Your frontline customer service teams possess deep knowledge about your customers, internal processes, and business strategies. But are you capturing their insights?

If we’re going to be honest about it, most organizations still exclude their employees from their decision making processes. It’s often because their culture prevents top executives and employees from communicating with one another. This kind of environment impedes progress, as it blocks information flow and encourages silos or isolated departments.

Additionally, most business leaders don’t realize that their call center reps are perfectly positioned to capture consumer insights. As the ones who directly talk to your customers, they’re likely to recognize patterns or trends regarding people’s wants and needs. Having access to this information will enable you to improve your customer service and marketing approaches.

Aside from this, here are seven other valuable insights you can gain from your support agents.

1. Recurring Issues

   

   Getting the same complaints from multiple customers can spell disaster for your business. Left unwatched, this can ruin the customer experience and even your overall reputation.

   Recurring issues could be a sign of alarming problems such as defective products or weak customer support. By seeking help from your employees, you can keep track of and monitor persistent customer complaints. This way, you can quickly find ways to eliminate the problem’s root cause.

2. Consumer Expectations

   Businesses operate in a fast-changing landscape, where customers’ expectations, needs, and preferences rapidly shift. If you want to gain a competitive advantage, you must stay attuned to the voice of the customer and make it the center of your organization.

   Your frontline customer support reps can help you understand consumer insights. They can tell you what customers truly want and give you ideas on how to formulate data-driven marketing approaches.

3. Common Queries from Customers

   

   Being able to anticipate people’s needs can help you build a hassle-free customer experience, which is what most consumers demand from today’s businesses. To do this, you need to look at the common questions customers usually raise and find ways to provide relevant answers right away.

   After compiling customers’ most common queries, you may include them in your self-service channels, such as your FAQs page or knowledge base.

4. Customer Journey Pain Points

   Brands can nurture people’s loyalty by providing them a pain-free journey, which encompasses:

   • the moment they discover your products and services;
   • their interactions with customer service reps;
   • the purchasing phase; and
   • post-purchase support and marketing.

   All these phases must contribute something positive to the overall customer experience. To make this possible, you need to identify the problematic parts of the consumer journey through the help of your call center agents.

5. Irrelevant Performance Metrics

   

   It can be hard to define consumers’ exact standards for excellent customer service, but your employees may have an idea. Using the insights they gain from interacting with your clients, you can tweak your performance management system. Identify the metrics that aren’t aligned with your customers’ priorities and your business goals and focus on them. For instance, if customers value problem resolution more than the speed of transactions, you should prioritize first-call resolution over average handling time before streamlining your transaction processes.

6. Weaknesses of your training program

   To deliver high-quality services, employees must be equipped with the right skills and knowledge. Training programs must thus be tailored to address the needs of your customer support agents. However, you can’t do this if you’re clueless about what they want to learn. Asking for employees’ inputs can also help you identify the program’s weaknesses, letting you find effective ways to improve your team’s performance.

7. Inefficient internal processes

   

   Your employees’ performance may be negatively affected by rigid internal processes, lack of interdepartment communication, and other inefficient call center regulations. Make sure you’re aware of the process bottlenecks that may be slowing down your customer service. This way, you can re-organize your operations and smooth out workflows.