‘Prevention is better than cure’, we strongly follow the proverb when we talk about improving customer service or experience. With the development of the technology, there is an upsurge in the number of communication channels. Among this slew of resources, social media is becoming the topmost channel that the customer prefers to share their frustrations.
Adding social media platform to a multichannel customer service approach needs planning, focus, proper training of agents and finally keeping a track on the business metrics.
Standing today, it has become very important to provide your customers with prompt, error-free service through their preferred communication channels. The rise in communication channels has often led to customer frustrations. When the customer cannot get the answers or resolutions they are looking for via their preferred communication channel and has to switch channels; it can also lead to poor customer experience, which, in turn, can lead to customer attrition. So, it has become necessary to avoid customer service mishaps and stop the flow of frustrations. Here are three practical tips to avoid service mishaps beforehand.
Let us set up an effective approach to solve the customer issues competently. Here, we go:
Gearing Up With a Plan
Simply leaping into the customer service channels without arming agents with a plan will be the prescription for a failure. We will find agents overwhelmed with the volume of conversations, frozen by situations, which we never anticipated or ignite a controversy over multiple channels.
In this age of customer service outsourcing, a business may outsource their customer service to a BPO call center. An experienced multilingual customer service call center can help them create an effective plan to ensure prompt issue resolution and improved customer experience.
Setting up a plan for both community and customers will empower the agents to handle the situation better. We employ certain rules to walkthrough the customer problems systematically.
- Accurate listening of all conversations
- Giving preference to a set of conversations
- Classifying conversation into – customer service issues, product analysis, sales lead generated etc
- Tagging sources as influencer, employee, competitor, tier 1 or tier 2 customer etc
- Assigning the customer issues to the right people – billing, technical support, inquiries etc
The plan will help agents and guide them on how to handle conversations, classifying how agents should respond to each conversation, whether they should deflect it to self-service, handle it via phone/email, or simply ignoring the respond. The plans will explain agents ‘what to say’ or ‘what not to say’ to the customers.
An up to date inbound customer service plan will allow agents to have enough freedom and respond to different situations in real time. Well, top customer service outsourcing providers have implemented the process and have protected their clients’ public image, ensured consistent customer service and made sure that nothing slipped between the cracks.
Arming the Agents with Proper Training
Does your contact center have teams to monitor different customer service channels? As there are multiple channels, we need to handle them in different ways. Thus, allocating channels with the right agents is necessary these days.
Excellent customer service is all about putting the right agent in the right channel with the right solution at the right time. While that’s a lot to take in, it is not utterly impossible. All you need to do is to find the agents that suit each communication channel and provide them with a proper, channel-specific training.
Next in line is the way you want your agents to handle the channels, routing the right conversation to the corresponding department and much more.
At Fusion CX, we feel that it is not important to draw the line between responsibilities shared. Rather making our teams know where the line is. We arm Fusion CXites with the right set of skills and let them understand the process that we have laid down in our customer management plan.
It will also help you deliver better customer experience and lead to a more significant customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.
Measuring the Business Metrics
It is often visible that the business metrics even works against the best customer service. Therefore, while measuring customer service efforts, we make sure to:
- Tie up with the resources that help to measure the hard business metrics
- Not to ignore the soft benefits
- Focus more on quality than on quantity
- Measure those metrics that will help to strengthen our call center goals
Sure, there are customer service issues, which takes a lot of time to respond. However, the customers do want a quick solution to the problems, but simply delivering a quick solution for the time being will land us up in a messy customer service. We avoid being messy by simply acknowledging the issue at first, then address it and ultimately fix it.
These are the three great ways to avoid customer service mishaps even before they occur. When implemented, these useful customer service tips can save you from a host of problems that may occur when you provide customer service without a plan. These tips can also help your outsourcing partner deliver a better customer service to your customers.
On the contrary, if your customer service outsourcing partner proceed without a plan, proper training, or metrics, it only leads to a messy customer service, which adds to customers’ frustration and leads to a very negative customer experience. Studies show that customers can leave a company after an instance of poor customer experience. So, if you want to retain your customers and deliver them a great customer service, you need to focus on every aspect of customer service and take measures to prevent any mishaps.
Having said that, let’s be realistic; mistakes in customer service are unavoidable. As the number of customers keeps increasing in every channel, providing each customer with a prompt resolution may not be possible. However, we can do our best to lessen the flow of frustration and improve the customer experience. Taking precautions beforehand against common customer service issues will help us deliver a better service. Here are a number of good examples of the measures that can be taken to prevent customer frustration:
- A business can notify their customers via customer service call center if they are facing an issue that can affect the customers even before they report it.
- They can also put answers to frequently asked questions on their website.
- They can also save the customer’s time by allowing them to put a call back request at their convenient time.
- In case a resolution takes time, a business should convey it to the customer and tell them the approximate time it will take to resolve the issue. Then, finish the job within the timeframe.
Taking these measures will definitely help the business to prevent the flow of frustration and provide the customers with a better experience.
To sum it all, good customer service needs planning, implementation, execution, and measuring the success. It also means taking measures to avoid mistakes and resolving any mistake that occurs promptly. If your customer service outsourcing partner can do that, you do not have to worry about delivering a poor customer experience anymore. A little preparedness, precaution can lead to prevention of some immense customer frustration.
