Psychology and the Contact Center – How Using Behavioral Science Leads to Better Customer Service

Article from Virtual Hold Technology - visit them at http://www.virtualhold.com/ 

Understanding your customers is highly important when it comes to product development, marketing, and sales. Yet, it’s equally as important to get inside your customers’ minds to decipher their behaviors and determine what they need and want in terms of service. What a customer expects from a national healthcare system may be wildly different than what they want when they’re making a reservation from a luxury hotel chain.

While there are vast differences in customer service models by industry, service always plays a significant role in retaining customers, building brand awareness, and sustaining a loyal fan base. To better understand the customer perspective, a growing number of companies are using behavioral science as an analytical tool to develop customer service strategies and even to create more customer-friendly contact center infrastructures.

Applying Science to Service
Back in 2001, Richard B. Chase and Sriram Dasu published an article in the Harvard Business Review called “Want to Perfect Your Company’s Service? Use Behavioral Science.” In the study, how customers were made to feel from the interactions they had with service providers was closely evaluated. This was a ground-breaking look at customers through behavioral science principles. This article as well as a similar one published in 2010 by John DeVine and Keith Gilson in the McKinsey Quarterly have helped to guide contact center professionals to better understand their customers and adapt their processes and systems to improve the overall customer experience.

When it comes to behavioral analytics, perception equals reality. In other words, how a customer feels during an interaction will profoundly impact how they feel about a company as a whole. This ultimately impacts buying decisions and the level of loyalty. In other words, behavioral science helps clarify how customers think about the experiences they have and how they respond to them.

Processing Time
Behavioral scientists have proven that when individuals are focused on a task or distracted by something interesting, they will lose track of time. They have also shown that segmentation can make time seem slower. For example, a customer will perceive the time they spend on hold longer if there is silence or just music than if they were listening to a message that provided relevant information. The time spent on hold will also be perceived as longer if there are multiple periods of time on hold.

Currently, the average hold time in a contact center is just short of one minute. However, behavioral research suggests that 15 percent of callers will get frustrated enough at 40 seconds to hang up. By the one minute mark, nearly two-thirds will abandon the call. One third of these individuals will never call back. While you may think that a one minute hold time seems relatively short, it may be enough to tip the scales for your customers to move on to a competitor.

To help maintain customers’ focus for longer and to provide the perception of a shorter hold time, it’s important to provide clear recorded messages throughout the IVR system journey from the first greeting to the on-hold messages. In fact, an on-hold message that both entertains and provides product or service information can serve a dual purpose of keeping customers engaged as well as helping upsell and cross-sell. On-hold music that is aligned with customer demographics can also help prevent dreaded dropped calls. It’s also wise to eliminate multiple holds even if they are short in duration.

Creating Low-Effort Experiences
The number of either positive or negative incidents a customer experiences will also affect their overall experience. For example, making a caller go through a complicated IVR system to wait on hold in multiple queues will be perceived far more negatively than if the caller was placed into a single queue for the same amount of time before getting assistance. More than ever customers expect low-effort contact center experiences and will choose to buy from the businesses that are able to offer them.

Contact center solutions that integrate channels can provide more context on customer journeys to help reduce the process of navigating through complex IVR systems. As well, “direct-to-agent” routing can prevent much of the frustration for the customer by eliminating the need for multiple transfers to get to the right agent.

Creating Familiarity
Customers, like all humans, are creatures of habit. They become familiar with certain processes and will perceive changes as hassles, even if the intent of the change is to improve the customer experience. Thus, it’s important to carefully implement needed changes gradually so that the customer doesn’t feel overloaded and put out. This includes adding new channels, changing IVR prompts, updating scripts, or changing routing procedures. Advanced notice of any change is essential. Throughout the change, ongoing communication and assurance that the change will benefit the customer is a good idea.

Offering Choice
With more customers using multiple channels and choosing self-service options over assisted-service, it’s clear that empowerment breeds happiness. Customer satisfaction can be greatly improved by giving customers more choices and the ability to have some control over their experiences with the companies they choose to buy from. By building more options for customers to obtain the help they need for their issues, greater customer satisfaction, and improved brand loyalty can be achieved. Convenient options on digital channels, such as live chat, SMS, social media, mobile apps, and IVR self-service applications not only increase customer satisfaction, they can also reduce operating costs.

What about the Agents?
It would be impossible to overlook the role of agents in a discussion about customer service. Behavioral science can also be used to maximize the success of agents. This starts with using data to identify specific personality traits that would make candidates ideal employees. While there is no amount of data that can accurately predict the job performance of every new hire, it can help to choose a stronger, more predictable team. This data can be collected via a screening process that requires candidates to answer questions that help recruiters find candidates with the most successful personality traits.

Behavioral analytics can also help to determine strengths and weaknesses to better place agents into roles that are the strongest fit for them. With better fits comes higher performance and improved agent satisfaction. By hiring and placing the best people for specific roles, there can be measurable improvement to retention along with reduced hiring and training costs and improved contact center profitability.

Once hired, effective knowledge management and an integrated desktop can support agents in their day-to-day work by providing the level of efficiency and context they need to succeed. With the right information to effectively manage interactions, call handling times decrease and first-call resolutions increase. This is perceived as good service by customers who now expect businesses to value their time and provide personalized engagement.

Putting It All Together
All contact centers can improve their service capabilities by using the knowledge gathered from behavioral science to make targeted, strategic business, and process improvements. These changes often don’t require a large investment but rather require a collective decision to be transformative. The results can be substantial – increased customer satisfaction and loyalty combined with more sales and greater efficiency.

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