10 Tips To Ensure Exceptional Call Center Customer Service
Call Center customer service is the most critical component of any organization. This quote by Damon Richards perfectly sums up how important customer service is:
“Your customer doesn’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.”
The success of a business highly depends on how effective is your customer service by showing your customers how much you care. In this article, we attempt to highlight the 10 most effective tips to ensure that your call center delivers exceptional customer service.
1. Focus on Customer Research
The first and foremost step for a call center to offer excellent customer service is, to begin with, customer research. So, what all can be your areas of focus for customer research:
- Who all are your customers?
- Which customers are the most active callers?
- What are the common channels that your customers come from?
- What are the common issues for which your customers call you?
These are a few basic questions that you can focus while researching on your customers. Based on the answers that you receive to these questions, you can easily interact and come to a conclusion before answering to your customers.
2. Analyze the Customer Interactions
While communicating with your customers, there are a few things you need to identify and analyze:
- What is the purpose of their call?
- How they have landed up to your extension?
- Check out the call histories of the customers?
- What are the interactions of your customers?
- Who has been handling calls for his earlier issues?
- What have been the success ratios of the calls made by a particular customer?
Before answering a call with a customer, it is very much important to be clear about his past communication with any of the call center agents. It will help you analyze how have been the communication, how their issues have been addressed, and what measures were taken to help them solve their issues.
3. Record the Issues of Your Customers Appropriately
Most of the time, the customers make a call to the call center agents in order to resolve their queries. The query might be of smaller configurations, technical issues, or maybe some kind of a system failure. Based on the importance of the issues your customers are having, you will need to record them based on the priorities.
Small configurations may take a few minutes to resolve so they can be flagged as of lower importance. What if a customer has a system failure kind of an issue? This needs to be flagged as the highest priority task and the level of task is critical or of higher importance.
Recording the issues of your customers appropriately helps you to collect the history of the customer issues whenever required.
4. Come up with the Possible Solutions
Once, you record the issues of your customers, your 1st step would find out the solutions that might help you resolve their queries of your customers. To find out what can be the possible solutions to a particular query, it is imperative to look for the following things:
- Is your organization capable enough to solve this issue?
- What is the cost attached to solving the issue?
- Whether the expertise present with the organization?
- How much time will it take to get resolved?
- What will be the average customer satisfaction ratio of this solution?
The above questions can not only suggest the possible solutions but, can speed up your communication process with your customers. This definitely improves your customer service.
5. Implement the Best Solution
So, now you have a list of possible solutions. But, which one would be the best fit?
If you are able to find the solution that matches the expectation of your customers as well as your organization, then you must move ahead with offering a helping hand to your customers.
Read Also: 7 Steps To Setup a Successful Customer Service Department
6. Follow Up with your Customers
You are capable of handling the queries of your customers carefully and precisely. But, it is highly required to make sure your customers are completely satisfied with the solutions offered. Now, what if they are having the same issues or some new issues? So, the best customer service expects regular follow-up with the customers. There might be cases where they might not have any issues. But, your follow-up will strengthen your relationship with your customers keeping them your lifelong customers. Also, regular follow-ups can be scheduled to gather feedback for your organization as well as your customer service.
7. Keep Open & Transparent Communication
Working in a call center, you often come up with the issues that are so critical that they need some special attention or they might take a longer period of time to get resolved or they are unable to get resolved.
Whatever is the case, it comes under your duty to keep your customers informed with the right information. Being honest with your customers retains their trust in your organization and your services offered. So, keep your communication always open and transparent to enhance your call center customer service.
8. Try to Improve the Turnaround Time
We discussed setting the priorities of the various customer queries and recording them as well. Based on the priority, you can set your turnaround time as well. If the queries do not require any technical support and can be easily handled by you, can be solved there and then.
But, if there’s an issue that needs your call center manager to take it up or assist you in some way, then too, you need to set the turnaround time to get those queries resolved. Also, if you are dependent on some authorities to resolve the customer queries, keep your customers well informed about the approximate hours to days will it take to get it resolved. But, you always need to run behind in improving your turnaround time to offer great customer service.
9. Learn from the Customer Calls
There are a lot of opportunities to learn from the customer who calls themselves. When using a perfect call center solution like HoduCC ( Call Center Software), comes with a feature that records each and every call made. You can conduct various training sessions or discussion groups where you can listen to those calls and learn how you or your peers can improve the communication that helps to offer great customer service.
10. Keep on Upgrading Your Ways to Customer Service
Customer service is something that also needs to get upgraded with the changing technologies. There are various communication and networking channels that you can utilize to help your customers reach you or may resolve their issues without even them calling and waiting in the waiting queues. Following are the samples:
- You can utilize your website to post FAQs for your customers
- You can connect with your customers through social media channels
- Include chatbots in your system to have your customers chat when they are unable to call you
- Improve your mobile site so that they can access your chatbots from anywhere and everywhere
So, there’s nothing much required to offer great call center customer service, but, just the dedication towards improving your communication with your customers.
What are your thoughts?
HoduCC by HoduSoft is a brilliant call center software with a strong base for improving call center customer service. Request for a Free Demo Now.