The Biggest Reasons Why Customers Hate Your Call Center

It’s not a bad hold music. You seem to do your best to make your customers happy but people still hate getting in touch with your call center. And the worst part, they can’t really tell you what’s wrong. Sounds familiar?

If your company faces such a problem, this post is for you. Below, we’ll talk about some of the most common factors that can create negative customer experience and help you fix it.

You choose the wrong priorities

Oftentimes, companies seem to choose the right KPIs but stick to the wrong strategy. Picture this: a company X recognizes that their agents spend too much time on conversations, which might affect the overall efficiency of their call center. To address this problem, they decide to minimize maximum call duration. A couple of months go by, issues are solved much faster, calls are no longer placed in queues, but customer satisfaction goes South anyway. How is this even possible? Elementary. In the pursuit of a shorter maximum call duration, agents try to end every conversation as soon as possible, even if they did not solve customer’s problem yet.


If something like this happens in your call center, it’s time for a little reality check. Did you address your problem wisely? Whenever you prioritize KPIs, make sure your priorities do not conflict with the needs of your customers. Reduce the situations when an agent needs to put the call on hold, provide your agents with all the necessary information to answer customer questions faster, try to optimize the post-call work. It is more effective and will give you the best results.

You have badly designed IVR

IVRs are great for a call center. IVRs are specifically designed to help clients connect with appropriate agents. Technically, they can make customer support more efficient by eliminating the need to transfer calls between departments. But the reality is that sometimes IVRs are not helpful. They might even prevent customers from getting through to the human agent. Some of the most common reasons why it happens:

  • poor voice recognition (cheap text-to-speech software with low-quality audio, the need to confirm every choice by saying Yes/ No, etc);
  • too many choices and layers in the menu (or choices that do not bring expected results);
  • endless IVR loops with no “escape” option (no option that would take the caller to the call center agent, let them leave a voice message, or exit the menu);
  • the disconnect of callers (if the caller does not make a choice, the system ends call);
  • poorly executed script (scripts are incomprehensible, choice options in the menu are announced after numbers, etc).

If your customers encounter such issues, you are in trouble because badly designed IVRs make people feel as if they are wasting their time. Long hold time is one of the main reasons why customers become frustrated with your brand. And be sure that they will share their negative experience with their friends and family.


Invest in IVR and speech recognition system that will really benefit your call center. Develop a well-performing routing system with reasonable logic and high-quality script. Also, don’t forget to test system menus on a regular basis to make sure it routes customers to the right departments because even the slightest changes in ACD queues can take people to unexpected places.

You customers must repeat themselves

If only we could clear up all customer problems through first call resolution! Unfortunately, many issues require more time. Oftentimes, people have to call back because not all customer support centers offer a follow-up or a callback service, which is mildly irritating. But when customers get through to another agent who doesn’t have a clue about what just happened and have to explain the whole story from the very beginning… well, that’s the point of concern.

Another example is when a contact center provides support via multiple channels but has no consistency. Imagine this: an issue strikes and the customer goes to the company’s Facebook page. He explains the problem, it is complex, so support agent redirects him to a call center. And when the customer makes that call, the other agent has no clue about his problem and he has to explain everything from the very beginning.


There’s a very simple solution to both cases. If your call center has such a problem, either you use inefficient CRM system, or your agents don’t have corresponding note-taking skills. Determine what exactly makes your customers reexplain themselves and address this problem with a new CRM or an extra agent training session.

Your agents are unprepared

The only thing that annoys people more than the inability to talk to a human agent is talking to an unprepared human agent. There are two root causes to this problem: you either conduct poor agent training or outsource incompetent agents. In regards to agent training, you can find some useful tips in this post. For now, let’s focus on the second problem.

The interaction between a customer and a call center rep can have a serious influence on your bottom line and overall brand image. There’s nothing wrong with outsourcing call center agents as long as you hire competent teams, but customer service is not a good place to save money. By paying less, you might get some extra bonuses, such as poorly trained staff or incomprehensible accent.


For in-house facility: train your agents well. For outsourced call center: monitor and control the performance of your agents. Voiptime Cloud inbound call center software can become your perfect assistant. With features like call recording, real-time and historical reporting, and live call monitoring*, you’ll be able to control the work of your remote agents to make sure they provide high-quality customer service.

It’s difficult to create a positive customer experience in a call center and you should really put in some work. But if you manage to do this, your efforts will definitely pay off.

* Live Call Monitoring feature is being developed at the moment.


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