What’s wrong with the “shared” customer service representative model? What is it?
Contact centers that offer this model use their existing agents from other clients to help multiple brands. This means agents must learn how to handle calls for multiple clients and be expected to serve them as if they were dedicated to that client. The shared arrangement could be excellent for small clients with simple FAQ style customer resolutions, but most brands don’t work that way.
Lack of In-Depth Knowledge
When you spread a customer service representative too thin, the knowledge they’re able to retain is thinned as well. Every company has its own unique products, services, internal processes, and FAQs. It’s unrealistic to expect one representative to have comprehensive knowledge across all those areas for multiple brands. When contact centers try to implement this, it leads to inaccurate information being provided, longer resolution times, and ultimately a frustrating experience for both the representative and the customer. Imagine calling Verizon about your phone service only to receive AT&T’s policy instead.
Inconsistent Brand Voice
Brands work hard to cultivate an image that reflects a very specific tone and style that customers can immediately identify. A customer service representative that’s juggling multiple brands is going to struggle to maintain each brand’s unique voice, creating a diluted, inconsistent customer experience. Duolingo might want to have a more casual, fun customer interaction, but that casual, “sassy” vibe cannot be used for a utilities company that deals with serious customer service issues.
Potential Conflicts of Interest
If I’m Coca-Cola, I don’t want to share a customer service representative with Pepsi. Companies in the same industry don’t want confidential information shared, accidentally or purposefully, because they share representatives. This could create disastrous conflicts of interest that are best avoided. An agents own bias could inadvertently raise ethical and business concerns. It’s important that customers can trust that inquiries are solely focused on the company they’re interacting with.
Reduced Customer Satisfaction
Customers are not dumb. It’s easy to write them off, thinking “they won’t notice” when you’re looking to cut a corner or two in customer service, but they can sense these things. The moment that a customer service representative shows signs of not having deep knowledge of the brand they’re representing; customers lose trust in the brand and start to feel like just another ticket in the queue. The possibility of errors like this and the overall lack of personalized attention leaves brands open to negative reviews and decreased brand loyalty. Customers feel valued when their issues are resolved quickly, efficiently, and when they’re interacting with a representative dedicated to that specific company.
When DiRAD provides outsourced contact center services, we exclusively use agents who are dedicated to a specific customer. This is because the type of call centers we provide is often based on complex subject matter. For example, one of our customers, a large utility, has specific requirements for how agents deliver information to callers. The subject matter involves several weeks of training, and the mission-critical nature of the contact center makes it imperative that our agents are experts in the material before they speak to callers. A shared model would undermine the customer experience we’re trying to provide and result in poor customer sentiment.
Since DiRAD only handles highly-skilled contact center services, we stay away from the shared model, and we never have our agents answer calls for anyone other than our dedicated customers.
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