Can you please everyone all of the time?

Contact centres constantly interact with people from all walks of life. No matter what service you are offering, contact centre teams speak to a wide range of people every day of the week. All of those people will have their own preferences on how they like their queries to be answered.

So, how do you keep everyone happy and ensure that your service is always quality assured? Although you can’t please everyone all of the time, here we look at how to achieve the highest possible standards of customer service no matter who you are helping. This is in light of a study by Contact Babel, which looked at offering customer service in today’s society.

Where and when?

There is no escaping that we live in a technological era and that this extends to contact centres. So, picking up the phone is not the only way in which a business answers the questions of its customers.

The terms ‘multi-channel’ and ‘omni-channel’ are often part of any discussion or literature about contact centres or customer experience for a reason. People are using and expecting contact centres to be able to offer options including web chat, WhatsApp, email and social media to answer their queries.

The age of the person who has the query is one influencing factor on how and when they choose to reach out to you. The millennial lifestyle does not operate solely during office hours. Those aged between 17 and 34 years old, which the Contact Babel study defines as millennials, crave flexibility in all areas of their lives. So, it’s little surprise that millennials consider 24/7 availability to be the most important factor in customer service. This is even ranked above getting their issue resolved the first time.

In comparison, the most important factor for those aged 65 years and older was that the contact centres were UK-based. This was only an important factor for 33% of millennials.

Age is not just a number

However, the different age groups do agree on some factors. We agree with them too.

49% of millennials and 68% of people aged 65 years and older both wanted to speak to an actual person rather than use an automated service, even if the outcome is exactly the same. Millennials are more willing to try it out at 29% but only 9% of those over 65 years old would be happy to use an automated service.

This does change a little depending on the type of query. For example, 48% of people aged 65 years and over and 47% of millennials would be happy to check a website for a high urgency enquiry, such as a flight time. But for more complex enquires, such as filling in a tax form, they would rather pick up the phone and speak to someone than use social media or a website.

Overall, millennials are much less willing to pick up the phone and speak to someone in a contact centre to resolve a problem than the older generations are. This makes perfect sense. Millennials are the ‘plugged in’ generation. They speak to their friends and family through messaging apps or email – so why should a company or a service provider be any different?

Moving forward

In summary, one principle is universal – good service needs to reign supreme. No matter how the customer reaches out to you, it needs to be pitched perfectly. This is especially given the fact that more customers are picking up the phone to speak to someone in a contact centre after they have exhausted all other avenues or to handle complex enquiries.

At BPA Quality the quality monitoring services we provide for our clients combined with our experience of delivering customer experience  ensure that your service is always with a smile. Find out more about our philosophy here.