By Garth Bevan
Good customer service is a crucial aspect of running a successful business. There are many different ways to ensure that customer service is improved upon consistently and that a good level is maintained. One area of customer interaction where you can make a significant improvement and have a big impact on your overall performance is to look at the way in which your customer service teams deal with call escalations when confronted with angry customers or those looking to make a complaint or request dialogue with a member of your management team. The best contact centres understand call escalation and how to implement a clear policy that keeps customers satisfied and the internal processes smooth and effective.
By implementing good call escalation policies that make sense to both your customers and your staff, your company can ensure that it retains customers for the long-haul. The best approach is to treat every single customer as the important person that they are. Think about how you act and feel as a disgruntled customer. If you call a company to make a complaint or to ask to speak to a member of management, it can be incredibly frustrating to find your pathway blocked or to feel like you are being ‘fobbed off’ or given unexplainable delays to an answer. All we ever want is clarity and honesty from the person we are speaking to.
Poor call escalation management can lead to huge problems for a company over a long period of time. If your customers find that their complaints are not being listened to, or that the outcome is unsatisfactory it can lead to a small compliant becoming a much larger problem. If you cannot look after your customers in a prompt and effective manner you are more likely to lose them as customers and as a result, potentially lost their recommendations and referrals to friends and family. Poor call escalation can lead to damage to your brand reputation, lower customer retention rates and harder challenges in finding new customers.
This is where professional call centre staff can be used for different customer challenges. They understand how to remain professional and optimistic at all times when speaking to customers about all manner of issues. They understand how and where to route calls when escalation is necessary and to ensure completion of complaints and an effective resolution within as short a timeframe as possible.
As a good leader of a company, you’ll learn the best ways to devise and implement call escalation policies that make a big difference to the processes internally that have to be completed, the performance level of your employees and the satisfaction that your customers feel. If you run a company that is fast approaching capacity or require some assistance from a specialist call centre with experience of dealing with call escalation and implementing processes that make a real difference to the success of a company. With support from experts in the field, your company can benefit from a clarity of purpose at times which can be awkward and lead to a loss of customers in the worst-case scenarios. A customer complaint can be a curse or a blessing, depending on how effective you are as a company in dealing with it.
