My best call center experience was ten years ago. I remember talking to a lady in Manila. We talked about my flight to India and she said, “Oh, so you flew right over me!” I was actually about two hundred miles North of her, but that is close! I had a nice experience talking to her because she was very sweet, soothing and personal not to mention fun.
There are all types of metrics in the call center business. You can measure how many percentage of calls were resolved without transferring. You can measure customer satisfaction rates. You can measure how long the call took or waiting time for the call to be answered.
To get real customer loyalty to your company, you need to find those agents who you never forget. Unfortunately, there are not so many agents who you will fondly remember, but many who you will wish you could forget!
To put the cart before the horse the way the gurus normally do, part of the battle here is to create an experience for your agents and managers that they will not forget. If you treat your agents like slaves, how can they treat your clients like kings and queens? Think about that! If you pamper your agents and give them amazing working conditions to brag about, they might just feel a lot better about treating your customers well and giving them a great experience.
Training agents to make small talk and little jokes, perhaps a little well placed sarcasm might make a huge difference. Even phone answering robots that are trained to make little remarks about the line to the ladies room for female robots, or how they haven’t been oiled in weeks could create a memorable experience.
You can measure metrics until you are blue in the face. But, what humans want in the stone age or the space age remains the same — we want a personable experience. The question is — do you have it in you to systematically provide those experiences?