How to boost the performance of your customer service department and make your customers happy
Any company interested in growing is striving to win new customers and retain their existing ones. Your customers, in fact, have the same need. Let’s see how you can help them.
Would you agree that winning new customers and retaining the existing ones, for the most part, depends on the performance of the customer service department?
In this article we will see in detail some typical challenges that call agents face each day, that prevent the company from achieving its business goals, and how you can help them overcome these problems.
✔ Flexibility in managing agent opt-in/ opt-out option
In a critical situation, when there is a high load of incoming calls, call agents have no easy way of adding themselves to a call queue. They either have to depend on a system administrator to do it for them or to remember complicated procedures to do it via a dedicated Feature Code.
Let’s keep in mind that the primary tool used by contact center agents has always been, and still remains, the desk phone. What about a simple button that allows a call agent to opt-in/ opt-out of getting calls from the selected call queue directly from the desk phone?
Thanks to this simple button, the company can speed up its responsiveness to the customer and improve the overall performance of the customer service department.
✔ Handling incoming calls in a timely manner
Today’s customers are quite demanding and expect companies to operate at incredible speeds. Here is where Artificial Intelligence (AI) comes in handy. It is important to understand that the goal of AI is not to replace humans, but to augment human capabilities, provide a quicker response to more customers at a time and increase the number of interactions.
In fact, today’s customers do not require much of a human touch–they love to self-service. Think about IVRs with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), allowing callers to interact with the system using just their voice. For example, you can program the system to invite the caller to say the name of the department, or the name of their account manager, and be automatically routed to the correct destination.
As a result, companies can decrease the wait time for the customer and their call agents can spend less time on routine operations and call activities.
✔ Automatic routing of calls from customers to account managers
Imagine that you have to call your account manager and you don’t know the DID number. You call the general phone number, the company is quite big, and then you take rounds repeating the same thing to different people before they finally route you to the right destination – what a waste of time both for the customer and for the company!
The times of switchboard operators have long gone. There is no need for the employees to spend time on repetitive call activities. Why not to assign each contact in the company’s phonebook to its account manager (“contact owner”). As simple as it is–the system will automatically connect a call arriving from a known contact to the right person in the company.
This useful feature helps the company provide a more professional customer service that saves a lot of time for both the customer and the company.
✔ Increasing sales through company website
Many businesses already understand the importance of their corporate website and how they can effectively use it to bring in more customers and convert a random website visitor into a client. This is why many of them have already added a contact button or a chat widget to their websites. Chat is a powerful tool, but let us not forget about the importance of a call.
Unfortunately many widgets do not provide such an option, and even if they do, they allow only one-way call, that is, from the customer to the company employee, or, even worse–an option to enter a phone number for callback.
No need to mention that this slows down and complicates the communication between the company and its potential customer. What if a call agent could place an outgoing call to an external user (website visitor) who contacted the company via chat, directly? Try to imagine to which extent it will simplify the communication and speed up the purchase.
✔ Making sure calls from customers do not get stuck in a call queue
What happens when you call a business and hear the following? “All our operators are busy at the moment, please hold the line…” What if all of the call agents are currently busy or unavailable? You might continue to hold the line forever. How do you personally feel when this happens? You feel like you are wasting your time.
How about intelligent call routing, where calls are distributed based on call agent status? If all of the agents in a given call queue are busy/ paused/ have an incoming call, then calls should be handled according to the next step in the Dialplan procedure, e.g. routed to a backup destination.
Needless to say that this feature greatly contributes to the customer loyalty and satisfaction.
✔ Making sure calls from customers always reach their destination
They say, you never have a second chance to make a first impression. Imagine the following situation: you call a company’s central phone number. Perhaps this is the first time you are contacting this company. Your call is transferred to the correct department or call agent… who is either busy at the moment or simply doesn’t answer. It’s an unpleasant surprise, but what could make it even worse? The call gets disconnected.
Return from transfer is a feature that any PBX vendor offers nowadays… But what if, after an unsuccessful call transfer attempt, the call returns to the person who is busy or unavailable at the moment? In this case, the company might not simply lose an important call, but lose this customer altogether, due to the poor customer service.
Here is the feature that you must offer to prevent this from happening–the possibility to define a backup destination in the Dialplan, where a call should be routed to, in case of an unsuccessful return from transfer.
Providing companies with the right tools that bring their customer service to a new level, improve customer satisfaction, decrease customer wait time, speed up sales and increase the call agent efficiency–this is exactly what helps MSPs retain their customers, win new ones, and as a result–grow their business.
The question is, whether or not the solution you are offering is capable of meeting your customer’s needs. If you are not sure, it might be useful to check the latest release from Wildix–WMS version 4, that adds support for all the above mentioned features, and much more: https://www.wildix.com/wms-release-4/.