Call Center Software

How to Reduce Customer Frustration with Seamless Transfers

“I need to transfer this call to assist you better. Can I please place your call on hold?” This is an all-too-familiar line often used in customer service. In fact, two out of ten customers are hit with this script (or any of its variations) before their call is transferred.

While such transfers can be annoying, they are also unavoidable to some extent. The trick is to orchestrate a seamless transfer process to reduce customer frustrations.

Quick and efficient transfers are nothing short of a relay race where you pass the baton to the next athlete. Do it swiftly and without fumbling, and the customer will appreciate the efficiency of personalized service delivery without any hiccups. However, do it shoddily and too often, and the bumps in the road will wreck the customer experience.

What Frequent Call Transfer Means to a Business

Frequent or janky call transfers can impact businesses in the following ways:

  • Rising Customer Frustrations: Your customers will not appreciate bouncing back and forth between agents, teams, and departments. This could lead to increased frustration, customer dissatisfaction, and higher churn.
  • Lower Efficiency: Frequent and unnecessary call transfers bring down the overall productivity and capacity of the contact center. The delayed resolution and poor results will further dampen morale.
  • Higher Operational Costs: Whether it is missed opportunities, lost revenue, efficiency dip, or rising dissatisfaction amongst customers and employees, excessive call transfers will eat into profit margins.
  • Reputational Damage: Unhappy customers will share their experiences with 15 or more people. The plummet of Sears from a leading retailer to anonymity (and almost on the brink of bankruptcy) simply because of poor customer service is a stark reminder of the stickiness of bad press.

The Underlying Culprits of Frequent Call Transfers

Any initiative to smoothen handoff between agents should begin by understanding the primary actors leading to friction. Here are some primary causes of friction during call transfers:

Unempowered Agents

Frontline agents are bound to occasionally run into one-off awkward exchanges with customers. However, those who lack the skill, training, or resources will often find themselves struggling even with the basic customer calls. Unable to resolve the issue, they will resort to transferring the call to their supervisor or to a peer.

Communication or Data Siloes

The inability to handle customer queries could also stem from a general lack of knowledge or access to information on the subject matter. It is pretty common in companies that fail to centralize data, resulting in siloes. As such, agents are left redirecting calls to specialists rather than servicing requests.

Lack of Technology

We have moved way past manual telephone exchanges into the world of cloud telephony. However, despite such developments, businesses may continue using outdated or incompatible legacy systems that impede the agent’s ability to resolve customer queries at first contact. On the contrary, they’re left passing the call around from one team or department to another.

Improper Configuration

In some cases, even businesses that have invested in next-gen contact center solutions may face the issue of frequent call transfers due to improper configuration. The automated call transfer menu could follow a more customer-centric transfer approach, or the call routing could be streamlined, and so on.

How to Get That Seamless Transfer Process: Tips & Tricks

Here are a few actionable steps one can take for quick and efficient transfers:

Enable Frontline Agents

Empower frontline agents with comprehensive training and onboarding so that they can handle a variety of customer issues singlehandedly. Encourage innovation, problem-solving, and strategic decision-making by offering them access to tools and resources required for it.

Centralize Knowledge

About 84% of consumers are frustrated when agents lack information. As such, destroy the information siloes by centralizing information and making it reasonably available to all. Develop a culture of knowledge sharing so that valuable information can flow seamlessly throughout the organization.

Invest in Technology for Seamless Call Transfer

Modernize your contact center to facilitate smooth handoff between agents. Smart IVR, automated routing, call scoring, real-time coaching, and system integration are some of the key features of telephony platforms that can be the backbone of a seamless transfer process.

While these are just the basic offerings of a contact center software solution, tools like JustCall take things up a few notches through warm call transfers.

Warm call transfers take the edge off of sudden handoffs by familiarizing agents and customers with each other before the transfer.

Configure Skill-Based Routing

Skill-based call routing can be the building block of a customer-centric transfer approach. It is a technology that directs calls to the best-suited agent depending on the nature of the inquiry, the agent’s skill set, and proven track record. Such direct contact reduces the need for call transfers.

Communicate, Communicate, Communicate

While you can prepare for almost all eventualities, call transfers may be unavoidable in some cases. As such, make clear communication during transfers a standard procedure before an agent transfers a call. You can even train them to use empathy statements to ease any building frustration.

Don’t Let Call Transfers Kill Customer Experience

Reducing customer frustration with a seamless transfer process is much more than optimizing business processes – it is embracing a customer-centric transfer approach to eliminate access barriers to customer service.

By prioritizing quick and efficient transfers, companies can lay the foundation for customer satisfaction, loyalty, sustainability, and profitability in the long run. While JustCall fits the criteria of an efficient call management software, what truly sells the point home is the warm call transfer feature.

Agents can use this to add other agents to a call before the transfer actually takes place. Doing so offers the new agent context on the customer’s issue before the handoff, making the transfer buttery smooth. At the same time, it gives the previous agent the opportunity to offer clear communication during transfers and the underlying cause of it. In both ways, it will enhance the customer experience and de-escalate situations.

In other words, tools like JustCall not only orchestrate smooth handoffs between agents but promise an impressive ROI to go with it!

Taran, as the Support Manager at JustCall, spearheads efforts to enhance customer satisfaction by strategically collaborating with client-facing teams. He upholds rigorous standards, ensuring JustCall's support services consistently excel. Passionate about superior customer experiences, Taran champions a company-wide dedication to a customer-first mindset.

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