Pitfalls Of Phone-Based Customer Service

There are numerous things that can be said about customer service over the phone. Every company that has any sort of line dedicated to receiving, processing, and solving customer complaints about anything from the sales process to the products will have a couple of traits in common. First off, there’s the constant claim that each call made by a customer is of importance to the company receiving it – in many ways, it is. Every call is an opportunity to keep a customer happy and coming back for more, and no business would refuse the chance to have a source of repeated revenues and profits, no matter how small. However, one should note that there are more than a few pitfalls to getting your customer support teams doing their jobs over the phone, just as there are pitfalls to any job that requires customer interaction that removes the physical element.

The first thing that should be noted is that without physical cues, it can sometimes be difficult for people to tell if the customer service representative is being sincere. The tone and sincerity of a voice can be faked, and many people depend on visual clues to tell whether or not someone is being sincere. A nice smile, for example, can go a long way in convincing a person that the speaker is sincere in wanting to help or trying to find a solution. In a call center or e-mail contact center, the core problem is the sudden lack of such things. For those who work phone lines, they can still utilize the sound of their voice, and what control over the tone they can muster, to show sincerity. It isn’t as easy as being there physically, having a face-to-face conversation, but it does help in the process. Those who do customer service via e-mail or chat have it even harder, being reduced to nothing more than words on a screen.

There are also some common pitfalls to customer service that’s based on telephone contact. The obvious one is when the call is disconnected. This is a major problem that, despite advances in technology, cannot really be solved. The first fact that someone needs to understand is that calls are always going to be disconnected, no matter what you do or what equipment one uses. Technology isn’t always perfectly reliable, after all. However, the second fact is that even if aware of this, people will still feel bad about a company if they are in the middle of a call, getting their problem fixed, and end up being disconnected. This is true for any department, not just the ones that handle the problems of a customer. This kind of problem can lead to a number of annoyed customers very quickly, especially for bigger companies, where it can take several hours for a call to get through to a live, human representative. Theoretically, the bigger a company is and the more departments it has, the worse off even a single, accidental disconnection would be.

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