One thing that all large and thriving brands have in common is excellent customer service. They are masters at recognizing, and meeting and even exceeding the expectations that customers have. Things like simple and efficient processes, quick responses through any channel (webchat, phone, email etc.), personalized service, consistent service and more, make their customers feel like they’re in good hands and can trust the company or brand. In business to business scenarios, customers especially rely on good service as it affects their customers. In order to be a master at meeting & exceeding customer expectations, let’s find out what those expectations are and how to meet them.
Personalized Service
Personalized service is making it clear to your customers that you don’t view them as just a number. Rather, you know their history of business they’ve conducted with you, you follow up on that business briefly per interaction, and maybe offer something tailored to them that they weren’t aware of that can provide further benefits. Simply knowing their previous issues when they interact with you and inquiring if everything been resolved since then is a personalized engagement. To button it down, make it clear to your customers that you know their history with your business, and that information hasn’t been tucked away in a dusty filing cabinet, metaphorically speaking.
One way to know this history is to upgrade your contact centers system by going with a cloud contact center solution. These solutions make it easy to provide personalized service by integrating with CRMs, and showing historic records automatically no matter which channel they choose to reach out with.
Consistent Service
You have probably experienced dealing with customer service multiple times for the same issue with a company, and being told different things from the agents, which prolongs the service even more than it already is. When/if your customers experience this, it makes your business seem disorganized, untrustworthy, and of coarse, causes frustration. Customers expect all of your agents to know the same process, procedures, and terms.
Your training program for agents may be the source of this problem. Check out the first point on our Management Tips blog, and the forth point on our Improve Your First Contact & Call Resolution Rates blog to see some effective training tips for your agents. Another solution is sending canned responses or having scripts readily available for your agents. Cloud Contact Center Solutions usually have these features allowing agents to send a present/canned response for webchat or email, or may search a script within the interface for when they’re on the phone.
Issues Resolved on the First Contact
Their time matters, and contacting customer service usually isn’t something they planned on doing, but they needed to. It’s already an inconvenience to reach out, so solving the problem on the first contact, with no transfers, and fast, is a prime example of superior service that shows you respect their time.
Many factors come into play in order to achieve this. It comes down to thorough training, effective routing, number of channels available, easily accessible material for agents, and more. Having agent skills set in a cloud based system will allow the caller to be connected to the best available agent to resolve their issue, reducing the need for a transfer, as well as look ahead routing which will evaluate phone line circumstances before placing a call in a specific queue for faster connections. Cloud contact center solutions also usually offer the ability to store files within the system to be easily searched by agents, and of course, allow for omnichannel support.
To Summarize
Your customers want personalized, consistent, and efficient service. It’s important to go above and beyond when it comes to customer service, not only because you’ll keep loyal customers, but you’ll gain more. How? Customers talk about extraordinary service with others, they won’t, however, talk about just good service. Reach out to one of our consultants with the contact us button on the top right, and we’d love the opportunity to help you reach this goal of modernizing and providing extraordinary customer experiences.
We hope this blog helped, and please leave a comment below!