14 Ways To Provide A Great Customer Experience In Your Call Center
Call centers are demanding and fast-paced places to work. With the era where everything is focused and controlled by customer behavior, the role of call centers has become all the more challenging. The revenue has lost its first position in KPIs and customer experience has magnetized all the focus. Deloitte in its global contact center survey reported that 88% of the centers see great customer experience as the key driver for their growth. This can be backed by another Deloitte survey on consumers which states, more than 50% of consumers place their buying decision based on the customer experience. Another study by Oracle shed the light on CX and stated, 89% of customers may begin doing business with a competitor following a bad customer experience.
It is time businesses understand the importance of customer experience, revamp their contact center strategies of handling customer interactions, and find lucrative techniques to provide top quality customer experience.
How To Enhance Each Customer Service Interaction In Call Centers?
In this article, we have listed down 14 sure shot ways to improve the effectiveness of the customer support for enriched CX. They are as follows -
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Adopt Customer-first Culture to Know you Customer
Knowledge of your audience and their customer experience journey can help you create tailored interactions. When you deeply understand your audience and know their motivations, you can draw out their personas, and profile them. Customer profiling can help you achieve greater customer experience as your interactions will be more meaningful and in synchronization with their values.
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Listen Attentively and Empathetically
The simplest and often the most overlooked customer experience strategy is to actively listen to your customers. You can know the exact thing that your customer wants from you, only if you listen carefully. Value their feedback and address their issues positively. Another way to show that you care is to restate what they have said and let them know that their opinion is very important. Do not interrupt your customers when they are speaking and only cut them in the middle to reflect on the major concerns or clarity.
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Show Courtesy and Politeness
Be respectful of your customers. Politeness can not only augment customer experience but can also help in building a better brand image of your company. Always, use please and thank you in your conversations and show eagerness to help. Show that you can go the extra mile for your customers.
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Don't Place Callers on Hold Indefitienly
Believe it or not, putting your customers' calls on hold can be annoying and frustrating. Your customer perceives call centers as their only way of getting direct support services. Many times, they fail to fully process your need to internally check with the relevant teams for providing the right kind of assistance. While achieving no call waiting time is practically impossible, you can certainly find ways to bring down the holding times to a minimum to keep your customers happy and ensuring quality customer experience.
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Improve Call Routing for Efficient Resolution
Call routing is an important strategy in customer service, especially, during peak call traffic hours. Ensuring all calls are diverted to the right departments can prove significant in creating positive first impressions to customers, and adding their overall customer experience. To build effective call routing strategies, they must constantly answer the crucial questions, "How can we quickly transfer the customer call to the right department?" "How can we assure first call resolution?" "How to handle calls that require long on-hold time?" and so on.
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Walk an Extra Mile to Personalize Interactions
Not just politeness but the tonality of calling agents is crucial for enriched customer experience. Many kinds of research have indicated that the tone of calling agents when sounds strained, tired, or irritated, can lead to decreased customer satisfaction. To avoid this, calling agents can include few empathy statements and practice greater rapport building by engaging in more personalized interactions. Businesses can also take the help of analytics tools to gain insights into phrases and words that resonate well with their customers.
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Check and Optimize the Quality of All Contact Channels
An important consideration is to not be limited by customer experience in call center. Call centers can run multi-channel analytics to ensure complete customer experience enhancement. Taking into account, the digital customer experience, live chat/automated/chatbot led customer service interaction, and effectiveness of other communication channels are as critical as call center driven CX. It can help in examining the overall customer experience journey with the company, to identify the pain points, if any, and rectify them before they become troublesome.
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Use Live Chat and Chatbot Judiciously to Customize Engagement
AI tools like live chat and chatbots are undoubtedly the customer experience trend to watch out for and can highly aid in customer service, but, striking the right balance is the key to its effective implementation. CGS survey shows, the inclination of over 86% of consumers to interact with a human agent in comparison to the virtual assistants due to a greater level of customer service engagements. This being said, we are not suggesting the total elimination of AI technologies as this is the future of customer service. However, businesses must identify the areas where chatbots can prove of greater help and domains where the presence of human-led assistance is mandatory for greater customer experience.
For example, having a chatbot may seem like a good idea of communication when someone is surfing through your website; for complaints handling, human intervention is a more appropriate approach.
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Use Emotions Adequately to Add a Human-touch to Interaction
Calling agents' emotional quotient is a highly benefitting trait for augmenting positive customer experience. Some emotionally intelligent tacks calling agents can administer are storytelling, personalized conversations, moments of wow (a free upgrade or a discount), loyalty reward systems, etc. An emotional approach can help connect the customer with the brand better, retaining them for a longer period.
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Make Support Services Simpler to Navigate
The efforts customers have to put in to get connected with you can determine good and bad customer experiences. Firstly, call centers need to measure customer efforts across all channels of communication. After analyzing the degree of customer efforts, businesses can draw out strategies to reduce them as much as possible. Instant call back in case of call disconnection, paying undivided attention to clients and not asking them to repeat themselves, trying to address the issue in the first interaction, quick after-call response, etc., are few techniques that can be adopted for a better quality customer experience.
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Request Feedback to Instill a Sense of Belongingness
When you ask your customers about their opinion of your services, you show them that you care. They feel valued and that can help develop a greater affinity to the brand. One way to do is to ask them to participate in a short (emphasize on it being short) survey about how efficiently you addressed their problems and how can you improve your service in the future. It is the best way to directly understand your customers and know what makes up for an improved CX.
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Keep Conversations Concise and Solutions Concrete
Like the first impression, how you conclude your conversation with the consumer greatly impacts customer satisfaction. Always summarize the focal points of the interaction and give a concrete plan of action to solve their issues. It will help in better customer relations and an augmented CX.
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Keep Agents Motivated to Improve Customer Conversations
Trust us, if you want customers to be satisfied, empower your agents. Sound infrastructure, the aid of advanced tools and technologies, a healthy work environment, and enough room for autonomous decision-making can help you achieve employee satisfaction. A happy employee develops a greater sense of company ownership and goes that extra mile to ensure that he/she retains valuable customers for the company.
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Innovate Generously to Solve Business Challenges
Thinking out-of-the-box and curating innovative ideas to amplify customer service is a great way for enhancing customer experience in the call center. This needs a proactive approach toward problem-solving. Deviating from scripts, tapping into customer's urgent needs, identifying creative ways of indirect marketing over the call, ability to offer flexible and tailored solutions for negative feedback, etc., can all prove instrumental in achieving greater customer experience.
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Outsource Call Center Services to Flatworld Solutions
These techniques to improve customer experience can help your contact centers to generate greater revenue for the business and retain more customers. In case, you think that applying an extensive customer experience strategy can be time-consuming and prove expensive for your company, you can always choose to outsource your call center services to experts such as Flatworld Solutions. Our 20 years of experience in the field of call center services have enabled us to master all the tactics of improving customer experience and our experts are proficient in providing customized solutions for all your telemarketing needs.
Contact us now to know more about our services and get a free quote for your requirements.
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Enhancing Customer Experience- The Power of Efficient e-Commerce Product Catalog Management
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