5 Key Tips For Improving Customer Service

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Intense competition. Demanding market conditions. Challenging financial situations. These factors threaten you daily. They make it increasingly harder to beat out the competition. So how do you overcome these factors? That’s no secret. You create consistent customer experiences or improving customer service. Doing so boosts your brand and reputation. It also increases customer service and customer satisfaction. Unfortunately, new challenges make it harder to produce consistent customer experiences. These challenges give customers a boatload of options to explore. As a result, customers are less willing to settle for anything less than the best.

Below are five opportunities that you can turn into consistent customer experiences using cost-effective best practices.

1. Provide Precise, Up-to-date Information

Studies show that a key reason for the majority of callbacks at inbound call centers results from one thing: insufficient information. You must provide CSRs and customers with precise, up-to-date information to create a consistent experience.

While the cost of doing this is significant, it’s worth doing. Why—because the cost of customer dissatisfaction generated by poor service is far greater.

Fortunately, the technology exists to provide up-to-date information cost-effectively to both CSRs and customers. These technologies often address the needs of specific industries.

Take the communications industry. Available apps exist to connect both customers and CSRs to a Web-based accurate depiction of coverage and outage areas during emergencies—key information of value to both CSRs and customers.

2. Improving Customer Service Via Customized Communication

Customers want to be able to contact you anywhere anytime across any channel. Providing this kind of communication is paramount these days.

To do this, you must have the ability to create, manage, and send personalized messages in all forms of communication—transactional, interactive, and on-demand.

This last element is becoming increasingly necessary. Customers not only want to reach you through your Website and by phone, they also want to reach you through two-way email and SMS channels.

3. Generate Accurate Transactional Documents

More than 95% of all transactional documents, like billing and invoices, are opened monthly. As a result, the highest number of customer calls relate in some way to transactional documents.

Take the Cable TV industry: 60% of all calls involve billing questions. In the wireless industry, 55% of all calls related to rate plans and account information.

You need to produce clear, accurate customized transactional documents to satisfy today’s customers. Organizations that have this capability receive fewer calls, get paid faster, and reduce cycle times.

With the right tools, you even add informative relevance and timely messages to these documents, turning them into powerful marketing messages that help improve customer service.

4. Improving Customer Service via Real-Time Visibility

Even if you produce clearer, accurate transactional documents, you’ll still have to field some calls about them. To handle these calls, you’ll need to provide CSRs with desktop access to any customer document in real-time. It’s called real-time visibility.

Desktop access to customer documents makes it easy for CSRs to explain where an invoice amount, offer code, or service charge appears. This in turn results in quicker call resolution and significantly lower costs.

5. Offer Intuitive Self-Service Capabilities

Customers want to address problems when they want and the way they want. Intuitive self-service capabilities enable them to do this.

The technology exists today to implement robust, well-branded self-service functionality faster and more cost-effectively than ever before through Websites.

These sites allow customers to view and pay bills, see updated balance information, order new services, change existing services, and dispute and adjust changes online, among other things.

You can augment these capabilities by also providing live chat options. In addition to providing a more personal touch to the activity, chat options generate opportunities for consultative selling.

These five best practices can help you provide consistent customer experiences. It’s what today’s customers demand and expects. Customers today won’t settle for anything less than your best.

To create consistent experiences, you must not only develop a customer-centric mindset, but you must also have the capabilities to deliver the right message to the right customer at the right time using his or her preferred channel Outsource customer service and boost your customer satisfaction to the next level.

Anything less leaves you vulnerable.

As a leading IT help desk outsourcing company, we are ready to leverage our proven experience in providing tech support for small and medium-sized companies to assist you. Take advantage of our expertise and request a quote from our dedicated sales team today.



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