Customer care is an integral part of any successful business. After all, potential or loyal customers will often engage with customer care teams to inquire about a product or ask for help regarding specific issues that they may be facing. These issues can be of a wide range from delivery problems to return policies and can even include suggestions on improving your product.
It is critical that your customer service is top-notch, professional and handles every customer’s issue with great care and detail. The last thing any business needs is a reputation for having a bad customer care service – in fact, studies have shown that customers are increasingly likely to punish businesses that provide subpar service.
If your agents sound too rude or cold, customers are more likely to leave bad reviews on your websites and less likely to recommend your product to others through social media and in their friend circles. At the end of the day, it will not matter whether your product was great or not – your customers will only retain the memory of how they were treated. Therefore, it is vital that you put a lot of thought into your customer support service.
Thankfully, with the help of modern technology, there are a few great ways to enhance your customers’ experience. In this article, we shall explore some great ideas to help improve the customer support experience for your business.
Chatbots
Chatbots are a great way to increase the productivity of your customer service team. In fact, they have been growing in popularity over the last few years. With advances in technology – particularly in AI – chatbots have become more efficient in understanding and predicting customer demands, making it easier to use chatbots as customer service representatives.
Using AI and chat in this format helps address the monotonous run-of-the-mill queries that agents hate dealing with, letting them get on with the more interesting work. Chat monitoring is also a great training tool as it lets senior staff and management provide feedback in real time, simplifying the coaching process which further improves customer satisfaction.
Another good way of increasing efficiency is by incorporating the most common questions into a pre-chat form so that agents do not have to ask for the same thing repeatedly each time an interaction begins. Apart from this, standardized greetings and introductions can also be automated so that no time is wasted. However, care must be taken with this to ensure that it does not seem too robotic.
Knowledge Base Creation and Deployment
A well-designed knowledge base (KB) can assist agents and remove some of the load they have to bear by allowing customers to view the most common questions and answers. In many cases, KBs can dramatically reduce the load on customer service centers and improve the overall service quality as customers move towards a “self-service” mentality.
Customer service agents can also benefit from a KB both as a training tool for newer employees and also as a single repository of knowledge in the case of new product releases. Utilizing a KB helps standardize the response provided to customers and simplifies troubleshooting.
Multilingual Capabilities
Today’s world has become very interconnected. As the internet connects more and more people together, we find ourselves at a crossroads where people can access virtually everything online regardless of the country they may be living in. You could be living in Norway and be purchasing something from China or Japan, on the internet, through the website of the company. Similarly, your customers will be from all around the globe and having agents that speak their native language will help satisfy their needs.
We believe that utilizing the staff’s multilingual abilities is a great way of improving your customer service strategy. In order to ensure that the agent with the correct lingual background speaks to the right customer, you can use automated skill-based routing tools with languages as a selection. This can be further automated by programming in country codes to automatically route the call to the agent with the correct skill. This way the language barrier between the customer and your agent is eliminated, resulting in better communication and quicker resolutions.
Skill-based routing is not only restricted to languages though. Intelligent routing can target an agents’ technical and product skill sets to ensure that he is most productive at what he does. This not only makes his job easier, but it also makes life easier for customers who are seeking help. By assigning staff according to their skill sets, you are maximizing workplace productivity and meeting the standards of a good customer service division.
Job Shadowing & Rotation
Another way to improve the agent experience is by making your employees do different jobs. For example, your phone support staff could provide email support one day a week in rotation, or you could have them spend half their shift on chat instead of the phone for the whole day. Doing this through a single agent dashboard makes things easier so agents can switch over easily, without needing to log out and in of different platforms.
Similarly, if your organization has the scope, have them work in a different department – billing instead of customer service, for example. Perhaps explore training in other products to diversify their skills even further. Offering your agents these options not only improves their skillset, which directly impacts the service they are able to provide to your customers, it also helps address monotony on the job. If you can keep your agents enthusiastic and happy, you’re more likely to have a motivated and engaged workforce that enjoys coming into the office in the morning!
Automated Scheduling
Automated scheduling can help manage your workforce by ensuring that all of the agents are occupied at a given point doing some productive work. By using an automated scheduling system, you will be able to ensure that no customer is waiting for support as there always be an agent available to answer them.
This helps reduce the hours customers spend waiting for an agent to respond, which is a big pain point. An integral part of a great customer service is making sure that the customer is satisfied, and with this system, you are on the right track to doing that.
Biometric Verification
In this case, biometric verification refers to the customer delivering a pre-set password or something similar while he or she speaks on the phone to verify their identity. By doing this, not only will you be protecting your client from fraud, you will also simplify the process for your agent as they will be able to quickly authenticate the customer.
Using most CRMs, you can catalog and track all of a client’s interactions with your business, often across multiple different divisions and groups. When you’ve authenticated the client through the pre-set password, this information can be made available to your agents saving your client the time required to relate their history with your organization.
Continuous Feedback
Automated feedback systems that give agents reviews and transcripts of their conversation in real time can help them prepare for their upcoming calls. By doing so, you can improve your agents’ service quality and grow their skill sets.
We think this is very helpful – especially if you are looking to train your agents in a short period of time. By learning on the job and noticing any mistakes they’ve made or something that they could have done better, your agents will be continuously improving.
Feedback of this nature should not only be restricted to the agent level. Customer surveys are a great way to understand all the positives and negatives of your product or service. The ability to understand issues from a customer’s point of view is imperative.
Noise-canceling Equipment
This might have seemed obvious for some of you, but you will be shocked to know how many people actually do not focus on their equipment when it comes to communication with clients. We believe that it does not matter whether you have a small customer support unit, or an entire call center dedicated to service, what matters is quality over quantity.
By using things like noise-canceling headphones, you are increasing the quality of your calls. One of the biggest complaints that customers have is the background noise that some call centers have of noisy colleagues that disrupts communication. By using high quality equipment you’re eliminating that and making communication more efficient for both you and your client.
Technology has improved employee engagement in the customer care sector through the use of automation and AI with both customers and agents benefiting greatly. This incorporation of technology is just a taste of what can actually be achieved as companies come up with strategies that help make them stand out from the crowd.
Originally published here.