While we are still waiting for the final numbers to come out for this year’s Black Friday – Cyber Monday shopping (including Small Business Saturday), I wanted to take a moment to thank the customer service team at PayPal for what I am sure was only one of the hundreds of calls their call center handled on Friday.
I was trying to buy a Christmas gift for my friend, and the retailer gave me the option to use my PayPal account to check out. Data from 2013 shows that ” approximately $13,996,600,000 was abandoned in shopping carts in just two days.” I’m sure plenty of those were people window shopping or comparing deals across sites, but having PayPal definitely saved my sale, so how many millions did it earn other retailers this past weekend?
But when I tried to checkout there was an issue with my PayPal account; the primary credit card had expired so the retailer couldn’t charge me. But when I logged into to PayPal to update my credit card I wasn’t allowed to change the credit card because there was a pending charge. Since the retailer couldn’t charge the card there was no order number, so there was nothing to cancel. But since the charge was still pending the credit card was essentially frozen in my PayPal account. It’s a Black Friday Catch-22! So PayPal customer service here we come!
After being on hold for about 5 minutes, which given that it was Black Friday is nothing short of impressive, I spoke with a very friendly guy named Dave. I gave a short recap of my situation and he knew instantly what the problem was. Apparently the PayPal dashboard had recently been changed, and one of the side effects was the inability to update a credit card with a pending charge. However, Dave knew the exact URL that could take me to the old dashboard setup where I deleted the card and added a new one in about a minute. Poof! Black Friday Catch-22 solved and I only had to spend about 8 minutes figuring it out.
While many other shoppers had terrible Black Friday experiences with call centers, simply because of the sheer influx of calls a contact center has to handle in those 24 hours (not to mention website issues!), I had a great experience with PayPal because of one main thing; Dave. Dave knew exactly what needed to be done to resolve my issue quickly and effectively and didn’t waste his or my time with unnecessary validation processes or transfers. This is a prime example of why training your agents is crucial to contact center success!
Just how important is an educated agent to customer satisfaction? 82% of customers say that getting their issue resolved quickly is the number 1 factor to a great customer experience. But 26% of consumers have experienced being transferred from agent to agent without any resolution of their problem. How often has that happened to you? How frustrated do you get as you bounce from agent to agent? Stop treating your agents like nothing more than office chairs and actually invest in their education The more they know about your products, your company, your return policies, your website and so forth the better they can do their job AND the happier your customers will be because of it.
