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In the post-pandemic world, customer experience management has become pivotal for retaining customers.
Buyers will only stay loyal to you if they get an exceptional experience.
A report underlines this trend where more than 30% of customers said they would give up on their beloved brand the moment they face a poor experience.
Sometimes, you may do everything right to inculcate the best customer experience, but things still go south. How?
There are some obvious culprits for this- dissatisfied agents, lack of proper call center software etc.
But the most dubious one is Dead Air.
We mention it separately because most firms never detect that this factor is causing them to lose business.
There are pretty high chances that Dead Air is responsible for customers not interacting with your business the way you would like.
Therefore in today’s blog, we tell you everything relevant about Dead Air with a deep focus on-
- Something in the air!- what does dead air mean?
- Nothing good comes out of dead air for customer experience management
- Why does dead air happen?
- How to resolve dead air and elevate customer experience?
Something in the Air!
In today’s time, customer experience management has a new nemesis: Dead Air !!
The origin of the term can be traced back to the olden days of radio transmission.
When seen in the context of handling customer experience in b2b companies, it gains a lot more relevance.
Dead air refers to the gap in a customer call where both the agents and the customer are not saying anything.
The most prominent reason for Dead Air’s occurrence is the lack of knowledge on the agent’s part.
When customer service cannot solve a unique query, they seek the correct response from additional resources. This leads to an avoidable occurrence of dead air.
Dead air can also occur because the call center uses obsolete contact center software that affects agents' response time.
Nothing Good Comes Out of Dead Air for Customer Experience Management
From the previous section, you might have gauged that dead air is detrimental to obtaining a unique customer management experience.
This is because customers expect a swift response to their queries. Instead, if they are greeted with an awkward silence, chances are they’ll not go through with the call.
It has several other disadvantages such as:
1. Reduces Client Trust
In a report, a healthy 70% of customers rated speedy and friendly service as prominent factors driving their purchases.
Dead air impacts exactly these two factors. The customer is not expecting a delay in response from your end. If the delay happens, the customer thinks you are not taking their grievances seriously.
2. Harms your Business Image
If instances of dead air occur out of the blue, your brand image is bound to reflect poorly on the customer.
The first conclusion the customer would draw is, “Hey, this company doesn’t know how to address my query. Let’s find someone else.”
In a matter of seconds, a customer would land up with your competitor. All because you didn’t take measures to curtail dead air.
Why Does Dead Air Happen?
There’s not one single reason for dead air to occur. It usually happens due to a combination of two or more reasons and can be pretty hard to detect for managers.
The best protocol in this scenario is to limit its occurrence by using robust customer experience management tools.
We list some of the decisive factors that often aggravate the occurrence of dead air.
1. Improper Training of Customer Service Reps
If you don’t have a proper call center coaching framework, there’s a high chance of dead air.
Proper training instructs agents on how to handle unique customer queries. Through mock calls and role play, they also learn how to utilize additional resources, knowledge banks, etc., to resolve grievances they don’t have an answer to.
2. Unique Customer Queries
Most of the inbound calls by customers revolve around standard queries that have a stipulated response.
But once in a blue moon, a customer might throw an unexpected grievance. Processing such instances can be tricky even for the top-performing agents.
Agents might not be able to follow the set procedures and in a hurry to assist the customer, might give way to dead air.
3. Out-of-Date Knowledge Bank
Knowledge banks are a strong ally for agents to nullify dead air occurrence.
But with frequent changes in call center trends, organizations might find it tough to update their knowledge bank and other resources.
An agent backed by an obsolete knowledge base is as good as one without any backing.
Your knowledge material is necessary not only for agents but also for customers. With outdated information, agents can’t assist customers properly.
Obsolete knowledge banks are also detrimental to an agent’s confidence and productivity.
4. Incapable Searching Option
While an obsolete knowledge base is a strict no-no, even updated knowledge banks can have their own set of issues.
Without a strong search option, the volume of information can become too much to handle. Agents won’t be able to correlate a customer’s query with the appropriate information, thus leading to dead time.
How to resolve dead air and elevate customer experience?
In today’s age, the top customer experience management platforms are realizing the downsides of dead air and are actively trying to remove it altogether.
The steps they follow are no rocket science- they focus on empowering agents by providing them with modern technical tools.
Below we discuss these points in detail.
1. Inform the customer
Dead air is a phenomenon that can’t be eradicated completely.
Rather than being caught unaware, a better approach would be to inform your customer about any unprecedented delay and request them to stay on the line.
This will showcase that your agents are proactively solving customer problems and have not left them in a lurch.
2. Invest in Agent Coaching
A well-equipped agent is a sure shot resolution to dead air. You can involve dead air mitigation in your call center training modules.
You can help agents learn great communication and technical skills to make them more confident while dealing with unique customer queries.
AI-backed platforms help you deeply analyze an agent’s performance and detect the occurrence of dead time. You can use this analysis to help agents work on their weak areas.
3. Make Dead Air Work for You
Dead air doesn’t need to be a period of anxiety. You can use that gap to promote your business offerings, inform customers about new campaigns etc.
You can also use automated messages to inform customers about progress made around the resolution of their queries.
Remember, you don’t want customers to be clueless about why there is unwarranted silence from your end. Keep them in the loop to avoid a bad experience.
Dead Air might seem like a small thing in itself, but it can significantly impact how your customers view your business.
If your agents are well trained and confident and your knowledge base is up to date, there is no reason why dead air would impact you.
However, training agents and updating the knowledge base are easier said than done. Without a capable customer experience management software, you can’t aim to develop a wholesome customer-agent relationship.
Convin is a conversational intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to detect how your agents respond to a customer query.
Managers don’t have to listen to each call recording completely; they can conduct analysis swiftly only on customer parameters completed on the call.
These are just glimpses of the exciting features convin offers you. For a more detailed picture, why don’t you visit us?
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