I’ll admit it. I’m a pretty bad customer. I’m the sort of customer that gets frustrated so easily that by the time I call, I’ll often ask to be escalated within 30 seconds of speaking to the frontline rep. Fortunately for all of you, most of your customers are probably less cranky than me and don’t need to be escalated every time they call in. And we’re seeing a number of companies do some pretty interesting things to avoid unnecessarily escalating their customers.
We’ve recently released a new white paper on how to manage the call escalation process. Of course, the biggest area of opportunity for many organizations is to actually decrease the number of calls that get escalated. We’ve identified a number of steps that organizations are taking to improve their frontline staff’s ability to resolve an issue without need for escalation, such as:
- Allowing frontline staff to grant the same ‘exceptions’ as the escalation team
- Establishing an internal help line so frontline reps can get additional information or support without having to transfer the customer
We’ve also seen organizations systemically identify the causes of escalated calls and come up with solutions to make sure that similar calls do not get escalated in the future. This involves:
- Understanding what triggers an escalation
- Classifying those triggers as avoidable or unavoidable
- Addressing the underlying reasons for those avoidable triggers through coaching, training, or policy/process improvement.
All of this supplements a great case study we published a few years back from Home Depot Supply about how to identify which issues reps should and should not be able to handle without escalation and how to communicate that with them.
Of course, no matter how hard the rep or company try, some calls will almost inevitably require an escalation, so we’ve also included some tips on how to route escalated calls, how to transfer the call, and how to staff the escalation team. What we’ve found here is that there’s actually a surprising amount of variation in how companies handle those calls that do get escalated–it’s not all just warm transferring the call to a more senior or tenured agent. Instead, it’s all about recognizing what is needed to ensure that the customer’s issue gets resolved after that transfer and making sure that your escalation process makes that possible.
Take a look at the white paper and let us know if you have any additional experiences with designing escalation management processes or minimizing the number of calls that do get escalated.