Is your customer experience holding your business back? As a call center manager, managing the caller experiences is a crucial step in making your brand stand out. Approximately 97% of customers share excellent customer service experiences with friends and family.
Create more of these experiences and leverage them to promote sustained business growth. Explore the ways that you can utilize automated tools, KPI statistics, CRM integration, and improved training methods to help your brand stand out.
Identify Demographics
Dive into your demographics to get to know your customers. Improving customer experience, or CX, starts with understanding your customers. Nine out of 10 consumers prefer an omnichannel experience, while 65% of customers say the most preferred channel is still a phone call. Focus on creating a streamlined call system with preview dialing and inbound calling solutions.
Spend time getting to know your current customer demographics. Additionally, CRM and KPI statistics are gold mines of customer information. Review any lists created by managers to identify their sources.
It can be helpful to create customer personas based on your research. A customer persona includes personal information and buying habits. This information is generalized to create a fictional character that represents your average customer. One or more personas help you and your call center agents better understand the values and needs of typical callers.
Once you’ve created a detailed profile of your current caller list, review your potential prospects and compare any differences. Integrate your data with cloud-based call center software to avoid losing critical data if you need to switch dialing platforms.
Use IVRs and Skill-Based Routing
Customers are calling to receive a quick answer. This can be achieved by promptly connecting customers to an agent who is capable of answering confidently. Skill-based routing is an excellent strategy to match agents and customers.
The process starts with an IVR system to direct customers. IVR, or interactive voice response, is an AI-driven process that can reduce wait times and quickly connect customers to the right agent.
After entering the relevant department or query topic, callers are funneled to the correct department or agent. This process is particularly useful if you’re handling a wide range of sales questions or highly technical information.
Finally, combining IVRs and skill-based routing reduces the amount of time spent waiting in a queue. A state-of-the-art IVR can also answer common questions, freeing up time for your agents. A detailed set of questions reduces the risk of transferring calls between multiple agents.
Provide Call Back Options
When your agents are all handling calls, a wait time is unavoidable. Your call center could handle every call immediately in a perfect world, but this is rarely the case. Unfortunately, this leads to customers being put on hold in a queue. Nonetheless, this can feel frustrating or infuriating for a customer.
Consider implementing a call back feature in your call center. As long as your software allows it, a call back option gives callers the freedom to hang up and enjoy their day before receiving a call and connecting with an agent.
Business SMS services offer another way to reduce the amount of time spent in a queue. Customers with quick questions can text your call center and receive a simple answer by text. Many customers may prefer to wait for an SMS message rather than being put on hold.
Create Emotional Connections
From retail stores to call centers, emotional connections transform satisfied customers into loyal followers. Create a call experience that doesn’t just provide answers but creates connections. Consider these goals to make emotional connections in business to build your call center brand:
- Communicate with empathy
- Use humor and a positive attitude
- Build trust with accurate information
- Show off your organized, efficient process.
The exact steps to achieve these goals can vary depending on your call center services. Discuss these goals with your agents and create action steps to build emotional connections with customers.
Study Customer Feedback
Is your call center living up to your expectations? It can be difficult to determine the mood of your customers without detailed caller feedback. Without multiple survey options, you may not have enough data to review your CX.
One popular way to gather customer feedback is a survey at the end of the call. A question or two doesn’t take up a considerable amount of time and gives you a window into the immediate thoughts and feelings of a caller.
Online surveys or in-person feedback can also be helpful. Feedback after the fact may require an incentive for your customer. A survey without an incentive may not create the emotional connections your brand needs.
Promote Proper Training
First impressions are crucial when building a brand. Your call center agents are customer-facing, which means they are often the first point of contact between new customers and your company. Don’t let an inexperienced or improperly trained agent negatively affect your brand, but invest in improved agent training to improve CX.
Agent training starts with the hiring process. Ideal candidates have a social, outgoing personality. They must have a positive attitude, even in the face of rejection and criticism. Once you hire a motivated, professional agent, be sure to invest in training that includes the following information:
- Your brand
- Your products
- Customer service protocol
- Technical support
- Sales strategies
The average call center needs to replace 26% of agents every year. This high turnover rate is a major investment, but proper training and professional resources equip call center agents for a successful career. Promote training, competitive benefits, and an excellent company culture to increase employee retention rates.
Improve Your Customer Experience With CallTools
Build your brand and grow your business with the latest in CX research, tools, and strategies. CallTools offers innovative call center software to help your brand stand out. Take a tour of this innovative platform today to see how a few additional tools can streamline your calling and promote customer satisfaction. An integrated, cloud-based approach offers you the flexibility your brand needs to grow in a competitive call center market.
