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It may seem like common sense, but calling a customer back if the call is disconnected is not a common practice in call centers. Usually, if a call is dropped, it is a good thing that lets the particular representative move on to the next call. Obviously, that isn’t how it should be.
The procedure for calling customers back may vary slightly in larger call centers, but outbound dialing is frequently enabled in smaller call centers. In small call centers, agents frequently have the ability to make calls to customers and can do rather easily. Most call centers look up customer information at one point during the call and a lot of them have caller ID to make the process of calling customers back even easier.
Calling customers back isn’t complicated. It is an easy procedure to standardize and is technologically feasible in most call centers. And, it can make a gigantic difference in the customer service experience. Besides having to avoid the hassles of calling back and waiting again, customers who receive a call back if disconnected have the opportunity to continue to work with the same representative to resolve their issue.
On the representative side, it probably takes less time for a representative to call a customer back than it does for a customer to call back, go over the entire issue with a new agent, and hopefully pick up where that customer was at before he or she was disconnected. The fewer people involved in resolving the issue, the less chance of someone overwriting someone’s work or misunderstanding what was done already.
The main disadvantage to not calling a customer back after he or she is disconnected is not well founded. If the disadvantage is that calling a customer back takes the representative off the phone for that time and doesn’t let that representative work with other customers, it is ridiculous. The representative would have been on the phone anyway. Customer service departments that care about their customers should not depend on unreliable cell phones or careless agents who may hang up on a customer accidentally to keep their call times down.
So the next time you are disconnected or you hear about a representative being disconnected from a call for one reason or another, call the customer back. It is almost sure to save time, hassle, and aggravation.
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