Your Call Center Agents Don't Know their Roles; 5 Reasons It's Your Fault

I know the customer service process is not perfect. I know that when I call a contact center, I will likely have to wait on hold. I know that once I begin explaining my issue, I will likely be transferred to a "specialist" that requires me to repeat everything I told the previous agent. I know that, even in an omni-channel world, some businesses will refuse to resolve certain issues in chat or social media.

Make no mistake. If your business is guilty of imposing any of the aforementioned burdens on customers, it is failing. It is not a customer-centric business, and it needs to remedy that reality immediately.

But as a jaded customer, I have learned that in the business world, immediately means eventually. And so I am left hoping that someday, somehow businesses will actually take their vows to prioritize customer service seriously.

While this jaded perspective makes me tolerate shortcomings in the process, my threshold for poor customer experiences can only be pushed so far. There are certain failures that I simply refuse to accept.

One of them is the requirement that I, the customer, tutor a customer service representative on the nature of his job.

As Call Center IQ readers know, I have run into my fair share of bad customer service agents and endured my fair share of bad customer service interactions. And when thinking about what spurred so much of my frustration, I realized that it was not simply the business’ failure to give me what I wanted. It was the agent’s failure to comprehend that he was supposed to be giving me what I wanted.

Instead of simply telling the agent what went wrong, what I needed to make it right and waiting for him to do so, I have wasted countless hours informing agents of their duties as call center agents.

And the saddest part is not that I, the customer, am coaching the customer service representatives but that in order to do so, I need to start at the very beginning. Concepts like "this call is not successful until the customer is satisfied" are somehow foreign to these trained call center representatives.

Businesses can blame individual hires for poor people skills, weak call documentation and inefficient call handle times, but the blame for agents not knowing what they are supposed to be doing lies with the business itself. The business—and its leaders—have clearly been populating training sessions with misinformation.

Below are five ways business leaders are steering agents in the wrong direction. If any of these echo the content of your training sessions, revise that training immediately (real immediately, not eventually immediately):

1. You told agents that you are their boss.

A common trait among clueless call center agents is the misconception that their supervisor is their boss.

When it comes to customer service, a supervisor can be a mentor, a trusted advisor or a sounding board. He is not, however, the agents’ boss.

The true boss is the customer. It is his favor that the agent must be currying, and it is his wrath that the agent should fear.

When putting forth the excuse that he had to do what his boss told him, the agent better be telling his supervisor why he had to ditch the script in order to satisfy the customer. If he is playing the "boss card" to say no to a customer, he does not understand his job as a customer service agent.

The beauty of the customer service landscape is that what is good for the customer is what is good for the business. As such, by doing what his true boss (the customer) wants, the agent is doing what his organizational boss (the supervisor) needs.

2. You are incentivizing the wrong behavior.

As noted, what is good for the customer is what is good for the business. If an agent breaks protocol and introduces a creative, outside-the-box solution for a customer, he should be rewarded.

Many leaders discourage such behavior. Instead of celebrating creativity and proactivity, they celebrate order, adherence to code and blind acceptance of the notion that internal doctrine governs all. If an agent veers from script and policy to satisfy customers, he is being insubordinate. He is not doing his job.

Such leaders need to buy themselves the beginnings of a clue because the job of a customer service agent is not to follow corporate order or repeatedly read from a script. It is to satisfy customers.

3. You introduced the corporate "policy" as a set of rules

Because no business can know exactly what every conceivable customer will conceivably demand, all corporate "policies" must remain open to revision. When an unexpected customer issue or expectation arises, any valid policy will be flexible enough to accommodate that scenario.

Remember, policies are not reasons for saying no to customers but guidelines for saying yes. When used as tools for helping agents quickly resolve common issues, they can be very effective. But when imposed on agents as rules they must follow, they are destructive. They cripple the agent’s ability to satisfy specific customers in the short-term and send the message that internal policy trumps the voice of the customer in the long run.

If a call center agent believes following policy should come at the expense of satisfying a customer, he is not doing his job correctly.

4. You gave them the wrong job description

In a recent nightmare of a customer service interaction, I was disconnected from a call after spending twenty minutes on hold and another fifteen reaching the near conclusion of my transaction with a live phone agent.

Unable to senselessly devote another 35 minutes to the call, I connected via live chat—which had no wait time—and asked if I could either be directly connected to the agent OR have my transaction finalized in the chat platform.

Her response? "No, I’m an online customer service representative. I cannot give you a direct number or assist you with this transaction. I can only give you the main customer service line."

In an omni-channel world, there is no such thing as an online customer service representative. There are only customer service representatives.

Today’s customers do not think in terms of channels. They do not say, "My phone broke – classic chat customer service issue…My cable is out – man, an email support issue again?!" They think, "I have an issue, and I need help!" They will contact support through a given, preferred channel, but they will not define their issue by the selected support channel.

Since businesses must mirror their customers, they must approach the issue in the same way. They must assure that every agent—no matter the channel in which he most notably interacts—views himself as a customer service agent with the priority of serving the customer.

If a live chat agent thinks the fact that I previously contacted phone support makes me a different kind of customer than the people who first contacted him via live chat, he does not understand his job.

5. You don’t include them in big picture discussions

Let’s face it: stakeholders might claim they put the customer above all, but they also care about money. No matter how altruistic their rhetoric, they will never shake their concern for cost. And, even if they understand the long-term benefits of doing so, a part of them will shudder at the thought of enduring significant, unexpected short-term costs in the name of customer satisfaction.

But they are business leaders for a reason: they understand business. As such, they know to weigh the pros against the cons of going off script; they know that they must eat some punches to win the championship.

They need to include agents in that decision-making.

Knowing that cost-consciousness is the default mindset for business leaders, agents, when lacking further direction, will operate in accordance with that philosophy. They will assume saying no to costly customer demands is what their business wants. Even if they know it makes sense to appease costly customers, they do not feel empowered enough to make such a strategic decision.

By looping agents into the big picture strategy of the business—rather than the mere tasks—leaders will give them confidence to make decisions that create long-term benefit. They will clue agents into big picture objectives and provide de facto authority to engage in behavior that helps best achieve those objectives.