Do you know what consumers want most from inbound call centers? If you don’t, don’t be embarrassed. Many call center managers don’t. What consumers want most from inbound call centers are great customer experiences. In today’s world, this means delivering experiences that are easy to complete, personalized, in context, and consistent. It also means offering experiences that are fun. Unfortunately, delivering these types of customer experiences remains elusive for many call centers. That’s surprising. Delivering great customer experiences is worth its weight in gold—literally.
Not only do they boost customer satisfaction and customer loyalty, but they also differentiate you from your competitors and serve as a sustainable competitive advantage.
But creating great customer experiences is easier said than done. That’s where technology comes in.
Technology can help you create the kind of experiences your customers demand and expect. But first, you have to do three key things.
Three Keys To Great Customer Experiences
The first key thing you have to do is to decide that creating great experiences is a top priority. That means getting buy-in from senior managers. Without this, you’re dead in the water. Once you get it, then you have to align all your other processes with this goal.
The second key thing is to understand the customer’s reaction during and after each interaction. Implementing a voice of the customer (VOC) program by using surveys or analytical tools can give you this information.
The last key thing you have to do is to understand the channels that different customers use to carry out various interactions. You want to know when customers use multiple channels to achieve their goals and what those experiences are like. Today’s analytical tools can help you do this.
Combining the information from the last two keys can help you target improvement programs designed to enhance your agents’ knowledge and customer service skills. Having done all this, you can now bring the full force of technology to bear.
Nine Technology Best Practices
The increased use of the Internet, smartphones, tablets, and so on encourages customers to expect that engaging with you will be fast and easy. They also expect to engage with you when they want and how they want.
Below are some ways you can use technology to meet these customer expectations. Today’s technology can help you:
- Support as many communications channels as possible, including website, e-mail, social media, text messaging, video, and webchat
- Create consistent, personalized, and speedy responses, so customers feel that they’re seen as individuals and that your responses aren’t the general purpose.
- Deliver value by solving customer problems in easy to complete, enjoyable, and fun ways.
- Provide rapid, effective service across all touchpoints—service that’s personalized and exceptional
- Enable customers to use self-service effectively, while also providing a seamless transfer of information to live service when necessary.
- Manage all customer interactions through a universal routing engine, which lays a firm foundation for exceptional experiences across all touchpoints.
- Use social media to generate an understanding of customers’ perceptions of your brand
- Monitor and react to customer conversations about your brand so you can quickly shift perceptions in a timely manner.
- Leverage unstructured data to provide feedback designed to help you direct improvement efforts.
These best practices are just some of the ways you can use technology to create great customer experiences. Many others exist.
Today’s consumers expect you to provide great customer experiences through your outsourced after-hours support center. Providing these experiences not only increases customer satisfaction and boosts profits, but it also differentiates you from your competitors.
In other words, today’s technology can help you go from good to great. And anything that does that is worth its weight in gold.
Let us put our proven experience in providing after hours call center support for small and medium-sized companies to work for you. Request a quote from our sales team.