Ditch the Scripts. Survey Shows Customers Want the Human Touch!

We’ve all had bad days when nothing seems to be going right. Your flight is delayed after you already arrived at the airport. You dropped your phone in the toilet. Your bank account is overdrawn so your debit card won’t work.

And usually, it happens on the same day.

Been there.

While our first instinct is to crawl back in bed and curl up in the fetal position, most of us, even at our lowest point, can find it within ourselves to take charge of the situation. We pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and resolve to fix the problems.

Armed with determination, we search for the nearest phone or computer and contact a customer service agent for help.

Well, let me tell you, there’s nothing more disheartening than reaching out to a human being for sympathy, only to be left waiting for ages, shuffled from department to department or “handled” with a scripted response.

It can make even the most hardened consumer want to break down and cry.

For years, customers have been treated more like ticket numbers than human beings. As automation has taken over, a very vital step in the customer service process has been lost. The human touch.

In the blog, What Customers Really Think About Your Call Center Script by Craig Borowski, call center industry advisor Gail Goodman explains, “It’s that kind of stiff, robotic, ‘I have been told to say this and I’m going to say it’ behavior that just makes the angry, unsatisfied or frustrated customer go off the deep end.”

Especially on a bad day.

But now the tables are turning. Customers have had enough. They’re demanding that companies ditch the scripts and start really listening to their problems and treating them like human beings.

In a survey by Software Advice, 69% of those polled said it would improve their customer experience if they felt like agents were more natural.

They also said that hearing “Please” and “Thank You” made agents seem more respectful and felt more sincere than other techniques such as using their name frequently or saying they understand how the customer feels.

Which of the following makes you feel like a customer service agent really cares about your call?

Whether on the phone, on social media or on a mobile app, customers want to FEEL like they have a connection with the agent and that the agent actually cares about solving their problems.

They don’t care about quotas, protocols or scripts. From the time they connect with a customer service agent on ANY channel, they want the focus to be on them and finding a quick resolution to their problem.

“Today’s connected customer expects the conversation to be 100% about them and 0% about you,” said Jason Falls, SVP Digital Strategy at Elasticity PR during a recent Sparkcentral Customer Experience Summit.

“If we go the extra mile, we can use the power in the consumer’s hand to our advantage,” he said. “We can learn how to be proactive and really listen to what’s going on with the customer so we can surprise and delight them by going out of our way to resolve their problem while engaging with them in a very human way.”

Customer service agents don’t want to go to work every day and behave like robots, any more than customers want to interact with robots.

By providing guidelines and training, companies can empower agents to answer more difficult questions in a natural, uninterrupted way and relate to customers like human beings with feelings and struggles just like them.

Everyone has bad days now and then, and customers will remember the brands who lent a helping hand when they needed it most and turned their bad day into a positive experience.

Graph courtesy of Software Advice Survey

Ditch the Scripts. Survey Shows Customers Want the Human Touch!