Four Tips for Indian Contact Centers Serving the US and Canada

Four customer service tips can help India-based contact centers support customers in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia more effectively.

If you operate or manage a contact center in India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh that serves English-speaking countries of the former British empire, you will find that this article offers some frank but perhaps politically insensitive ideas that could help you improve customer satisfaction for your business.

Even if you’re a two-person company, these tips can help you start your call center with nothing more than a toll free telephone number and a great customer service plan.

1. Use Your Real Name

US, Canadian, and Australian consumers and business owners are surprised to hear Suresh in the Nagpur call center say “Hi, this is “Larry”, how can I help you?”. It’s just awkward. If your name is Sadeka, Anil, Sreechand, Lakshmi, Satish, or Akbar, that’s the name you should use on the phone. You can blame the English, but most English-speaking customers like it simple.

Yes, blame the English. The sun never sets on what’s left of the old British Empire, and all the countries of the old empire have English speakers. At the same time, each country also has many residents from India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, among other nations. The customers you support in the countries of the old British empire know a neighbor or someone at work with your name, so it’s easier just to use your real name. Using a short form like “Ravi” could be a good idea for first names from any country. That’s partly how “Robert” becomes “Bob”.

2. Provide a Scope Up Front

The greatest annoyance of all is explaining your complete problem to someone who really only needs to hear a small bit of it in order to route the call to someone who can actually help. So, before you, the customer service representative, start taking information on the phone, take 30 seconds to explain your scope of work – what you can do for the customer.

This doesn’t have to be tedious. Something like this short introduction can save everyone time.

Hi this is Ramana in Customer Support. I can help you with billing, account, and login questions. If you are having trouble with the API or the new toolkit, I’ll be transferring your call to our technical specialist.

Of course, if your company uses toll free numbers, you can let the customer self-select by either assigning a separate number for customer billing and account support and another to technical support. But in any case, setting the scope up front in the call will make the whole experience better.

3. Get a Context First

Nothing annoys customers more than having to recite a lengthy service problem history over and over. Sometimes, as a customer, I have to re-tell the same sad story to each of several call center staff members on a single call, or to each person who answers when I have to call several times.

It’s a much better experience for me, the customer, when the call begins like this:

Hi this is Suraya. Your customer account records show that Aamir was helping you with a problem setting the MTU for your wireless device so that it would work with your Netgear WAP. Are you still having that problem?

Now I’m delighted that we’ve come right to the problem, and that we know Aamir was working the problem with me. What a time saver!

Success at setting the context depends on having a working CRM, having virtual extensions so that calls can be routed to the most qualified technical resource, and having a commitment to working with customers this way.

4. Know Your Stuff

A customer once called support for a bookkeeping software package and asked if the customer could keep the data file on a network server. It’s a single user database, and only one user can access the file at a time. The customer just wanted access to the data file when the bookkeeper was on vacation.

The call center staff member who took the call was apparently a trainee who was not being monitored. The question was asked “Can we put this file on a network server without problems?”

The trainee checked with a supervisor and reported this amazing response, which left the customer in polite disbelief:

My supervisor told me that files sent over a network are broken up into little packets, so it’s probably a bad idea to have your file on a network server.

Every call center needs to train new team members, but in this case, monitoring might have helped. A little more basic product and network training would have helped as well.

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