Stop Mistaking Customer Silence with Customer Satisfaction

5 Ways to Turn Find and Fix Problems Early

You know the saying, “if it’s not broken, don’t fix it…”

In a year like this one, when so much has seemed to be broken, turned inside-out, or teetering on the edge, your time, focus, and resources have probably been pretty tied up. You’ve been busy. So it would be understandable if you haven’t spent much time lately, digging into your customer satisfaction performance. Even when you do, it’s entirely possible that you won’t see dramatic spikes in complaints.

Don’t breathe a sigh of relief just yet.

Why? Because, just like you, your customers have been spending the past several months juggling a million shifting priorities. When they reach out to you for answers or assistance, their needs and expectations are higher than ever. And the quality of your response matters more than ever.

The truth is, customer complaints are lagging metrics. That’s especially true this year.

But here’s another way of looking at it: if you’re waiting for your customers to reach out and complain, what message does that send? Do you really expect a disappointed customer to go to the extra effort of educating you on your own process and performance?

They don’t want to.

That’s always been true. Countless studies will point to the fact that most dissatisfied customers will simply find something better – without ever saying a word to the brand who let them down. These days, it’s easier than ever to shop around and sample countless new, disruptive brands, and quietly move on.

So what can you do? Here are 5 steps to help you catch and turn around customer care mistakes before they turn into customer experience failures.

  1. Listen Beyond the Silence

When is the last time you – you, personally – listened in on customer calls? What did you hear? As I mentioned in a recent post, when you hear an agent who sounds rushed, disinterested, or confused, don’t rush to judge the agent. Instead, start by looking at your own training, technology, processes, management skills, and supervisor bandwidth. Do you have the resources in place to keep up with customer needs and expectations?

  1. Reach Out and Ask Your Customers

If you want to know how you’re doing, ask the right questions. And make it easy for your customers to tell you. I believe that now more than ever. But I also know that right now, it’s trickier than ever. Keep your questions brief and focused on what you most need to know. More importantly, make sure that everything you say and ask is sensitive to the times, gracious, and zero-pressure. Work with your customer care and marketing leadership to develop a survey that warmly says you value your customers and care about how well you’re serving them.

  1. Listen to Your Agents and Your Supervisors

Do you have a robust agent feedback process in place? Are your agents happy in their job, proud of the work they do, and eager to deliver a great experience to every customer on every call? Are your supervisors actively engaged coaches, capable of identifying trends and communicating the good, the bad, and the ugly to you? A great customer care team is one of the greatest sources of information about customer service performance. Tap into it.

  1. Make Everything Easier

If the current pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that, when a customer needs assistance during stressful times, it’s annoying to be left waiting on hold. It’s frustrating to get incomplete answers. And it’s deeply disappointing to be met with apathy. Is your customer care operation capable of keeping up with customer needs? Today, it would be nearly impossible to do that without the speed, flexibility, and long-term cost savings of conversational AI. If you’re not currently leveraging artificial intelligence in your customer care call center, start looking into the possibilities now.

  1. Start Comparison Shopping

What are your customers finding when they look around at other brands? Who’s doing it better than you? Dig deeper to learn how today’s top customer care outsourcers manage to deliver consistently superior customer experiences and find out what it will take for you to do that, too.

At Skybridge Americas, we have been investing in the people, the processes, the technology, and the artificial intelligence to take care our clients and their customers. We understood the importance of having at-home customer care agents capabilities years ago. That’s why we invested in our Agents Anywhere program and we were able to stay up and running, delivering seamless customer care, while most call centers went into shutdowns or slowdowns earlier this year. If you would like to know more about how Skybridge Americas can help you deliver improved customer experience, please reach out. We would love to talk!

-Bobby Matthews

Senior Vice President, Sales and Marketing
Skybridge Americas
bmatthews@skybridgeamericas.com


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