6 Tips for an Amazing Customer Experience
How to get past the challenge of delivering total customer satisfaction by focusing on taking the process one simple step at a time.
Complete customer satisfaction is the contact centre’s Holy Grail: much sought after but seemingly impossible to reach. A positive customer experience is vital to the success of any business, but maintaining a user-friendly and efficient support system can be difficult to achieve. Think you can afford to let customer experience slide? Think again: market research from Harris Interactive found that nearly 90 percent of consumers have ceased doing business with a company because of unsatisfactory customer service. Here are some tips and tools that can ensure you’re providing the best possible experience for your customers.
1. Consolidate Your User Interface
The first step to creating happy customers is creating happy agents. A streamlined, consolidated user interface, running call centre software that integrates with your existing business tools, will provide thorough and up-to-date information to your agents. The more central your interface, the easier it is for agents to do their jobs and the more customers they can effectively assist.
2. Use Interactive Voice Response and Intelligent Call Routing
Customer support can begin before an agent even answers a call. Interactive voice response (IVR) technology allows you to record professional greetings for your callers and efficiently route them to the agent who can best meet their needs. By directly referring callers to the appropriate agent, both agent and customer are saved time and hassle.
3. Provide Caller Information
Once a caller has been routed to the best agent for their needs, that agent often needs to acquire basic information – such as the customer’s name and account number – that both drains time and feels forced and impersonal. Consider incorporating call centre software that automatically provides caller information such as name, account number, email and phone number directly the agent’s desktop interface so they know what they need to about the customer before even getting on the line. This information will both streamline the call process and provide a more personal experience for the customer.
4. Use Conference Calls
Incorporating conference calls into your call system is one simple way to make life easier for your customers. Customers become frustrated at having to explain their problem over and over to different agents as they get pushed off down the line. Instead, if an agent is in need of backup or wants to enlist another department’s service, he or she can conference in another agent and facilitate the exchange for the customer (“I’m on the line with Bill, who is looking to improve his Internet connection, which is problematically slow in the evening. Could you tell us what package upgrades are available for his account?”). Not only does this relieve your caller of the burden of their complaint, but it can also help maintain a friendly, personable atmosphere in your contact centre.
5. Monitor Your Calls
So your automated hold message assures the customer that “Your call may be monitored for quality control purposes”, but are you really utilizing this tool? Call monitoring may be one of the single most useful tools for improving the customer experience. The most basic form of call monitoring allows the manager to listen to a live call without either the caller or agent knowing. This can be excellent for providing feedback to agents. However, sometimes your agents might need a little help. “Whisper coaching,” which allows a manager to speak with an agent without the caller hearing, can be excellent for helping green agents find their footing; “call barging,” which allows a manager to interrupt a call and speak with the agent or customer, can be useful for getting both agents and customers out of tight spots. If live call monitoring isn’t feasible for your schedule, recording calls for later listening can still help you provide agents with specific and necessary feedback.
6. Provide Comprehensive Metrics
The more information you and your team have, the better you can serve your customers. Providing detailed metrics, such as average hold time, handle time, and service level, can help your agents track their strengths and weaknesses and make informed, data-based decisions. Even better: providing these metrics in real time with a comprehensive dashboard for agents that displays live data.
Personal, friendly service can be hard to come by for today’s consumer. As businessman mogul Leon Gorman once put it, “Customer service is just a day in, day out ongoing, never ending, unremitting, persevering, compassionate, type of activity.” But don’t give up! Keeping your focus on the customer experience will allow your business to prosper and grow from the roots of loyal customers. For more information on delivering a top-notch customer experience, check out our free white paper.
