Can I Please Speak with a Live Agent?

by Randy Saunders

A new report from Forrester Research, “Why Talking to Customers Is Ruining Your Business,” shows that customers still want to speak to live agents, but companies aren’t making it easy.

Forester’s study finds that 45 percent of consumers prefer to speak with a customer service agent to answer questions and resolve service issues, yet most walk away from customer service agent interactions disillusioned, disappointed, and disgruntled.

Why Are Customers Frustrated?
“While the trend over the past 10 years has been to try to move customers to self-service channels to reduce costs, 45 percent of consumers still prefer to speak with a customer service agent on the phone for customer service,” writes Natalie Petouhoff, senior analyst and lead author of the report.

“Consumers expect to speak with a human who is knowledgeable, patient, friendly, courteous, informed, easy to understand, and responsible for resolving issues,” Petouhoff continues. “Instead, consumers often encounter incorrect problem diagnosis, agent attitude issues, several transfers to ‘experts,’ long hold times, incomplete or contradictory answers, and a need to repeat information already given.”

Some of the major problem areas identified in this report include:

• Clumsy self-service to live service transition
• Routing calls to the wrong customer service agent
• Dismal knowledge management capabilities
• The agents’ ability to review customer histories, products, and services

Does Age Matter?
While you might expect that younger generations should prefer self-service channels, that's not what Forrester found.  “Boomers, Gen Xers, and Gen Yers all prefer talking to an agent to get service more than any other channel,” Petouhoff writes.

Five Ways To Deliver Extraordinary Customer Service Agent Interactions
To fix these problems and deliver extraordinary customer service agent interactions, Forrester recommends that customer service process and application professionals tackle five key initiatives:

1. Mapping out proper customer routing logic
2. Modernizing call center infrastructure
3. Beefing up agent management
4. Embracing natural language and intent-based knowledge management
5. Fixing self-service customer interactions

Comments

[Randy Saunders]

Colin, I agree--nothing has more emotional impact with customers than the genuine power of a real human voice. It has always been at the heart of one-to-one interactions. For building rapport, strengthening relationships, building trust and conveying captivating enthusiasm, the human voice reigns over IVRs, email, and even web chat.

Often contact center agents are the only human voices that customers will experience when interacting with an organization. Because the influence of the "human touch" can have such a dramatic impact and lasting memory on the customer experience, this is an area that should be central to every organization's customer experience strategy.

[Colin Shaw - Beyond Philosophy]

I think the Forrester report is somewhat superficial. To get to the real reason you need to look at the deep-seated motivation of Customers and this can only be gained by understanding peoples physiological make up. Customers are human beings and as such they are driven by emotions. In a recent blog, we described how Customer emotions are evoked. It is in this detail that you find the answer. Customer want to Trust the information they received they believe the best way of achieving this is talking with a person, not a machine.

Colin Shaw
Founder, Beyond Philosophy
Blog: www.Experience Clinic.com

[Mona]

Could customer judgment vary with the same experience?