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5 Things That Matter to Customers Regardless of the Industry

Customers today have a different frame of reference and expect more from all of their providers, regardless of industry. They expect the same level of exceptional service from online retailers to insurance providers, utility companies and beyond. Regardless of your industry, using an integration platform and guided process such as SpiceCSM allows you to bridge those divides and seamlessly provide superior customer service across any industry providing any service. As you read this article you can add this to the end of every sentence…”SpiceCSM already does that!”

#1: Customers want you to be there when they need you.

New technologies such as mobile, self-service web portals, chat and social media have given customers more options when it comes to how they choose to communicate. These new channels must be appropriately staffed and the customer experience must be consistent across all channels.

Taking the approach of balancing agents across channels allows you to quickly leverage those agents who are less busy in one channel to help out in other channels that are experiencing a spike in volume. This reduces hold times and leads to increased customer satisfaction.

#2: Customers want to talk to someone who can actually help them.

Not only do customers want their inquiries handled fast, they also want them handled accurately and on the first try. This requires agents who are skilled to answer their questions and handle transactions in the customer’s channel of choice.

And as inquiries have become more complex, it is even more critical that agents receive the training they need and are in the appropriate queue (not taking calls or answering chats in a queue they are not qualified to handle).

By updating agent skill associations based on training and performance metrics in real-time, agents are ready to handle inquiries in multiple channels right away, responding to customer demand.

#3: Customers expect you to answer their questions fast and sometimes faster.

Most customers today have wireless devices in front of them around the clock, making channels like social media and chat even faster options than calling in to speak to a live agent.

These channels are good for customers because they can multi-task, continuing to work while waiting for support and also good for agents because they, too, can multi-task and handle more than one customer at a time. The downside is that response time expectations with these channels are often different than those of incoming calls.

Customers expect on-demand access. They don’t care that you staff your e-mail queue differently than for incoming phone calls. They want someone there, ready to handle their transaction, no matter what channel they choose.

To accommodate this expectation, like any other channel, chat, e-mail and social media must be adequately staffed with the right number of skilled agents to maintain service levels at all times.

#4: Customers don’t care about your silos.

Your customers don’t want to hear why an agent can’t handle their type of inquiry and they don’t want to be transferred all over the place while you find someone who can answer their question.

To the customer, you are one entity and they want you to act like it! One of the biggest challenges faced by today’s contact centers is when an already fragmented view of the customer across lines of business gets compounded by a lack of insight into what is happening across all channels.

Only in this way can agents have the skills and visibility into customer interactions across all channels to ensure customers are receiving consistent, seamless service.

#5: Customers want an outstanding experience every time.

Though customer expectations have changed, customers haven’t. At a very basic level, customers just want to accomplish what they set out to do when they reached out. They want to trust that you can take care of their transactions and answer their questions quickly, accurately, and on a consistent basis.

This is the very definition of what SpiceCSM accomplishes. Using SpiceCSMs guided process coupled with seamless integrations; all agents in your call center will provide the same answer to the same questions every time. No more “I just spoke to another one of your agents and they gave me a different answer” or “a different agent offered me a better deal.”

See the full article By Matt McConnell

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