Good call center customer experience is the ultimate goal for the success of every business. Indeed, the call center is the only focal point of contact where many customers’ issues can be treated with caution. In this regard, the manner in which customers are treated at a call center determines the actual first-hand customer experience. Therefore, call center customer experience is an essential and vital part of the company’s or the business’s brand and its market differentiation.
However, many companies and businesses have been having poor call center customer experience; because they do not know either some of the best ways to adopt that can improve their customer experience or they are just ignorant. Imagine a situation where a customer calls customer care to inquire about a product and the customer care representative just ignores to pick the call because he/she is chatting with his/her colleague!
How to Improve Call Center Customer Experience
#1: Instill proper training to all customer care representatives
The first step towards achieving excellent customer experience at the call center is by making sure that your representatives are well trained to handle customers. In most cases, they must have the necessary academic certification from a recognized institution of learning. Once you have recruited them into your company, extensive training follows.
During the training, the human resource managers must carefully instill a sense of brand stewardship so that they know exactly what the company or the business does. Indeed, there are some cases where a customer may wish to speak to customer representative over the phone trying to inquire about details or issues of a certain product(s) or service(s). It will definitely create a bad customer experience if the representative is unaware of the product (s) /service (s) offered. Therefore, the degree to which a call representative is familiar with brand principles is vital for delivering a better call center customer experience.
#2: Call waiting time is a significant contributor to customer experience
In most cases, many customers call customer care to have their issues solved. If a company or business has many customers, it is most definite that they will be a lot calls coming from them. Actually, the average wait time to reach a representative differs significantly for different companies. However, as the volume of incoming calls increases, the average wait time increases.
In fact, in worst cases, someone can be held on line waiting for the service for close to an hour! In such a case, customer experience, reputation will go down and shoppers might decide to shift their interest to other companies offering the same product (s) /service (s). Therefore, effective measures must be taken to make sure that the average call-waiting time is reduced to just a minute. There are several ways of achieving this:
- Getting more call devices and representatives to serve more customers
- You can use automated call answering services for calls that needs inquiring of product (s) /service (s) offered by the company
- Embrace the use of the latest technologies such as WFM, quality monitoring systems, and IVR
- 24/7 available operator systems
In this regard, if the above measures are adopted, average wait time will be reduced significantly, which will improve customer experience on call centers.
#3: Agility and efficiency is the key to customer experience on call center
As stated previously, empowering call center representatives with all relevant information is not only paramount to make them workers of the company, but rather to offer them the ability to implement their duties effectively to improve call service delivery. In this case, efficiency means that customers are served with the correct information within the least time possible. In addition, all customers must be served equally in a courteous manner, based on a first call first be served. Therefore, if all the representatives of a company or a business do their duties effectively with agility, it is beyond doubt that customer experience on call center will improve drastically.
#4: Customer satisfaction revolves around resolution
Ideally, customers make calls promptly to a company or business’s call centers to get resolutions for the issues they have encountered concerning their product(s) or service(s). In this regard, the initial customer experience will always be positive if the call representative deals with his/her issue satisfactorily. If there are any complaints and problems raised by a calling customer that needs to be transferred to other department(s) within the organization, then, the call representative must do it quickly while providing the right direction(s) to the inquiring customer.
If the matter cannot be resolved at that moment, you are supposed to ask that customer to give you a little more time as you find the ultimate solution. As soon as you get the right resolution, you must contact that customer by calling him/her so that he/she actually feels that the company or business has effectively handles his/her queries with diligence. Therefore, it is always recommended that call center managers zero in on resolution(s) to help them have better customer experience; and to achieve this, the areas of investigation should include optimizing CRM systems, fast access to essential or vital knowledge bases, and off course, effective training to all call representatives.
#5: Customers are getting smarter
Currently, competition for customers among companies or businesses offering same product(s) or service(s) is increasingly becoming stiffer. However, customer loyalty is a factor that remains more intangible part of the customer’s overall experience. Therefore, companies/businesses must focus on some specific customer touch-points to position themselves on the line of producing positive experience for their esteemed customers.
In this regard, to achieve this, a call representative should be pre-empting customer’s call by asking them to give vital and more competitive information aimed at improving the services/products they are offering. In some cases, call agent is asked to call their customers to ascertain their loyalty by asking them amazing things they need to be offered in their line of service. Therefore, if customers are called and contacted promptly by call representatives, they are more likely to develop a loyal customer experience, which makes them to remain permanent customers of the said company or business.
Conclusion
The smarter business organizations or those companies that are increasingly winning more customers are precisely the ones that understand how call center processes and their stunning technologies can be combined to yield a more holistic customer/consumer experience. Therefore, to improve call center customer experience, it requires a deep expertise in the interoperability and integration of all the above-mentioned different solutions.
