Tips For Managing a High-Volume Caller
Have you ever come across a high-volume caller? Some customers would do anything to avoid calling a customer service center. Then, there is a high-volume caller. These are clients who see calling you as the best and only option to solve their problems or answer their questions. In this article, you will find out how to deal with a high-volume caller and how this can affect your business.
What Is a High-Volume Caller?
A high-volume caller refers to a customer who calls your business notably more than the average customer. These customers constantly contact your team for product or service assistance, reoccurring, or unresolved issues.
What High-Volume Callers Indicate About Your Business
A high-volume calles may indicate that customers trust your brand and your service team so much that they prefer interacting directly to get problems resolved. Smaller or dedicated customer account service teams build relationships with clients which allows them to feel they can contact you for assistance and even simply for guidance.
High-volume callers are, however, not generally a good sign for your business. A high-volume caller usually contacts your business in excess because they are not happy with the product or service. They may have problems using the product or service. Sometimes it can be due to a problem in your administration process preventing the client from achieving the service outcome.
Rather than trouble-shooting and finding answers online, high-volume callers keep calling your customer service team until their problem is completely resolved. This can make customers feel like they are going down a rabbit hole to chase solutions. Ultimately this will reflect poorly on the business with a low customer experience rating and customer loss in the long-run.
How Reducing High-Volume Callers Can Affect Your Business
If you are experiencing an increase in high-volume callers due to unresolved issues and troubleshooting problems, your customer service team will be largely occupied attending to these clients. By reducing the amount of high-volume callers you can free up your customer service teams to attend to more pressing issues and solve matters more efficiently.
Your team will also be able to focus on sales, up-selling, and customer retention rather than doing damage control. This will reduce business expenses, ease demands on service teams, increase customer satisfaction, and improve customer retention.
How to Reduce High-Volume Callers
To reduce high-volume callers it is important to understand why customers are contacting your business. Assign a team of people dedicated to listening to calls and identifying the main reasons for the interactions. Once the reasons have been identified the underlying issues can be addressed. Solutions can be put into place to eliminate or fast-track queries.
You will need to find out whether these queries are because:
- Your self-help service is too complicated
- Information on your website is incorrect, or
- There is a service delivery failure
Example
Consider a large number of calls are being received from customers who need assistance changing contact details on their account with your business. To resolve this you can:
- Add a clear indication of “How to update your details” on your website’s Home page.
- Implement an Interactive Voice Response on your company answering system. This means the customer can get the information they need without having to wait for a consultant. They can then hang up immediately after they obtain the needed information on the voice response system. Your interactive voice response system can answer pressing questions immediately
Interactive Voice Response Example 1:
“Thank you for calling XYZ. If you are calling to change your account contact details, please log in to your account at www.xyz.com and click on ‘My Account Details”. Follow the prompts at the top of the page to make and confirm changes. Alternatively, hold for a customer service agent.”
Your answering system can also provide the customer with options.
Interactive Voice Response Example 2:
“Thank you for calling XYZ. If you are calling to change your account contact details, please press 1. If you need to cancel your account, please press 2. For details on how to upgrade your account, please press 3. Alternatively, hold for a customer service agent.”
How to Deal with a High-Volume Caller
Here are 4 tips to effectively support a high-volume caller.
1. Notify Your Customer Service Team
To reduce frequent calls from the same customer you may simply need to educate them on how to use the product or to leverage easily accessible support tools. Notify the client’s customer success manager about their high-volume call rates. The customer success manager can then offer the client access to training, user guides, chat support, and knowledge-based resources.
2. Provide a Personalized Onboarding Plan
If your customer support team is limited, offer new clients an onboarding program to guide them through your product or service when starting out. This will give them insight into the available support resources that can be referenced before contacting your support team.
3. Prioritize Phone Etiquette and Advocacy Language
It is easy for customers to get agitated when they need to contact your customer service team many times in a day, or even a week. Make sure customer queries are recorded and tracked to avoid repetition. This is especially important if the customer is dealing with a different service agent every time.
Use advocacy language when communicating with your client. This implies that you are working with them to solve the problem, as opposed to solving it independently from them.
For example, rather say;
“Let’s see what we can do,” as opposed to “I will see what I can get for you.”
This puts the customer service agent on the same side of the problem as the customer.
4. Use a Screenshare Tool
By using a screen share tool when dealing with customer issues, you can guide the customer to resolve the problem themselves by giving them instructions as if you were standing next to them. This allows you to ensure the customer is getting the issue resolved while teaching the customer to troubleshoot on their own.
Quick Summary
A high-volume caller is a customer who contacts your service team frequently, mostly via telephone, for product or service assistance.
To reduce high-volume callers:
- Determine the reason for high-volume calls
- Implement a strategy to avoid the recurring customer issues at hand e.g. Updating your website
- Simplify self-help tools for customers
- Identify weak points in your customer service pipeline and implement a strategy to deal effectively with inquiries on the first interaction
4 Tips to effectively support a high-volume caller:
- Notify your customer service team
- Provide a personalized onboarding plan
- Prioritize phone etiquette and advocacy language
- Use a screen share tool
By reducing the number of high-volume callers, your customer support team can spend their time attending to more serious issues. They can also focus on up-selling and customer retention. In the long run, this will provide you with improved customer satisfaction and most likely a happier workforce.
Other Resources:
CustomersFirst Academy offers comprehensive customer service training designed to help you grow your skills and advance your career.
To keep learning and developing your knowledge of customer service, we highly recommend the additional resources below:
Ace the Interview Question: “What Does Customer Service Mean to You?”
Top 10 Customer Service Rep Interview Questions
Ace Interview Question: “Do You Want To Tell Us Anything Else About You?”
How To Decline A Job Interview (FREE Templates Inside)
