4 Ways Contact Centers Can Ensure a Positive Customer Experience

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Business leaders can ensure that every customer has an exceptional experience by optimizing call center operations.

Call centers are a key customer touch point. Customers engage company call centers to find out information, solve problems and – most importantly – order products and services.

You can create a work environment that ensures the long-term sustainability of your organization by ensuring that your call center is operating at peak performance. By optimizing call center operations, you can help your company capture new business and retain existing clients.

The following are four ways that you can ensure that nearly every customer calls center engagement is exceptional.

1. Reduce Hold Times to a Minimum

Most consumers grow impatient after waiting on hold for two minutes or less. However, hiring more customer service representatives (CSRs) isn’t necessarily the answer to reducing hold times.

A more effective method is to schedule CSRs based on demand. For example, you can coordinate with the marketing department to estimate the anticipated call volume for mass mailings.

With advanced demand information, you can outsource additional support to call center partners. By teaming up with a third-party provider, you can meet temporary surges in call center demand.

2. Simplify the Sales Funnel

When managing costs or inbound marketing campaigns, you can optimize workflows by simplifying the sales funnel. As an example, you can display a toll-free number on your mailings that customers can call, instead of filling out and mailing in a form.

Phone number services can provide you with a toll-free vanity number that customers can remember easily. By making it more straightforward for customers to respond to an offer, you’ll increase the likelihood that they’ll perform a desired action.

Also, use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to track customer information and history. For instance, a CRM such as Salesforce can enable your CSRs to build a database of consumer information. The software tool eliminates redundant manual data entry and makes working with customers much smoother.

3. Keep Track of the Right Metrics

You can monitor and coach CSRs with an agent scorecard. However, there is no one size fits all scorecard for all call centers.

Accordingly, it’s essential to customize your scorecard for your organization. Managers can track the performance of CSRs in several common areas:

• Account verification
• Call closing
• Engagement quality
• Follow-up
• Greeting

An automated scorecard can save call center managers a significant amount of time by eliminating manual CSR performance tracking.

4. Happy Employees Equal Happy Customers

You must recognize the importance of front-line employees in promoting customer satisfaction. Even the most dedicated employees can’t perform well if they’re unhappy with their working conditions.

Your employees’ job satisfaction directly correlates to service quality. Even if a CSR does everything right, an employee’s feelings about their work conditions will affect the quality of their interactions with customers.

Accordingly, it’s essential to provide a positive work environment for customer service representatives. For example, you can work with human resources to provide call center employees with job perks and career development opportunities.

Also, make sure to establish a framework to address employee concerns. If you keep employees happy, they’ll keep customers happy.

Customer satisfaction is essential for sustainable operations. Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend your offering to a friend or family member. By making sure that call center engagement goes exceptionally well, you can help your company earn the most coveted advertisement around – word of mouth advertisement.

By optimizing call center operations, you can keep customers happy and satisfied. Ultimately, the quality of call center engagements will mean the difference between failure or long-term, successful operation.

Matt Shealy
Matt is a seasoned marketing leader working with brands ranging from SAP to Campaign Monitor. Matt’s strategic vision has brought together technology, influencers and brand marketers to produce, amplify and measure innovative influencer marketing campaigns. As SwayyEm's Founder/CEO, Matt’s focus is to lead the charge in connecting brands with their consumers in a meaningful, authentic way.

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