The Future Is Now: Providing a Modern Customer Experience
Deliver the ultimate 21st century customer experience with these 5 contact centre tips.
As technology booms, the average user is quick to keep up. Every year, there is a new iPhone, a more convenient payment method, and a more advanced interactive gadget, and keeping up with the latest has never been more, well, exhausting. Sure, your colleague or neighbor or even your kids might have no trouble adapting to new technological developments, but what about your contact centre? Sadly, while customers have by and large embraced 21st century trends and simplified methods of communication, the majority of businesses have remained stuck in the past.
Here are five tips for making sure you deliver a modern customer experience.
1. Make It Easy
Shifting from customer service to customer care is a 21st century phenomenon that describes a new way of thinking about business-customer relations. Customer care refers to making each customer experience stand out, and one of the best ways of doing so is by making it easy for customers to interact with your business.
- Simplify your internal policies. The more difficult it is for your agents to follow protocol, the tougher time they will have resolving customer issues.
- Go beyond FCR. Instead of focusing on resolving problems, encourage agents to anticipate common problems and tackle them before they start.
- Help them, help themselves. Most customers would prefer to solve their own issues, if they only knew how. Keep a regularly updated list of FAQs guiding customers through solutions to their most common problems. To supplement, video tutorials provide handy visuals to self-help solutions that may otherwise be hard to follow.
2. Collaborate
One revolutionary aspect of some of the most successful 21st century businesses is less management and more collaboration. Transition to a more collaborative way of thinking with these tips:
- Reduce hierarchies. Encourage all members of your team to share their thoughts and ideas, contributing to the culture of teamwork at your contact centre.
- Think about growing your network laterally. This means teaming up with other businesses, start-ups and third party customer service providers with whom you might be able to form a solid partnership.
3. Personalize
The 21st century customer experience is all about personalization. Using customer information to enhance their experience can save both you and your clients time while helping your contact centre stand out.
- Mine customer data effectively. This means that when you have repeated customer interactions or you transfer customers from one agent to another, their personal information comes with them. You shouldn’t have to ask a customer’s name, most recent purchase or reason for calling more than once.
- Prioritize customer preference. If your contact centre makes outbound calls, be sure to honor any expressed customer preferences regarding times of day or certain days of the week when they’d like to be left alone.
4. Reach Out
Modern technology has paved the way for all kinds of ways to communicate with one another. Among the most important and widespread channels to reach out in the 21st century are SMS and social media.
- According to a report by Mobile Squared, 90 percent of people read a text message within 3 minutes of receiving it, making SMS one of the most reliable ways to reach others. Encourage customers to text your company on your website or social media page to resolve simple issues like password changes, requests for directions or hours, and appointment setting.
- Speaking of social media, your company’s responsiveness on social media is one of the most effective ways to show your customers that you care. On websites like Twitter and Facebook, everything is publicly broadcast, meaning if you don’t respond to a comment made about your company, whether negative or positive, others can interpret your silence to reflect a lack of caring about customer satisfaction.
5. Make Calling a Breeze
Lastly, there will always be customers who simply prefer to talk with a live agent over the phone, or whose needs are too complex to be resolved through modes like SMS. Show these callers that you value their time and support by making their experience as simple and convenient as possible.
- Use automatic call routing to transfer callers to the best-equipped agent to handle their specific problem or question.
- Offer a callback option for customers on hold.
Delivering the ultimate 21st century customer experience means more than just keeping your technology up-to-date. It also means embracing a more modern way of viewing business management and customer relations. By focusing on making the customer experience as effortless and enjoyable as possible, you can help launch your contact centre into a top customer care provider that helps you stand out from the competition.
Interested in learning more about how to deliver an outstanding customer experience in the digital world? Download our free white paper!
