We consider the benefit and impact on the customer in everything that we do. From the time we pick up the phone, to saying our farewell, our mission to the customer is to benefit and provide a positive impact to their needs as effectively as we can. When you’re thinking about call center excellence for your audience, ask yourself:
- How would my audience like to reach us beyond using the phone? Would they like the experience a chat feature offers?
- What personas can I create to help me understand my callers and their attitudes and preferences?
- How can I be the most helpful to my audience? What’s stopping me from delivery this?
Our people are our primary asset – It is not enough to just have staff, but to have excellent staff. We motivate our employees with our culture, we help develop their growth by coaching them, and we welcome their ideas by giving them access to speak their minds and suggest improvements. Employee’s that feel they’re part of the company will want to make a difference, and we promote that with everything that we do. Questions you can consider asking your team:
- Are you happy in your role?
- What can I do to support you more?
- How are we getting in our own way?
Maintain a positive customer service experience – We aim to provide a consistent and positive service to all of our customers, and with each other, by maintaining the same level of customer satisfaction for everyone we serve. A great customer experience is genuine, sincere and heartfelt. We achieve this by dedicating time for training, reinforcing the client experience and planning an overall experience for customer service. Thoughts for considering your own experience:
- Do you have a customer service vision? If not, check out ours for inspiration and ask your staff for input in creating one for your company.
- What’s the best experience you’ve ever had and how can you create that for your audience?
Availability – No matter how friendly or skilled your customer service team,, if they’re not there to answer the phones, it doesn’t matter. Our aim is to maintain a constant level of availability by providing consistent levels of utilization across our staff. We are ready and waiting when our customers need help. Where are you falling short on your availability performance?
- Are all of your calls getting answered? If not, is it less than 5 percent of your total calls?
- Do you need to staff longer hours than your team is willing to work?
Vast Knowledge Base – We pride ourselves in having an accurate and ever expanding knowledge base available to our staff. We could go on for hours about knowledge! Ask yourself these questions to get started on your own assessment:
- Are you providing answers for your team to address questions in a quick and consistent manner?
- Do you have a framework and process for making sure your knowledge is always up to date?
- How much time each week are you dedicating to your knowledge effort?
It’s more than a Call Center – A excellent call center does more than take calls. As an outsourced solution, a call center acts as the first point of contact for problems. A excellent call center consults, provides recommendations and best practices, and grows alongside your business. Thoughts on expanding beyond your current mindset:
- Would a third party help you evaluate where you are today and provide a list of recommendations to help you improve?
- Where is your gut saying you’re falling short and do you have the data to back it up?
- How transparent is your experience when it comes to data?
Help customers help themselves – Since more people are technology savvy, they often prefer to conduct transactions and resolve issues themselves, whether online or over the phone. Integrating solutions that help them safely do it themselves can lead to fast query resolution and improve customer satisfaction. How are you improving here?
- Are you looking at your top call types and then finding creative ways to eliminate those calls?
- How does your audience find their answer if they can’t call? What resources do you offer on your website?
- Is video part of your solution offering? “How To” videos are some of the most popular on the Internet. Is your service or product conducive to a good library of videos?
We hope you found a few thought-provoking ideas in this post. We’re happy to help you walk through more ideas or provide a short term consulting project to help you get your customer experience where you want it to be. Go be great!
