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Building a Better Business: Customer Service Improvements

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Exceptional customer service was once considered a luxury; it’s now considered a necessity.

How much impact does customer service have on business, really?

Research by Gartner found that 89 percent of marketing leaders believe that business-to-business competition will be focused on the overall customer experience by 2016. Another report by Aspect Software revealed that 76 percent of consumers view customer service as the true test to determine how much a brand values them.

Clearly, marketers and customers are in agreement—quality customer service is poised to become a competitive differentiator in the business marketplace. Contact centres must rise to meet this challenge and adapt their service to the ever-changing demands of their market.

Defining Poor Service

Before customer service can be improved, it’s important to first identify the behaviors that drive customers away. The 2015 UK State of Multichannel Customer Service report shed some light on customer frustrations during their service experience. According to those surveyed, some of the most common customer pain points involved:

Lack of Resolution:

  • Being passed off to multiple agents during an interaction (23 percent)
  • Having to contact a company multiple times for a single issue (23 percent)

Feeling Helpless:

  • Not being able to find information/solutions online (16 percent)
  • Being kept on hold for too long (15 percent)

Lack of Appreciation:

  • Frustration related to navigating automated systems or inability to reach a live agent (13 percent)
  • Impolite or unfriendly agents (9 percent)

What do all of these pain points have in common? They have to do with how a customer perceives their interaction. Much of the customer service experience relies on emotion and the customer’s individual experience.

Frustration vs. Value

Though quality service relies on well-functioning CRM systems, adept agents, and integration across multiple channels, emotions form the core of the customer experience. Empathetic agents trained in the soft skills of customer service keep a positive experience within reach, even if your other service areas are lacking.

And if we accept that emotions are the basis of the customer experience, we must examine the two competing emotions experienced by contact centre customers: frustration and value. Put another way, the customer experience can be defined by how much effort is expended by the customer—low-effort interactions tend to be positive and create value, while high-effort interactions are negative and create frustration. This creates a situation where better customer service is found by simply making it easier for your market to achieve their goals.

Making It Simple

Of course, making service simple for customers is easier said than done. Eighty percent of centres surveyed by Dimension Data’s 2015 Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report revealed that their current customer service systems aren’t equipped to meet their projected needs for the future. While this news is troubling for the industry as a whole, it presents a unique competitive opportunity for contact centres who want to stand out. How is this possible? You guessed it—producing positive emotions by taking the effort out of the customer experience.

Making service easy for your customers means addressing their needs on their terms. You might find that your agents are most efficient on phone and chat platforms, but if your market’s favorite outreach option is social media, your agents had better get used to being online. Understanding how best to utilize the wealth of service options available is the best way to address the needs of your market and create a customized service experience.

But providing a multichannel experience alone isn’t enough—your agents must be prepared to problem-solve only on the channel that the customer chooses. While most of us enjoy the flexibility of multichannel outreach, it stands to reason that we’d still rather get our problems fixed through our primary channel of choice. This is another reason why proper agent training is essential to better customer service—agents with knowledge of their market’s preferred options and relevant soft skills are a recipe for a stress-free and effortless customer experience.

Streamlining Service

Customer service and business success are closely linked. Making the sale is one thing, but business relationships aren’t maintained from a constant cycle of buying and selling—they’re maintained by the customer support staff that guides the user through their problems and helps shape their experience.

Customer service is becoming a bigger priority for competitive businesses, and contact centres must update their practices to reflect this need. Contact centres should be staffed with adequately trained agents who are skilled across multiple channels, know how to listen, and possess the interpersonal skill necessary to handle (and diffuse!) difficult customer situations. When your team is able to tap into the emotions that drive customer behaviors, effortless customer service comes as a matter of course. Want to learn about more ways that customer service can impact business success? Download our free white paper!

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