This blog is the first part of a series that will focus on behavioral economics and how research about human behavior and biases affect customers and employees in a call center context.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
As leaders, you want to know about barriers and inefficient policies and processes that keep your reps from delivering the kind of customer service you know your customers demand. And so, you ask your reps open-ended questions to uncover these barriers, keep suggestion boxes available, and hold monthly breakfasts/lunches to give your reps multiple opportunities to share their thoughts.
But more often than not, you get feedback that is not relevant to the majority of the rest of your reps or is too expensive to change; it can be difficult to identify the hurdles that cause the most pain for your customers and reps, and that are also easiest and least costly to remove.
According to Availability Bias, this happens because your reps are more likely to recall a recent incident with an angry customer and the process that stood in her way than a policy or process that she may face often, but one that she doesn’t give much attention to since she deals with it on a regular basis.
Availability Bias is a phenomenon that was first studied by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman (mostly regarded as pioneers of the behavioral economics field). It is a tendency for people to recall events and memories that are unusual, recent, or emotionally-charged, and therefore more readily accessible. It is basically a mental shortcut that your brain takes to make fast judgments. It is the same bias that encourages people to buy lottery tickets and irrationally fear shark attacks.
So instead of openly asking reps about barriers to serving customers, one FS company introduces a “Capture the No’s” initiative that asks reps to document every instance in which they must tell a customer “no” due to company policy. This allows leaders to quickly and systematically surface barriers that stand in reps’ way.
The “Capture the No’s” initiative allows the company to compile a list of barriers that has the most direct impact on customers (and not folly to a rep’s memory or most recent interaction) and is objective (and not influenced by a rep’s biases, assumptions, or emotions). In effect, “Capture the No’s” overcomes the Availability Bias.
As a result, the company achieves 26 policy improvements within a year and improves customer satisfaction by 17%. Furthermore, the process sacrifices very little time in the reps’ workflow and requires little to no training.
Behavioral Economics can help people better understand why and how people make decisions, and the biases that influence those decisions. Next time, we’ll learn about another bias that impacts call centers, and the steps you can take to overcome them.
How do you uncover barriers that stand in reps’ way?
CEB Customer Contact Resources:
“Capturing the No’s” to Surface Customer Dissatisfiers
Eliminating Policy Frustration by Capturing the “No’s”
