’s face it, the pace of change isn’t slowing down anytime soon. Every company on the planet has more change initiatives underway than they could possibly count at any given moment.

On any given day, your agents need to assimilate a LOT of new information — whether it’s the official process or system change that’s just been put into production, a new development target from their team leader, or a misinformed rumour they heard from the guy or gal sitting across the partition.

Poor communication is the result of running around attempting to implement changes so quickly, that we often forget to stop and fill people in. While some may thrive in a fast paced environment, others are meticulously detailed and may need months to comfortably adapt to change. This can cause immense stress and frustration to adapt a new process without the proper adjustment and processing time.

How does poor communication impact your customer experience?

As we’ve established many times over, happy, confident agents are the biggest contributors to happy customers. No customer wants to deal with an agent who’s fumbling around apologising because “they’ve implemented a new change in the system and I’m still learning how to use it”. Let alone resolve time consuming errors that occur downstream because half of the workforce forgot to tick that new box or complete that new step of the process.

Communication starts with engaging the team

Engage team members in the early process (especially the meticulously detailed) and use them as your guideline for developing detail, context and frequency of information you need to communicate to your teams. This ensures that everyone is on the same page and are prepared for the change(s) coming their way.

Need help with your CX strategy?

Transformation within contact centres is more critical than ever to the future of how we do business. Without a clear plan for change, things can go horribly wrong and it’s your customers who will suffer in the end. That’s why we provide a free assessment tool (CXMA) that allows you to assess your operations before making any decisions.

Here at Athena Consulting, we help companies navigate transformation with the right skills, leadership techniques and technology. We understand that day-to-day management of contact centres requires a myriad of innovative solutions from how we manage and motivate people to the integration and transformation of technology solutions and operational practices.