Call Center Myth Busting #3: How a Reliable Barista and a Prepared CSR Can Improve Your Online Business

By Janet Jaiswal, Sr. Director of Product Marketing —

A lot of jobs go underappreciated. Here's one—the barista that serves up my triple grande caramel macchiato with skim milk each morning. And while you might think the only thing a barista can grow is your waist line, I'm here to say that role makes a vital contribution to business productivity as well. That latte improves my mood and makes me a calmer person when dealing with fire drills at the office. It also gives me enough energy to get through a hectic morning.

My point is, the little things can make all the difference.

So if a barista can have such a dramatic effect on productivity, think about how much your call center agents can do for your online business if they're equipped with the right tools, training and knowledge.



Here's a scenario to illustrate the point.

Say you're a financial services firm and one of your customer service representatives receives a call from a customer who's having trouble transferring money into his brokerage account. The CSR uses Tealeaf to review the customer's browsing session—what that customer saw and did, the values he entered into form fields, etc. That means there's no need to use the customer as a troubleshooting tool by asking a bunch of questions. Because the CSR is able to quickly understand the website issue that prevented the transfer from going through, she completes the transaction on the customer's behalf and ends the call. However, the real problem hasn't yet been resolved, as the CSR realizes that this is the third call she's received that day about the same issue. And chances are that many more customers have been affected by the same website issue—not just the ones that took the trouble to call in.

So the CSR annotates the customer's web session with notes from the call and passes that session to the Web team responsible for maintaining the site. The problem is quickly solved for good.

Think of all the benefits:

• You've got more satisfied and loyal customers.
• You've reduced the time to find and fix online issues. In fact, on average, Tealeaf customers see a 60%+ reduction in IT and development costs associated with problem reproduction and resolution.
• You are able to resolve issues before they reach a critical level or impact more customers.
• Your firm has improved the efficiency of its operations and cross-organizational communications through an enhanced workflow and automated escalation process.

Still think that CSRs aren't capable of helping your online business? Arm them with the right tools and see how much better your online presence can be. And who knows, you might just gain more appreciation for your neighborhood barista as well.

Got a story you can share about how your call center helps improve your online channels?