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Is Your Call Center Armed to Address Customer Complaints?

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Brian Cantor
Brian Cantor
01/16/2012

Though they know them to be "always right," few with customer management experience—or with a hint of common sense—would dispute the fact that many customers can be rude, impractical and blinded by self-interest when expressing their complaints. It thus goes without saying that many instances of customer outrage and brand controversy are, technically, the fault of the customer—not the organization actually delivering the service.

Still, even if the customer is not actually always right, the fact that he is the one purchasing products and requesting service on those products gives him justification to believe he is always right. As a result, the brand always must be willing to shoulder the blame for customer issues, no matter how those issues would be analyzed in an academic debate.

More importantly, it must be ready to produce a favorable outcome for the customer, because if the service issue breaks down unfavorably, it is the brand’s inadequacy—not the customer’s difficulty—that will be held accountable for the trouble.

In order to properly handle even the most gratuitous, obnoxious complaints with smiles, call center agents must therefore wholly and believably embrace two conceptual realities within their organization.

  • They need to recognize all customer complaints as welcome, justified opportunities to develop valuable engagement with the audience.
  • They need to have complete faith in their organization’s ability to resolve the complaints.

Central to many customer service "horror stories" has been a motif of disrespect from the customer service representative. When the agent does not believe a complaint to be substantively-justified and does not believe the engagement—and the quest for a resolution—to be worth his or his company’s time, he naturally cannot hold himself properly accountable for the situation. As a result, he will dismiss the complaint through either disinterest, argumentation or downright rudeness, and the organization will fail to pacify the situation, win back the customer’s support and, perhaps most importantly, gain the process and conceptual insight needed to more-permanently conquer the issue in the future.

Of course, even if the agent believes in the value of welcoming and resolving customer complaints, that attitude is in vain if he is not completely confident his organization shares the same commitment. An agent’s ability to resolve an issue, after all, is dictated by both his organization’s ability to resolve that issue and by the extent to which it values the agent’s participation in reaching such resolution.

No matter how altruistic and customer-centric an agent may be, if he wants to keep his job, he cannot stray too far from his supervisor’s mission statement when engaging customers. And even if he wanted to be rebellious, it is not like he, singularly, possesses the power to resolve many of the issues he will face—the entirety of his business, from HR to research & development, to marketing, to accounting, is needed to drive complaints to ideal and sustainable resolutions.

Underscored here is the importance of effective call center leadership, particularly as it relates to the cultural mindset towards customer complaints. If complaints are internally viewed as a "nuisance" and resolutions viewed as a "cost," the agents will simply not be empowered to maximize interactions with customers. As a result, the organization will squander the opportunity to acquire the insights needed to properly comfort customers in the short-term and improve the product and its accompanying service over the long-term.

Though far from a comprehensive illustration—and certainly not enough to impugn the organization—published comments from leadership at British Gas epitomize the wrong way to prime agents for beneficial interactions with customers. Instead of demonstrating a willingness to accept blame for customer frustration and do whatever is necessary to alleviate the situation, the comments seem content to blame external forces for the situation. They portray the recent customer satisfaction roadblock as an unfortunate annoyance, and they signal to call center agents that their role is to provide a line of defense—rather than a direct connection—between angry customers and internal decision-makers.

The recently-published internal email comments from British Gas managing director Phil Bentley emerged in the Daily Mail, and they shed light on how the organization is viewing a recent barrageof customer complaints.

"We have seen a groundswell of anti-British Gas comments, with increasingly aggressive tones. All our call centres are under extreme pressure from more angry customers struggling to pay bills," wrote Bentley, according to the publication.

Noting that the influx of complaints has provided customer service representatives with a "tough gig," Bentley further attributed customer distrust to "relentless media criticism" and a broad affordability and investor confidence crisis in the energy sector.

In all likelihood, Bentley’s comments were intended as a positive endorsement of his call center agents and as a sign that management empathizes with their difficulty in facing such "angry" calls. Unfortunately, when management focuses so much on defining the external forces responsible for unfair customer unhappiness, it is naturally sending the message that it does not see itself as fully blameworthy for the situation.

As a result, it is signaling that it will not assume the entire burden of resolving the situation and is therefore tying the agents’ hands behind their backs. Assuming the comments from The Daily Mail are not misleading, the company, in this is case, is telling agents that the customers are not entirely right and that part of the agents’ job is to weather this somewhat-unjustified storm. In such an environment, customers are unfortunately not conditioned to believe that doing whatever it takes to appease the customer is the best practice.

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Further, by portraying customers as misled, angry and irrational, the organization is effectively excusing those agents who cannot bring their calls to rosy conclusions. When it comes to the "debate" between the agent and the customer, the customer always wins. The agent, therefore, should not feel any power to write off a vitriolic call as the mere fault of a difficult customer.

According to the story, the latest wave of customer outrage stems from the company’s unwillingness to trickle the full extent of wholesale utilities pricing declines down to the customers. As it is, some agents, facing tough economic times themselves, might even sympathize with the disgruntled customers. But the clearer consequence is the message sent when the organization does not back down from the tidal wave of customer dissatisfaction.

In order to warmly handle customer feedback, agents need to feel confident in either their ability to respond on the spot or in their organization’s willingness to develop a future response based on the feedback. "Staying the course" might represent the most astute business solution on some rubrics, but if organizations want agents to invest fully in the customer experience, they must show evidence that agents’ customer interactions have a substantial impact on the business.

We all saw the consequences of Netflix’s initial decision to portray customer outrage over the price increase as exaggerated and untenable. And we all see how customer service standouts like Zappos avoid such problems—what, if in response to the recent hacking issue, it told its customer service team it will temporarily have to deal with an influx of irrationally-angry customers whose fear of privacy invasion is being unjustly portrayed by aggressive media criticism?

For business-minded professionals outraged by this commentary, of course the suggestion here is not necessarily to do exactly what every isolated customer wants, all the time, no matter how demanding.

Businesses should, however, be able to clearly demonstrate a connection between customer feedback and organizational practices. In addition to keeping customers satisfied, such a demonstrable effort to achieve the best possible outcome for customers also assures the agents understand the importance of forging an invaluable collaboration with callers. Otherwise, they are simply a line of defense separating those with the power to satisfy from those whose satisfaction is the key priority of the business.


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