Building rapport with customers is necessary for long-lasting, profitable relationships. You want to create a community of individuals who advocate for your product or service. Those who do will talk about your solution with others in their circle who can make use of it.
Rapport starts with the first call an agent makes. It continues during the purchase decision, throughout their time as a customer, and even after they discontinue use if that happens. If you want your company to last, maintaining a secure connection with those who use your product is an absolute necessity.
The 5 Features Every Call Center Needs
How do you establish and build rapport with customers? Obviously through stand-out service and providing an experience for each person who uses your solution. However, you can simplify the process with the use of certain contact center software features.
Which features are most useful for building rapport with your potential and current customers? Continue reading to learn which features you should have to amplify your customer rapport.
1) Local DID Match
Building rapport with customers begins the moment your agent’s phone number pops up on a prospect’s phone screen. Do they see a careless toll-free number? This laziness quickly leads to frustration and, more often than not, an ignored call.
However, if you use Local DID Match, you can use a phone number with an area code that matches the location your agents are dialing. Prospects are more likely to answer a call from an area code they know compared a toll-free number. An 800 number is usually a dead-ringer that a telemarketer is on the other end of the line.
Going the extra mile to pay attention to essential details like local area codes can increase trust with prospects. Once you get them on the phone, your agents can begin the real rapport building through the way they converse and gain confidence from the candidate.
2) SMS Messaging
It’s undeniable how connected people are to their smartphones today. Americans reportedly check their phones an average of 150 times per day. Convenient ways of communication continue to evolve, but SMS messaging remains one of the most popular.
SMS messages have an estimated 98% open rate. The convenience of being able to receive and read a message immediately without having to respond right away has catapulted the popularity of texting. A platform with SMS messaging capabilities allows you to engage with prospects and customers in a low-pressure manner.
Send appointment reminders or follow-ups without forcing them to engage in receiving your message. If target contacts prefer it, using this technology will build consistently build rapport throughout the entire customer journey. When you reach out through a preferred method of communication, prospects, and customers take notice.
3) Redial Rules
Redial rules are an updated alternative to recycling campaigns and phone lists. Rather than waiting until agents dial through a list or campaign in its entirety, redial rules actively run as agents make calls. They allow for more calculated timing on further contact attempts and follow-up calls.
Managers establish the parameters within which redial rules work. For example, if an agent calls a prospect who doesn’t answer, you can create a redial state that will make three additional attempts, once every day for three days. The system automatically adds the number back into the queue without any action required by your agent.
Redial rules ensure consistent contact attempts with both prospects and customers. Rather than bombarding them with calls, your agents can reach out at specific, set intervals that apply across the board for each attempt. When you are intentional about your follow-up attempts, agents are more likely to reach customers on their time, helping to build rapport.
4) Integrations
Integrations allow your contact center platform to communicate with other third-party software applications. They create seamless connections between your solutions, most importantly, third-party CRMs. Most often, integrations will pass call data from your dialer into your CRM and vice-versa.
When you start using a new contact center solution, your current prospect and customer data already exists in a CRM like Salesforce or HubSpot. While some contact center software includes a built-in CRM, you may prefer to work with the one you already use. If that is the case, you need a dialer that allows for third-party integrations.
If you transfer data from an existing CRM into a new one, you risk data loss. This loss can lead to headaches for your agents and, more importantly, frustration for your customers. On the other hand, if you integrate with your existing system, you can pick up right where you left off with each person your agents are in contact with and maintain rapport throughout the transition.
5) Functionality
While it’s not a feature in and of itself, having a contact center solution focused on functionality is important for building rapport with customers and prospects. Fully-fledged software packed with features is important. However, if the software is not intuitive, it will lead to frustration for agents which may, in turn, end up projected onto customers.
Finding The Right Call Center Software
When looking for contact center software, consider the functionality of the platform. How is the user experience? How simple is it to work with other third-party software? Will your agents spend more time fumbling with the software than dialing? Each of these questions is important to consider when you’re looking for new software, especially from the perspective of building rapport with your customers.
