Customer Service Issues Critical Thinking Examples

Excellent communication is the key in achieving success in any field of business, especially in the line of business process outsourcing or BPO. The working environment in these companies is more diverse, stressful and challenging. Every day, many customers call their company’s contact centers to report a specific problem they encounter. Many foreign companies seek new ways of lowering their labor costs by investing in other countries with lower currencies such as China, Mexico, Philippines and India. As we move on to this paper, I will enumerate the seven reasons of the customers’ difficulty in relaying their technical issues. As I have mentioned earlier, the trend of employee outsourcing has been popular with most international companies, mainly to seek out new corporate partners and to lessen their labor costs. This issue falls under the communication category; the company, in order to satisfy their customers, must implement quality training for the job as well as the exposure to the different level of accents for them to be familiarized. Second, customers tend to have difficulty in relaying their concerns because they have limited knowledge with the product. Again, this issue is under the customer service skills/technical skills, since the agent or representative of the company must be knowledgeable enough to solve the customers’ issues by doing basic troubleshooting steps via phone or by sending a technician straight to their homes. Moreover, all customers who have experienced a delay or bad level of service will have an aggressive or irate behavior towards the employees of the company, simply as means of telling the organization that the service is not satisfactory. This third reason will fall on both customer service skills (call handling) and agent’s self-control over their emotions. Out of the blue, customers’ tend to lash on agents to express their annoyance over the service. Likewise, the best strategy for this is to keep the emotions’ in check and build the customers’ confidence on the product. Fourth reason is that, sometimes elderly people who have been in the company for long needs personal assistance and priority to keep their services working. Although, a representative can help the senior citizens in basic troubleshooting, the technical jargons will prove more difficult for them to understand what the agent means and often, service disruption occurs due to improper troubleshooting steps. The best strategy for this issue is to probe the customer the main issue of her problem and ask them if they have someone, perhaps a family member who can assist them in doing the troubleshooting steps. Aside from this, another reason for the customer to experience difficulty in elaborating his concern lies on the agent themselves. Due to stress, agents became less courteous and helpful towards the customers and eventually leads the customers to become aggressive or worse service cancellations. Proper agent trainings should be made as well as proper coaching and constant call monitoring will be the prime option. Honesty also plays a very important role in an agent-customer relationship because this is where the company establishes their reputation by proper customer education by engaging customers in the light, conversational talk (building rapport). Lastly, the seventh reason will be the disabled persons who called to report an emergency or service failure. These persons needs the help of other to assist them in troubleshooting with the technician. These issues should be properly addressed by building rapport, whilst helping the customer attend fix their issues through troubleshooting steps and reassurance. The main point that I wanted to argue on this is that, since the BPO industry has become a booming trend on today’s business, valuing customer loyalty should not be sacrificed to lower the labor costs.