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If you want to have better relationships with your customers, prioritizing improvement of customer support and service is one of the best things your business can do. Both can have a direct and lasting impact on the customer experience — and ideally, a positive one.
Many businesses across industries, from healthcare to automotive, rely on agents in call centers or contact centers to deliver efficient yet personalized support and service that leaves customers feeling satisfied. In this post, we’ll examine seven ideas you can institute quickly and easily to help improve the overall quality of customer service delivered through your contact center and help ensure you’re meeting your customers’ needs.
Providing standout customer support is a challenge, even for veteran customer service representatives. But it’s a business imperative, considering the potential bottom-line impacts of not meeting customers’ expectations. According to Invoca’s research, 76% of consumers will stop doing business with a company after just one bad experience.
Today’s consumers expect relevant and effective responses to their concerns or questions within minutes (or less!). This is a problem for customer service teams who need to handle high volumes of calls but also have less time in the workday to manage customers’ issues effectively because they’re bogged down by other tasks.
Before we dive into seven ideas for improving customer service, let’s first establish that you should have a measurable goal in mind for improvement, and a series of strategic steps to achieve that goal. In other words, you need a customer satisfaction action plan — also known as a customer service improvement plan.
A good plan should incorporate a goal with viable key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure. It should also encapsulate a strategy and tactics designed to achieve that goal and, finally, the measurable results. (Here is a good customer service improvement plan example. Another customer service plan example can be found here.)
Now, let’s look at some ideas you might want to include in your plan.
One of the biggest complaints made by customer service teams is that they don’t have enough time to fulfill their tasks. Technology can make work easier for customer service and customer support teams by streamlining processes and assuming some nonessential workloads.
Here are five tech tools worth considering as part of your customer service improvement plan:
The phone is just one part of a sound omnichannel strategy, but it’s still the communication tool most commonly used by customers to reach out to businesses.
The three basic business telephone system types, which have both cloud and on-premises versions, are the:
Interactive voice response (IVR) systems allow incoming callers to access information via voice response software. They also give callers the option to self-route to the most relevant department to meet their needs.
IVRs can lessen the load on customer service teams while still meeting customers’ needs. For example: When an event occurs that affects a group of customers — such as a local power outage — all callers to the utility will get the same updated automated response. IVRs also reduce unnecessary transfers because callers can route themselves to the best destination.
Online chat systems can help enhance the customer experience by bringing speed and efficiency to basic problem-solving situations and answering of FAQs. However, customers should still have the option to interact with human agents when they have more complex issues or are frustrated by the limitations of the chatbot experience. And, when they choose that option, the handoff from a chatbot to a human agent should be as seamless as possible.
Invoca’s AI-powered call tracking software helps companies maintain the human touch in customer service. Invoca supplies agents with information about caller intent, for example. Before each call comes through, Invoca automatically sends support agents a screenpop that contains the caller’s name, geographic location, and the webpage or search keyword they called from. This information about customers’ digital journeys allows agents to focus more on delivering a great experience, and less on trying assemble background details.
Call center managers can access an array of tools to enhance the customer experience while easing the pressure on customer service teams. These tools include:
The latest form of technology enhancement for call center teams is conversation intelligence, which is powered by artificial intelligence (AI).
Invoca’s solution can automatically analyze 100% of your contact center’s calls and score them based on your criteria. This eliminates the work of manually scoring calls, allowing managers to spend more time coaching agents hands-on. These scores are immediately available to customer service representatives, providing insight that helps them quickly adjust their call tactics and deliver superior quality assurance (QA).
A second benefit of conversation intelligence is the collaborative opportunity it provides managers and peers for more meaningful and ongoing coaching moments. Managers can easily review call transcripts and tag agents in comments. That allows them to give agents immediate constructive criticism and direction so they can improve customer service.
Data gathered by the Invoca platform can also be easily integrated into customer relationship management (CRM) systems, updating customer details with conversation insights from phone calls.
Training customer service representatives the right way from the outset, and throughout their time working for your organization, will set them up for success in customer support.
You can also improve contact center agent retention with training. Less churn means you can maintain a seasoned team that knows how to focus on delivering great customer service.
Set up your customer service representatives for success from day one by providing them with the right onboarding experience. Research shows that organizations with strong onboarding processes can significantly increase new hire retention and improve productivity. (See this resource to learn about the four phases of good employee onboarding.)
It’s easy for call center agents to fall off the talk track and get lost when dealing with customers’ needs, or simply slip into a routine that doesn’t help to elevate the customer experience. Ongoing and targeted training can help customer service representatives stay focused and engaged and become more effective in their role by knowing when to change up tactics.
Many call center managers are using Invoca’s AI-generated scorecard feature to equip their agents with unbiased insight that can help them make call adjustments on the fly. Managers can also use the Invoca platform to review call transcripts in real time and provide direct comments and suggestions to agents to help them improve customer service.
Even the most well-trained, veteran agent can succumb to negative emotions if they’re being harangued over the phone constantly. Teach soft skills such as active listening and empathy to arm your agents with the tools to better cope with difficult customers and keep a close eye on your customer service team’s cohesion and mental attitude.
Best practices are constantly being honed and refined. Make sure you and your team keep up to date with the latest ideas and trends by being involved in industry trade groups like the Association of Customer Contact Professionals (ACCP) and reading industry publications such as Contact Center World and Customer Service Manager.
Open communication is the key to a positive workplace culture and efficient, engaged, and empowered employees. Make sure your agents know their ideas are welcome, and that they are free to express their concerns or raise a hand for help when needed.
Don’t allow your customer service team to become siloed. Encourage cross-team collaboration, even though it may be difficult within a larger organization.
Your customer service team has valuable customer feedback that other teams, especially sales and marketing, can use. And here’s where Invoca’s call transcripts come in handy again. The AI can quickly and accurately analyze and detect patterns or keywords that may set off triggers for your team and others. (Plus, you can also provide feedback to your customer service teams using the scorecard feature mentioned earlier.)
Surveys, statistics, and customer feedback show that improving the customer experience results in more satisfied customers, more repeat sales, and more frequent referrals and recommendations — which can all lead to business growth.
That’s why it is crucial to do the following:
You only get one chance to provide the customer with a superior experience, so make every customer service interaction count. Research from Invoca shows that 76%of consumers will stop doing business with you after just one bad experience.
Everyone loves to receive VIP treatment, so make that happen for your customers — especially your best ones. One idea for making customers feel special is to make sure they can connect directly to customer service representatives who have helped them before and are familiar with their history and needs — if those agents are available.
Encourage agents to always think of customers as people first (because they are!). They should always strive to be patient with customers and show them empathy when needed.
Personalization adds a human touch to customer services, and research from McKinsey shows that 71% of customers today want personalized interactions. You can use data insights gleaned from Invoca’s call transcripts to build a picture of each customer that agents can use to provide a more personalized response with every call.
Set your customer service team on the road to success by establishing challenging but realistic key performance indicators (KPIs) for them to meet.
Remember, too, that your call center team is being asked to deliver a stellar customer experience, not just help the business to manage costs. So, give appropriate weight to the human touch through scores such as customer satisfaction and contact quality.
Here are some metrics to help you determine whether your customer service and support efforts are hitting the mark:
Also known as customer attrition, customer churn is the percentage of lost customers compared to your total number of customers over a specific time period. A high rate of customer churn could be a sign that customer service needs refocusing, or there is a larger issue with your product or service offering.
Customer service teams are well-positioned to help keep customers satisfied by providing superior customer service, but also by sending them down the path to sales and conversion.
This is an excellent measure of customer service effectiveness since it can help overcome the perception of the contact center as purely a cost center. In fact, companies that excel at customer experience can increase revenue through the contact center.
NPS is another measure of customer satisfaction, based on a scale of 0-10. It typically appears as a question, asking how likely the customer would be to recommend a product or service.
NPS is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (customers responding with a score of 6 or less) from the percentage of promoters (scoring a 9 or 10). A high NPS can be a sign of business growth ahead for some companies since it indicates the brand and its customers have a strong relationship.
Call center agents can only do so much on their own to provide outstanding customer service. They also need the backing of well-run contact center that is focused on:
The right technology will help your team be more efficient. Invoca’s conversation intelligence software, for example, can analyze and provide valuable data insights into why customers are calling before your team member even picks up the call.
You can also help to lift team performance by encouraging them to prioritize tasks. Using tools like Invoca to automate routine work can also make a significant impact on overall efficiency.
Good morale is a key component of a successful customer service call center. Employee turnover can be high in these work environments, and a commonly held perception is that customer service is a high-stress job with limited opportunities for creativity or growth.
The average customer service representative in the 20-34 age bracket stays on the job a little more than 12 months, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. That makes retention a significant and costly problem for employers.
Creating an esprit de corps through team-building, gamifying day-to-day aspects of the job, and providing timely feedback and encouragement to agents can all help to drive up morale and counter turnover.
Customer service representatives can deliver a better customer experience when they know exactly what’s expected of them. Set realistic expectations upfront as part of the employee onboarding process and be clear in communicating what you, as a manager, expect of them at key points along their career path.
Even the best team needs support. Here are two ways you can demonstrate that you are invested in the customer service team’s success:
It’s a simple strategy to adopt but one that’s often overlooked: Shine a light on good work and reward employees appropriately. These efforts might be as simple as a leaderboard to instill friendly competition among your customer service team or a gift card to a local coffee shop for employees who hit major targets or go above and beyond to meet customers’ needs.
Invoca’s conversation intelligence software can help level the playing field for everyone in the call center by providing accurate scoring for every phone call your customer service team receives. Taking the human bias out of the equation will help activate the team and eliminate any question of favoritism for specific team members.
How can your customer service team not deliver their best performance if you’re making the point every day to show them the same level of respect and empathy that you expect them to demonstrate to every customer? That said, it can be tough for a manager to give every agent the attention they deserve in a busy contact center where pressure and stress can run high.
With tools like Invoca helping you track team performance, provide timely feedback, streamline workflows, increase efficiency, and much more, you can enhance your effectiveness as a leader. And with your team behind you and feeling invested in the mission of providing a customer experience that’s memorable for all the right reasons, your customer service improvement plan is destined to be a success.
Want to learn more about how Invoca can help you improve customer service in your contact center? Check out these resources:
