Rob McDougall, president of Upstream Works, a call center solution company that is focused on providing measurement solutions for call centers that want to do better at "first call resolution," gives five reasons why issues don't get fixed the first time, on the first call. (It's the second article on the page - you have to scroll down.
His first reason?
"Agents frequently don’t have the authority to resolve a problem, even when the solution is obvious. This results in transfers and escalations, with increased hold time and abandons. It also means the next callback will be an escalation call that ties up supervisor time."That's priceless: "even when the solution is obvious." Tom Vander Well has a hilarious example of this on his blog: "Our System isn't Set Up For Death". Obviously, if a customer is dead, he doesn't need your services (unless you do jiffy outbound funeral sales). So we know there's a problem, and it's not the customer's problem.The problem is on our end, and we just need to set a policy to deal with it. Then it's smooth sailing.
As far as I'm concerned, the purpose of an escalation to management is to get something done that a agent doesn't know how to do, not something that they aren't allowed to do. It doesn't make sense to anger a customer and show your corporate rigidity by making him call back to ask for something that's obvious, that he was going to get anyway. We need to give agents enough power to do their job.
» Fake escalations from CallCenterScript
One kind of call center escalation, perhaps more difficult than ones involving obvious customer issues, happens when the customer was treated appropriately and didn't like it. When the customer is legally responsible for the charges on their bill, ... [Read More]
Tracked on: July 5, 2007 2:29 PM | Permalink to Trackback