Mitigating bad customer service is a full-contact team sport

In recent years, customer service has demanded an omni-channel presence that allows consumers to ping them at any time — be it an email, a text message, an Instagram direct message, or an online chat bot. But the ability to ping doesn’t necessarily mean excellent service.

According to a recent study by the WP Carey School of Business at Arizona State University, detailed in a Wall Street Journal article, 50% of customers surveyed were using digital channels as their primary means of complaint, picking up the phone for the first time since school started conducting the annual survey a decade ago. The study also found that the number of customers seeking revenge for poor service encounters has tripled since 2020, including 32% shaming companies on social media.

Not that any of these tactics have worked. If public denunciation were effective, airlines would always run smoothly and the McRib would be served year-round. Thomas Hollmann, executive director of the Center for Services Leadership at WP Carey, has a theory about what drives despised customers to unleash anger. From the school’s website:

Although many customers ask for repairs or refunds, they also hope for a sincere apology and acknowledgment of their complaints… These free actions show that the company cares, listens, and values ​​the customer. It’s up to brands to communicate as people with their customers. A sincere “I’m sorry this happened” can turn a potential explosion into a lifelong customer.

While it’s certainly important for a rep to empathize with customers, Hollmann’s theory isn’t enough to fully explain what’s going on. If a rep can only offer an apology to a frustrated customer, it means they couldn’t solve the problem themselves, at least not to the customer’s satisfaction. All too often, inefficient permissions, communication silos, and lack of accountability cause the representative to fail before the interaction even begins.

When members of the customer service team are not authorized to help through no fault of their own, apologies are nothing more than trophies for participation.

authority figures

In general, there are two ways to ensure staff are equipped to handle customer issues comprehensively. The first is to train all service personnel in all areas of the business to ensure they can answer a wide range of questions – it’s not often that a problem is confined to a single part of a product, and customers may want to ask about theirs as well ask account. This tactic requires almost infinite training and is quite impractical as a company grows and expands its capabilities.

The second is to establish a digital platform that allows reps to flawlessly find, update, and share information across the organization. In this framework, it’s not as important for employees to know everything as it is to know how to find everything – or to have the ability to direct the customer to someone who can help directly.

Customers want to experience forward momentum, and the worst possible scenario is that they are speaking to a representative whose hands are tied because they lack the resources, visibility, or authority to make immediate changes. Even the efforts of the most empathetic and well-meaning service workers fail when nothing can be done.

A colleague of mine recently faced the horrors of a disjointed customer service team. They encountered some issues on the first leg of their journey with an unnamed airline and were told to call the company’s customer service for help. However, people on the phone told them to use the airline’s live chat feature, whose reps told them to email the company instead – and whoever was checking that inbox urged them to do it again to call The cycle continued and at no point was anyone able to even glance at my colleague’s call or chat history for more context – nor were they able to escalate complaints to other departments or leave notes for them . Certainly many apologies were made but my colleague ended up wasting a lot of time for zero benefit.

Imagine instead of customer service reps using an app or two, they ran a dashboard showing activity across a range of different apps – even the ones they don’t use regularly. This level of transparency enables two important things, the first of which is the ability to let customers know where their request is in the pipeline and which team is currently working on it. Second, whichever person in an organization speaks to the customer, they can inform the rest of the organization of any new information that the customer may have provided. Within connected technology ecosystems, authority is something agents share and can access at any time.

Everything, everywhere, all at once

A unified system allows companies to delegate employees from across their organization to help with customer service, either to bypass roadblocks or provide necessary information to make changes. One company that would benefit greatly from this functionality is Cartika, which offers IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and IT support. The company hosts mission-critical processes and services for its customers, and as such, fast, immediate customer service has always been paramount to the company’s growth. Then, as the company grew, it needed a system that would streamline service interactions while collecting data for continuous improvement. This prompted the company to abandon Salesforce and try Zoho Desk.

The first step was to embed customer service functions into the existing customer portal. Some aimed to help customers get their questions answered at the pass, including an FAQ page and integration with an AI-based conversational assistant to answer basic questions. When customers chat with a live agent after the escalation, they weren’t limited to just asking questions about the issue they were having. For example, if they came with a technical question but wanted more information on billing or new features, the agent could easily direct them to the right department.

The company’s multi-touchpoint approach to customer service enabled continuous improvement. The upgraded system could track data across a customer’s entire call, not just while working with the original agent. At every step of the process, data was collected — things like total successful call time and average customer sentiment — and stored in a central database that everyone in the company can access. This improved accountability and the empowerment of managers to step in when needed to ensure that a lack of authority to provide assistance was never an issue for customer complaints.

stay accountable

Land Title Guarantee Company (LTGC), a Colorado-based agency, took a comprehensive approach to customer service in their small days. However, the tools were rudimentary — LTGC had designated a few core email addresses for customers to use, and staff took turns monitoring incoming notes. The team used Gmail’s labeling feature to assign cases to individual representatives. As you can imagine, simple color coding was not enough to establish accountability and cases often slipped through the cracks.

Upgrading to Zoho Desk was a step that was long overdue for LTGC. Now, when a customer complaint came in, the system analyzed the note to identify the right person for the job and automatically added the customer to its queue. There was no longer a need to communicate with other team members about the status of a customer request as this information was accessible across the entire app system from a central dashboard. Managers and high-level representatives could also be pinged from within the system if they needed to intervene to ensure the tag team’s efforts were carried out flawlessly.

The improvements in customer service were measurable. Together with Zoho Desk, LTGC reduced their response time by more than half from seven hours to three hours. In addition, the management team was able to monitor activities in real time, opening up the opportunity to experiment with departmental changes and immediately measure the effectiveness of those changes.

Diploma

Unifying data is paramount for great customer service platforms, and having apps within a unified system is an asset here. They are all developed by the same vendor and ensure seamless communication, consistent data collection and increased security. Employees from all departments can take a peek at customer service efforts from any of the connected apps and intervene if necessary. Mitigating a customer’s urge for revenge is a team sport—a full-contact sport at that.