In a contact center, there is nothing more important than customer service. It is both the center of the business and the foundation from which conversions and sales spring. Without good customer service, companies don’t earn positive word-of-mouth recommendations and may even lose customers. In fact, of the customers who leave a company, 68% do so because of poor customer service. With this in mind, it is clear that providing outstanding customer service is the best way for contact centers to maintain a strong customer base and to ensure that business stays on track.
7 Steps to Better Customer Service
1) Training
Every contact center agent should move through an extensive training program. This training program should include everything from the basics of customer service to the products, goods, services, and options offered by the company.
The training should also offer extensive hands-on practice with software systems and computer programs needed to address customer concerns. Uninformed personnel within companies are a top concern of customers’, so contact centers can do well to ensure that each agent on the team is equipped and prepared to handle customer service issues of all types.
2) Streamlined information systems
No matter how well-trained agents are, they cannot provide outstanding customer service if they don’t have access to the information they need to resolve customer issues. Because of this, it’s important to provide agents with high-speed computers, integrated software systems, cloud-based technologies that allow them access to up-to-date documents, policies, and materials, as well as access to any customer accounts and supplemental information that may be needed during a call. This sets agents up for success and ensures that a negative customer service experience will never be due to the simple lack of technology or integration.
3) Intelligent routing
Intelligent routing is an intuitive system that can greatly decrease waiting times by directing callers to the department they need. This decreases long hold times, avoids customer frustrations, and ensures that the contact center’s customer service experience is streamlined, efficient, and respectful of customers everywhere.
4) Person-person contact
While systems like intelligent routing are important for a positive customer service experience, many customers dread interacting with contact centers because it is notoriously difficult to get an actual person on the phone.
For this reason, it’s important for contact centers to offer customers the chance to reach an actual agent. This can easily be done by including a “speak to a representative” option on the initial contact center menu and staffing additional agents to reduce wait times and increase customer service.
5) Call review standards
Although it is a common practice in today’s contact center environments, reviewing customer calls is one of the best ways to ensure that a contact center is meeting and addressing any present customer concerns or complaints. Call review can be orchestrated by listening in on live calls or recording calls for later review and training purposes. These recorded calls should be part of an ongoing training program and should be addressed with experienced call center agents as well as with new employees.
6) Use of account numbers for tracking
To make the customer service process as streamlined as possible for consumers, it is important for call centers to track each call according to customer account number. This saves customers the trouble of having to explain their problems again and again to different agents and ensures that each agent handling the call has up-to-date access to relevant information about the issues the customer is experiencing.
7) Designating single contact points for profitable customers
Most businesses reap 80% of their revenue from 20% of their customers. If this is true for your contact center, it’s wise to push your most profitable customers through to a single point of contact, such as a designated team of agents or even a manager. This does two things: first of all, by assigning your most valuable customers to specific agents or points of contact, you build relationships and ensure that those customers remain satisfied and get their questions answered in a timely manner, thus prompting them to return again to do business with your company.
Additionally, pushing these customers through to a certain point of contact frees up other agents to deal with new customer concerns and promotes strong relationships between customers and your company.
Conclusion
Efficient customer service is one of the most important commodities a business can offer, and these 7 tips can help contact centers ensure that, no matter what types of customer concerns or questions are presented, each agent is ready and equipped to deal with them.
Additionally, these tips can ensure that each contact center is providing outstanding customer service 100% of the time, thus ensuring repeat customers, happy agents, and a good business model. To learn more about streamlining contact center communications or producing happier customers with every interaction, contact SpiceCSM today.
