Your Agents Don't Believe You; 5 Ways to Prove You Care About Customer Service

All customer service rants are not created equal.

While the commentaries found on sites like Call Center IQ typically remark on how businesses are failing to deliver optimal experiences for their customers, other communities host rants about how customers are failing businesses.

Havens for disgruntled agents, groups like Reddit’s "Tales from Call Centers" blame poor service experiences on rude or overly entitled customers. These customers, they argue, are not only being irrational in their requests but also irrationally holding agents responsible for their dissatisfaction.

Though superficially united by their experience with such unpleasant customers, these agents, it soon becomes clear, are actually driven to frustration by their organizational leadership.

That an agent could ever deem a customer "irrational" speaks not to an agent’s incompetence but to poor conditioning from his supervisors. These managers and senior executives, the ones responsible for determining the status of his employment, have not trained agents to believe that the will of the customer conquers all. They have allowed the agent to mistakenly believe his "bosses" are internal employees rather than external customers.

That an agent would ever expect empathy from a disgruntled customer speaks not to an agent’s shallow emotional state but to poor organizational strategy. If an agent, especially one working for an organization that officially claims to be customer-centric, believes himself unable to meet a customer’s demand, he clearly does not believe his organization is putting money where its mouth is. He does not see himself as an empowered arm of his call center function; he sees himself as a line of defense for a management rank that wants nothing to do with satisfying customers.

Both circumstances, at the end of the day, reflect a fundamental misalignment between agent experience and management rhetoric. They reflect a situation in which agents, at best, believe management does not understand the realities of satisfying customers and, at worst, believe management is actively lying when it says the customer comes first.

If you, as either a call center or C-level business leader, believe that analysis unfairly reflects your true stance towards customer service, you must adopt these 5 steps for regaining the proper flavor of agent trust.

1) Frame Policies in Terms of Customer Benefit

By articulating policies from either an agnostic or organization-centric perspective, businesses signal that they exist in opposition to customer demand. "Customers might be demanding one thing, but you are only permitted to give them this (typically-lesser) thing."

If policies exist to limit what a business will do for customers, agents will naturally conclude that businesses are limited in their customer-centricity. They might talk a big game, but they are only willing to go so far (and "so far" usually means "not very far") to satisfy customers.

That is the worst possible message to send call center agents.

If a business wants agents to go above and beyond for customers, it must instead use policies as roadmaps for creating great customer experiences. Instead of telling agents what not to do, policies should – accounting for historical customer behavior – coach agents on what they can do to deliver the most effective and efficient service possible.

2) Empower Agents to Resolve Customer Issues

You cannot expect agents to satisfy customers if you do not allow agents to resolve customer issues.

By requiring agents to seek managerial approval before meeting customer demands, an unfortunately large number of organizations damage agent relationships and customer experiences. Their disinterest in granting agents leeway to satisfy customers reflects a lack of trust. Their portrayal of simple resolution as something that requires "approval" suggests it is an unwanted cost.

As a result, agents not only feel unable to personally give customers what they want but skeptical that they will be judged harshly if they do take a proposed resolution to a supervisor. By enraging already disgruntled customers, this ultimately produces a breakdown in the customer experience.

Using data from existing interactions and research, as well as common sense, successful organizations determine typical resolutions to typical customer issues and grant agents complete authority to offer them. Aware that unique issues will require unique responses, successful organizations also grant agents significant leeway—sometimes in the form of a set budgetary "bonus" agents can offer on top of the usual solution—to give customers what they want.

The benefits are irrefutable: agents not only feel trusted and valued but also come to see how serious their organizations are about customer service. And insofar as they can actually give customers what they want, agents are in position to quell customer outrage and inspire customer satisfaction.

3) Listen to the Voice of the Customer – Literally

Advised to avoid transferring calls to supervisors at all costs, agents quickly lose faith in the notion that management cares about the voice of the customer.

The conditioning instead reminds agents that their job is to keep angry customers away from the business. The "important" members of the organization do not care what angry customers are saying; they simply want those customers to be silent.

In successful organizations, agents are encouraged to connect customers—happy or sad—with supervisors. They see requests to "speak to a manager" not as tricks to get faster support but as opportunities to regain customers’ trust in the service process. They are coached to believe that management, in its desire to create a more customer-centric business, literally wants to hear the voice of the customer as often as possible.

If management is not interested in engaging with customers, how can agents possibly feel excited about their day-to-day responsibility?

4) Manage and Train Based on Customer Feedback

Accepting opportunities to speak to customers is a great start, but if management truly wants to inspire agents, it must show that it is acting on the voice of the customer.

Too often, management dismisses customer feedback as a required but weightless annoyance, which causes agents to further divorce themselves from notions like "the customer is always right" and "what is good for the customer is always good for the business."

To send the right message, management must put customer feedback and "satisfaction metrics" at the center of its talent development strategy. Customers who receive positive marks—both in isolation and as a trend—should be rewarded specifically for their contribution to customer satisfaction. Customers who receive negative customer feedback should not be encouraged to brush it off as the product of customer entitlement; they should be reprimanded for their irrefutably poor performance.

In addition to managing agents based on feedback, leaders should also assure they are overtly adapting their business models to the voice of the customer. If customers repeatedly complain about issues with a certain product or process, businesses can signal their customer-centricity by transforming to overcome those challenges.

5) Proactively Recognize the Exceptions

Managing based on the voice of the customer is essential, but it is not without hazard in organizations overrun with cynicism.

If agents are rewarded or reprimanded exclusively based on customer feedback, they—still believing their job function is to impress their supervisors—will potentially see glowing feedback, rather than creating successful experiences, as the paramount objective.

This does not render step 3 irrelevant – in order to prove the customer conquers all, businesses must manage based on customer feedback. But it does remind businesses that they must also recognize agents who do the right thing for the right reason.

Even before feedback is collected and interpreted, agents who go above-and-beyond in their effort to satisfy a customer should be applauded. Those who spend time getting to know the customer, getting to understand the customer and getting the information needed to offer the best possible resolution should not be reprimanded for missing average handle time but rewarded for committing themselves to the goal of customer satisfaction.

By "catching agents in the act," supervisors encourage agents to create the best possible experiences without exception.