Walk into any customer-service department and you’re likely to encounter a scene that looks more like a factory floor than a knowledge-worker environment. In almost every company around the world, the contact center typically features row upon row of workstations, with reps at each station—headsets on and heads down—going through the same scripted, robotic interactions with each and every customer. While posters on the wall might exhort reps to “be themselves” and “let their personalities shine through,” the organization does all it can to actively prohibit such behavior, seeking instead to eliminate variance from one service interaction to the next. Calls are recorded and reps are ultimately evaluated on their ability to hit a prescribed set of quality checklist items—for instance, whether they used the customer’s name to build rapport, thanked the customer for being loyal, used an approved greeting and sign-off and, above all, whether they said anything factually incorrect about policies, products or services that could land the company in hot water.
Customer Service Reps Work Best When They Work Together, But Only 12% of Companies Let Them
In almost every company, the contact center typically features row upon row of workstations, with reps at each station—headsets on and heads down—going through the same scripted, robotic interactions with each and every customer. This is a big mistake. In a global study of more than 7,500 service reps from across 38 different companies, CEB found that service organizations that this type of management approach doesn’t just lead to lower-quality service interactions, but it’s more likely to increase errors than to reduce them. It turns out that the best way to improve performance and minimize risk isn’t to tightly manage reps, but instead to liberate them to engage with one another and share both best practices and lessons learned in handling customer service requests.