All of us love great customer service stories. From the storekeeper who carried an older man’s shopping bags and walked him to his car, to the airline cabin crew that celebrated a young flyer’s birthday during the flight, stories of heart-warming customer service amaze us and move us. Such happy customer service incidents occur because customers are regarded as human beings who deserve more than just ordinary service. A customer-centric culture is what makes businesses thrive.
Customers expect consistency if the service is excellent; they expect the same level of ethical service that they once received every time they come back to your business – tomorrow, next month, or the following year.
Businesses today are moving to a People-to-People (P2P) model; people sell to people, and customer experience that is provided should not be any different. Delivering better customer experience is reliably the best way to impact revenue, particularly over the long-term positively. A dissatisfied customer will immediately look for other service providers or business options. With competition being fierce, only companies that deliver superior customer service can reduce churn, enhance customer loyalty, and progressively create customers for life.
Phone conversations with customers or prospects can be complicated. The right telephone etiquette enriches customer support and service excellence that can significantly help your company. Call centers provide excellent opportunities for companies to outrun the competition, resolve customer issues, and deliver better customer experience. Call centers help update customers about new products or services, spread the word about a company’s culture, and sell. These interactions are more intricate and consequently have the potential to delight customers more than at any other stage of the buyers’ journey.
Improving a call center’s processes may seem overwhelming, but the results will be well worth it. Implementing a few procedures can bring remarkable changes in an agent’s way of engagement with callers. Here are a few best practices to bring in constructive changes in the way call centers can boost customer experience.
Categorization Of Customers
Call center software features like IVR or auto-dialler help categorize customers based on the issues they face. IVR empowers customers to resolve minor queries on their own using automated information that can be stored and accessed using the call center software used by agents.
Furthermore, enhancing the routing of IVR enables the auto-dialler to match the right customers to appropriate agents in a call center. This dramatically improves customer satisfaction as they get the correct information from the right person. For the call center agent, this means improved job satisfaction.
Evaluation Of Agent Performance
Evaluating the way an agent handles customer calls is as essential as routing the calls to the right agent. The right call center software can double up as a performance management software that can track and evaluate every agent’s performance on a timely basis. Performance management tools empower call center agents to perform better, which eventually leads to better customer experience.
Utilization Of Customer Feedback For Performance Improvement
Prioritizing agent performance alone cannot entirely boost customer experience. Feedback from customers is often honest and reliable, and perhaps can be the right catalyst for performance improvement. Usually, customers filling online surveys or feedback forms tend to be more straightforward and upfront about their experiences. This candid information can be used to boost customer experience to a great extent.
Minimizing Call-Hold Time
Customers can get irritated when a call center agent keeps their call on hold for too long, more so when they reach out to customer service teams. Callers may tolerate hold-time when they are not urgently looking for information or solution, but low call-hold time is one of the critical parameters that influence customer experience. The reduced on-hold time during calls is a necessity, and any company looking to boost customer experience must provide additional focus to it. Customers usually don’t comprehend the complexity of their challenges or queries and always want instant responses or solutions. Although minimizing wait time may not be secure, it is not impossible. Research indicates that about 85% of the time, callers are annoyed if an agent does not readily have the information they are looking for. To curtail this issue, agents need to have access to call center software that helps them instantly pull out all the relevant data to resolve customer queries quickly. This saves time for both the agent and the customer; saving time certainly boosts customer experience.
Choosing The Right Call Center Software
Emerging businesses that serve the right customer service give maximum importance to the preferences and needs of customers. Call centers should focus on building tech stacks that empower agents to perform efficiently. To deliver unparalleled service and increase agent productivity, businesses need to evaluate and choose the right call center software. Agents must be appropriately trained to use the software to boost customer experience.
Companies that consistently deliver better call center services to boost customer experience are those that understand the value of establishing a genuine, meaning bond with customers. Such companies outperform the competition by allocating dedicated resources and enhance call center agent performance with training. This helps them stay ahead of competition and boost improve call center experience. With patience, practice, and willingness to thrive, everything can be achieved. Are there more such best practices you are aware of? Share your thought.
