What We’ve Learned About Human Connection – Customer Service Lessons

Seamless Human Response. We’ve been talking about this at Contact One for years. It’s the reason we exist.

But this year, we’ve also seen how important human connection is.

Throughout this pandemic, and especially as we go into the holiday season, we’ve been grateful to be in the business of connecting people to people.

Here’s what we’ve learned about human connection through our 40 years in the customer service business. We hope some of these tips will help you in your business, as they have in ours.

Most people just want to be heard and understood.

Angry, irate, unreasonable customers – they’re a reality in every business. But most of the time they just want someone to hear their complaint and acknowledge it. There’s a workable solution to 99% of customer complaints, but the only way to get there is to begin with someone listening to the customer and acknowledging their dissatisfaction. Chatbots, text messages, and email won’t help here. Human-to-human voice or video contact is the best way to make an unhappy customer happy.

Tone matters.

Most people can’t correctly interpret tone in written word, especially in emails (though emojis can help). The best way to convey the appropriate tone is by direct phone, video, or in-person interaction.

Talking on the phone is a skill that takes practice.

Many people are uncomfortable talking on the phone these days, so they move to other, less direct ways of communicating – text, email, chat. But, as noted in tips one and two, human-to-human contact is often the best way to be understood, so developing phone skills is critical to good business. We pride ourselves on training our agents to be expert phone conversationalists. Plus they get hours and hours of practice, which is the most important part of skill development.

Technology changes, but people are still people.

Our company has adapted so many times over the years to keep pace with technology. It’s mind-blowing to consider the pace of change over the last 40 years. From cell phones to VoIP, to the widespread use of email and then chat services and texting, we’ve stretched and grown to meet customer needs. But the need that has never changed is the need for human connection.

In 2020, just like in 1980, people still want to speak to other people when they have a problem.

That hasn’t changed, and our guess is that it won’t.

Happy holidays,

Jeff

Press 0 for a representative… maybe

I called my bank recently and found that they, like many companies these days, had changed their phone directory so that dialing zero doesn’t immediately send you to customer service. My need didn’t fit into a clearly defined service option, and pressing zero did nothing, so I listened to the automated message a few times and picked the option I thought was most likely to get me to a live human.

The Importance of Speaking to a Representative

(Pro tip – If you need to speak with a human and you can’t get past the automated system, dialing the sales team is a sure-fire way of reaching a person who can then connect you to the correct department.)

Being unable to reach a real person when I just had a quick question was highly annoying. And I thought about the general state of customer service communication these days.

We have found more and more ways to avoid direct conversation with the companies we buy from. We love the ability to email support, leave comments on Facebook for the customer service team, use the website chatbots, and even text about our orders.

But nothing angers us more than being unable to reach a real person when we have a need.

It’s easier to use these tools than to pick up the phone…  until we have a real problem, a real hurry, or a real need.

And then the fastest way to solve a real problem is to reach a real person.

This becomes clear anytime you have to listen through an automated menu before reaching a human, like I did with my bank.

Technology helps us do wonderful things.

Our Services

Our team at Contact One does a lot of non-spoken communication for clients. We offer chat service, email support, and online scheduling, but we’re also there when people want to speak to a human.

It isn’t enough to add chat features and email support if customers can’t be helped by a real person when they need it.

A chatbot can’t de-escalate a frustrated customer, and an automated phone system does nothing but further inconvenience an already pressed for time caller.

Are all of the other technological tools supportive of an excellent customer experience? Yes, of course.

But as long as people are people, a human on the other end of the phone will always be the most critical component of customer service.

Cheers,

Jeff