In the telecommunications industry, poor customer experience is a deal breaker in the relationship between enterprises and their customers. But, it is no easy feat for contact center managers to ensure meaningful and purposeful customer interactions each and every time. With calls, messages and emails going back and forth about service offerings, new plans, network usages, etc, things can get heated between the customer and contact centers in the telecommunications industry.

While customer-first strategies are sound ideas, dealing with customer issues is just half of the solution. It is also essential that contact center managers focus on proactively overcoming challenges to keep the contact center up and running while showing customers some love.

Here are five challenges that contact center managers can face while driving exceptional customer experience in the telecom space:

Choosing the right agent for the job

One wrong move by an agent can risk losing a high valued customer. Whether providing monthly billing reports or dealing with escalations, the customer expects them to understand the problem without partaking in more than one conversation. This calls for trained agents who have both knowledge and experience to handle complex customer service issues.

Contact center managers should be able to create a workflow that agents and other teams can work around while playing to the strengths of the agents. They also need to provide the right platforms of training to agents for improving their customer service skills to perform better and handle situations better.

Reputation management

Social media drives our lives. It has become our daily newspaper. Often, we see customers sharing tales of things going wrong in their interaction with customer service agents. And one mistake can break the reputation of a service provider.

On this account, contact center managers need to identify technology and social media savvy agents who can quickly resolve customer complaints, beyond the traditional channels of communication.

First Call Resolution

In the exchange between an agent and customer, it usually takes about two or three interactions to address and solve an issue on the excess use of mobile data. But as customers, these problems should be addressed and rectified immediately.

In order to achieve First Call Resolution, contact center managers need to identify areas of improvement through critical metrics. These metrics will help investigate particular problems areas and categorize areas of training for agents with access to the information they need to give customers the answers they need.

Proactive warnings

Customers would like to communicate anytime and anywhere in today’s connected world. But there are times during seasonal or untimely spikes when customers reach out to contact centers to solve issues like excessive call dropping or loss in internet access.

Contact center managers should invest in technologies that can predict these sudden downtimes and communicate with customers through SMS blasts to maintain customer satisfaction levels. These warning messages can also include data usage alerts. To solve this issue, the enterprise can proactively reach out to customers and inform them of plans that can suit their needs better.

Efficiency in operations

When a customer reaches out to a contact center they might be put on hold due to increase in the number of interactions that agents are handling. Contact centers managers should be able to predict the number of agents available in a shift duration.

They should be able to have enough agents to handle interactions. This can be done by creating a mix of experienced, shared and dedicated agents who can be pitch in during understaffed points.

All of these challenges may be easier said than done but for contact center managers this goes a long way in improving customer retention, customer acquisition, and customer satisfaction scores.