While customer service has always been a critical business element, over the past several years it has become dramatically more important. This is due to a number of factors, including the increased ability of customers to share their experiences on websites like Yelp and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
Companies, both large and small, that fail to provide excellent customer service will suffer. According to one study, U.S. brands are losing an estimated $41 billion each year as a direct result of poor customer service. Another report indicates that as many as 65 percent of customers have stopped frequenting a company due to only one poor customer service experience.
How call center effectiveness can improve your overall customer service experience
One of the most important aspects of the overall customer experience — that often has the most room for improvement — is call center effectiveness. After all, the customer’s first point of contact with your business is typically to reach out when he or she has a question or an issue, so it is imperative to make that experience as efficient and, most importantly, as effective as possible.
There are a few elements in almost every call center operation worthy of at least being reexamined, if not revamped completely. Perhaps the most important is to understand why customers are calling. There are a number of customer relationship management (CRM) and desktop agent applications that will allow you to quantify and categorize the reasons why customers are calling. By understanding the typical questions that are being asked by customers, you can better prepare efficient solutions that require as little improvisation on the part of customer service agents as possible.
Having a stronger understanding of the categories for customer calls will also make it easier for your company to produce skill-based routing processes. Using an interactive voice response (IVR) solution, you can automatically route customer calls to the specific members on your customer service team that have the knowledge to provide solutions. By reducing the number of times a customer needs to be transferred (preferably to one or zero) and by increasing first call resolution, you can dramatically improve customer service satisfaction ratings.
The other benefit of increasing call center effectiveness is that fewer labor hours will need to be spent on customer service calls, freeing your staff to work on other core-business aspects.
Small and medium sized businesses particularly benefit from increased call center effectiveness.
There is a misconception among many small and medium sized businesses: Increased call center effectiveness is something best left to large corporations.
In fact, smaller businesses arguably benefit even more than larger enterprises from increased call center effectiveness. This is largely due to the fact that in many smaller and medium sized businesses, the employees that are taking customer service calls also have other important business functions. By increasing the effectiveness of customer service calls — which greatly reduces the amount of time each employee will need to spend on customer service calls — employees will be able to work on other, potentially high-productivity tasks within the business.
Thanks to a number of technology developments (e.g. CRM, desktop agents and IVR), the ability to increase call center effectiveness is more affordable and attainable for even the smallest businesses. If you are looking for ways to improve your customer service ratings while also increasing the productivity of your employees, consider integrated customer experience solutions to serve your business needs.
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