While every call to our contact center is essential, it’s one of the most critical calls an organization can take. By answering those calls with excellent customer service, we can positively impact both customer satisfaction and overall business success.
Making sure customers are happy and our business is thriving can be challenging, especially in a contact center environment. Whether it’s poor retention or long-time calls being dropped, there are quite a few ways we can influence customer experiences with our company and keep them satisfied.
Customer experience is crucial to the success of any business, and contact centers are no exception. Controlling service quality through managing the customer journey helps ensure that our customers are happy and satisfied.
What is the Key to Success in a Call Center?
Check the keys to success to keep our contact center services running smoothly:
Recognize the Customer
Every customer who calls our contact center has a unique experience, a set of problems, and a set of questions. Even if we have some general information about the people who call in, such as their demographics and expectations, our agents may not know much more about the customers.
To provide a more positive customer experience, agents should learn as much as they can about their customers. Customers expect call center agents to recognize them, including information about previous interactions. Choosing phone answering services should give customers what they want by knowing them better.
Separate Intent for Support and Success Teams
It’s essential to make a distinction between customer support and success teams. Support teams are responsible for resolving any questions or issues that users may encounter while using our product. On the other hand, success teams focus on ensuring that users get the most out of their product.
Making this distinction early will make it easier to handle customer requests. Keep in mind that both teams are critical to the success of our business.
If someone is seeking assistance, contact a successful agent, and they will not receive much assistance. However, defining roles and routing customers to the right team make resolving tickets and satisfy our customers in a better manner.
Provide the Best Technology to our Agents
It’s crucial to provide our agents with the best technology possible. Even the most motivated agents will be less productive using outdated or complex IT processes and systems. Our agents cannot get into the flow required for optimal performance if the steep learning curve or the tool is too slow and lacks essential features.
Call centers must use a variety of databases, such as CRM, sales software, or helpdesk tools. The process slows down with outdated tools making our agents confused.
What is the solution? Business owners need to know that cloud-based tools are as safe and secure as their in-house counterparts. So when selecting a CRM, IT service providers make sure the cloud security controls are strong and secure.
Consider Self-service Channels to Reduce the Workload for our Contact Center Agents
As customers become more self-sufficient, they are likely to search for an immediate solution online before calling a human agent. By providing self-service options, we can ensure that customers get the assistance they need without overburdening our agents. This will free up lines for more complex customer issues that require human intervention.
Maintain a Strict Quality Control Process
Maintaining a strict quality control process is key to running a thriving contact center. Quality assurance (QA) is typically done on a sampling basis, which means only a few random interactions (e.g., phone calls, chats, emails) are checked. Feedback from the QA process is then shared with agents so they can improve or be assigned to relevant training. Using speech analytics, all calls/interactions can be validated against set rules in near real-time. This way, all interactions handled by agents are better understood and can be analyzed quickly and effectively.
Here are some popular metrics for call center performance, along with average values and best practices for improvement:
- Service level
- Abandonment rate
- Response time
- First-call resolution rate
- Call duration
Return to Customer Feedback and Improve It
It’s essential always to take customer feedback into account and use it to improve our company. Businesses often collect customer feedback but never do anything with it. This is a wasted opportunity. Not only that, but some companies fail to respond to customer feedback, which can lead to losing business.
So, being serious about growing our business, we should take customer feedback seriously and use it to make changes in our company. This will show our customers that we care about their opinions and are willing to make changes to improve their experience.
Conclusion
Conduct customer surveys to determine customer satisfaction and perform root-cause analysis and corrective action. We should use the information to guide our best efforts for maximizing the customer experience. Customer experience is one of the critical success factors for our business, it should be considered important at the level of the organization.
When we keep these tips in mind, we can ensure customer satisfaction. Be sure that our contact center employees are always ready and willing to use them during calls for excellent customer support.
