Back in September 2019 I talked about some minor and inexpensive things you can do to improve your customer service. This topic comes up often as many customers want to make incremental improvements without breaking the bank. The focus on this follow-up post is to try and provide another round of simple things which will yield improvements. Use these tips and the ones in my previous post before making any huge investments in your customer service strategy.

Have consistency across all your inbound numbers. This one is specifically important for healthcare. If I call your pulmonology department or I call my PCP, it’s ideal to have the same menu structure and same get out mechanisms. Trying to remember what options work for my pediatrician and for my neurologist creates unnecessary friction which really shouldn’t be there. If you absolutely have to have different flows, use this opportunity to compare and contrast which flows behave better and use data to use the best flow in as many departments as possible.

Have your agents live where the information is found. There’s nothing worse than hearing agents banging away a novel on their keyboard when they are talking to you. Surely I’m not asking a question which they have never heard before and surely they don’t have to type these many words for every call, right? CTI connectors for CRMs/ERPs are getting cheaper and cheaper and there are plenty of tools available which allow keyboard shortcuts and templating. If your agents are repeatedly typing out the same phrases this is an easy win for automation and get immediate returns.

Agent training and retraining. The best run call centers have a lot of communication between agents, supervisors, management. There is constant reminders about the work they do, why they do it, and how to do it better. Training and refreshers happen constantly and they expand beyond what to say to the customer, but also how to better navigate tools, how to deal with tough calls, and how to improve their writing. All of these things create a better experience for everyone around.

Collect some information. Every call center dreams of 100% deflection. Bots, virtual agents, etc., all with a single purpose to prevent the caller to talk to a human and have a computer answer their question. However, not all call centers even have any type of self service, but even if you don’t you should still have your customers provide you with some piece of information. It can be something simple like their zip code or what state they are calling from or more complex like their customer or account number. Either way, training your callers to have some information to give you does a few things: paves the way for adoption of self service to be easier, makes you seem like you’re more advanced than you really are, and give some extra data which you can later use for analysis. What data you ask for is certainly depended on the call center, but in my opinion asking anything from the customer is better than nothing.

This is getting longer than I expected, I’ll work on releasing part 3 of this at a later point.

Be well,

~david