Customer service is an inevitable aspect of a company and it’s success. You may offer the best of goods and services to the customers but that’s not the only thing that matters. Despite the exceptional quality of your goods, customers may still have queries that if go unresolved may lead to customer dissatisfaction.
So, you need to ensure that the customer service you offer to your customers is satisfactory. For this, you further need to make sure that you hire the right candidates to handle your customers. Let’s have a look at the mandatory interview questions you need to ask while hiring customer service reps:
Power lead generation refers to a bidirectional lead generation strategy. It requires you to work with a combination of inbound and outbound lead generation strategies. The process involves the creation of inbound and outbound leads.
With the ever-increasing customer expectations, it becomes quite difficult for the small customer support teams to live up to customer’s expectations. With all the customers’ queries and complaints flooding in through different channels, providing timely responses becomes a daunting task. However, even the smaller teams can provide the expected level of service using the following strategies:
Working at a customer service center is quite a daunting task. You have to deal with a variety of customers and situations may not always be in your favor. The only solution is to handle every situation gracefully. There are certain things that a customer service representative needs to know before everything else. Let’s see what they are:
Live chat is undoubtedly an untapped potential to grow your business. A live chat feature on your website can drive numerous benefits towards your business. However, you need to use the live chat software wisely to enjoy those benefits. Here are the best strategies that can profit your business through live chat:
All the CRM software are specially designed to help businesses meet the overall goals of customer relationship management. As a matter of fact, a CRM software can work wonders for your business provided you choose the right one. Let’s have a look at the best CRM software available:
Multichannel marketing refers to the process of blending distribution and promotional channels for the purpose of marketing. Distribution channels involved in this type of marketing may range from a retail storefront to a website. An effective multichannel marketing is supported by good supply chain management systems such that the details and prices of goods on offer are consistent across the different channels. It is also supported by detailed analysis of the return on investment from each different channel, measured in terms of customer response and conversion of sales. It benefits a business in a number of ways:
No business wants to witness customer churn. In other words, every business fears losing its customers but some customers are past saving. These are the ones who’ve made their decision and are about to leave soon. Now all you can do is prevent more of customers from following the suit. How can that be done? Let’s have a look:
So far we have seen that live chat benefits a business in a number of ways. It can help reduce the bounce rates and site abandonment rate, boost sales and build strong customer relationships. There’s one more benefit of using live chat on your website. Wondering what it is? Well, live chat if used appropriately can increase your business’s conversion rates. Want to know how? Read on.
As mentioned earlier, brand building refers to the process of generating awareness, establishing and promoting company using strategies and tactics. It is basically the visual voice of your company that differentiates you from your competitors and convinces people as to why they should choose you. You need an efficacious visual representation of your company that is capable of conveying the branding of your company. For this, you need to opt for an exceptional brand building platform. Let’s have a look at the best ones:
Brand building refers to boosting a brand’s equity directly through advertising campaigns and indirectly through promotions such as event sponsorship. In order to build your brand effectively, you need to employ an exceptional brand building process. Now, what all does an effective brand building process do? Well, It does a lot! For instance, it:
This is an era of digitization. You can find everything from a newspaper to books to apparels online. There is no need to hop stores to purchase something that you require. You just need to browse and click and that’s it! Though online shoppers experience convenience with the help of online shopping, there are a number of difficulties they have to face:
Lead generation refers to the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing sales pipeline. It is very important to have qualified leads so as to have qualified leads.
Lead generation is all about brand awareness, pulling down leads and making sales. Therefore, employing the best lead generation strategies can prove to be beneficial for any business in the long run. Here we have piled up the best lead generation strategies that you can leverage to boost your lead generation:
The quality of customer service you provide to your customers plays a vital role in the success of your business irrespective of its size. Therefore, almost all companies try to improve their customer service performance by employing the best strategies. Also, a productive support team will be consistent at all times. Here are the best strategies employed by the most successful businesses in order to maximize their performance in customer service:
Customer relationships need to be nurtured as they play a vital role in the success of a business. Companies should work towards the enhancement of customer relationships. Here are a few tips on how you can deepen the customer relationships:
Customer retention basically means customers of the product or business tend to return to, continue to buy or in some other way not defect to another product or business, or to non-use entirely. Selling organizations fear customer defections and hence try to minimize them by employing effective strategies to retain the customers.
Researchers have proved that acquiring new customers cost more than retaining the existing ones. Moreover, customer retention is directly proportional to profitability. So, companies need to implement certain customer retention strategies so as to grow their business. Here are the best strategies to curb customer defection and develop long-term relationships:
In a typical situation, customer queries are addressed when they arise. Though an instant query resolution would make them happy this reactive approach may not provide you with the desired customer satisfaction level. So, a better option for an inflated customer contentment rate is the “proactive approach”.Now, what exactly is a proactive approach? Well, it means, you solve problems before customers have to call you. With a proactive customer support, you can solve customer queries even before they become aware of them. Let’s see how you can accomplish this highly efficacious strategy.
ASA is a call center key performance indicator (KPI) typically referenced by managers while assessing their team’s performance, efficacy and degree of accessibility to their callers. It is a term pertaining to the service industry where it is also known as “Average Seconds to Answer” and “Average Time to Answer” (ATA). It is further defined as the average waiting time for a caller before he is acknowledged by a service representative.
The mathematical formula is:
Average Speed of Answer = Total Waiting Time for Answered Calls/Total Number of Answered Calls
ASA
Factors affecting ASA:
1. Customer satisfaction:
Customer satisfaction is associated with an average speed of answer. This is because the time spent queueing is one of the main factors that affect how customers judge the level of service. Low waiting times do not automatically indicate high CSat. Customer satisfaction is understood from the contact center’s perspective. It starts from the instant when the customer is placed in a queue after they have navigated IVR. As a matter of fact, long or confusing IVR processes can lead to a bad customer experience. This is because lengthy IVR processes cause frustration in the customers. Moreover, they make the customer experience much more drawn out than the ASA figures would ideally indicate.
2. Call abandonment rate:
Call abandon rate is yet another factor that affects the average speed of answer data. In the cases where customers end the calls before they are connected to an agent, their calls do not count towards the ASA figure. Various factors may be responsible for the agents abandoning a call. Of all the possible reasons, a prolonged wait has the highest probability of triggering call abandonment. As a result, the worst offenders, in terms of answer speed, are often discounted from the understanding of the actual figure.
We made you familiar with the concept of occupancy in our previous post. Now, let’s have a look at the most effective tips for improving call center occupancy:
1. Agent utilization during the quiet periods:
There might be days when the traffic at a call center is not much. These days are referred to as the quiet periods. Productivity and occupancy levels can be increased by asking agents to take on different tasks during these quiet periods. As an example, call centers that normally handle only incoming calls ask agents to make outbound calls during quiet periods or ontact customers to ask if they were satisfied with the service they received. These periods are even utilized to call customers who have recently purchased a product to offer them information on other products of interest. This ultimately improves the call center ocupancy.
2. Self service facilities:
You can consider offering customer self-service facilities through website, e-mail or voice mail. These facilities help reduce staffing levels and call volumes Providing customers with self-service options for services such as requesting service calls, placing and tracking order etc. ultimately reduces the call volumes and helps in optimizing the call center occupancy.
3. Call monitoring:
Call monitoring is yet another powerful strategy for improving call center occupancy. You can consider monitoring the call volumes at different times of the day and on different days in order to identify busy periods and quiet periods. Thereafter, you can schedule staff levels to reduce the time customers have to wait in a queue during busy periods.
4. Call center outsourcing:
You can provide additional resources for peak periods by outsourcing a part of your call center operations. Moreover, you can consider switching resources between the main call center and the outsourced call center instead of asking permanent staff to attend more calls during peak hours. Apart from improving the occupancy rate of each staff, it also ensures that their efficiency is not getting affected during peak hours.
Agent occupancy refers to the percentage of time that call agents spend handling incoming calls against the available or idle time, which is determined by dividing workload hours by staff hours. It is a statistic used in calculating the productivity of a call center. When agent occupancy is the final outcome of how staffing is matched to incoming call patterns to a call center, the desired level of occupancy may drive staffing decisions in a sequential work environment. This useful metric can be utilized to measure instant messaging interactions as well.
Agent occupancy
Utilization rate, also known as call center occupancy, is measured as:
Handle time (talk time + after call work time) / time signed into a queue.
This metric is expressed as a percentage and tells you the amount of time that work is being performed in support of the call center’s queue. It also tells you how hard the call center agents are being driven. Higher the occupancy rate, shorter is the amount of time between calls. According to a research, 80% occupancy rate means that 20% of the time the representative was available for a call and the remaining 80% the representative was either on a call or in after call work status.
Occupancy rate
Call center utilization or agent occupancy is not controlled at an individual level. It is rather a group, queue or center measure. Also, it is a function of forecasting and staffing, the workload offered by the calls arriving randomly and the handle times. As a matter of fact, smaller groups have lower occupancy than the larger ones. Also, higher occupancy rates do not always correlate to an increased productivity. Therefore, call center agents can generally handle short bursts of increased activity but sustained high occupancy can lead to burnout. You need to know that call center occupancy needs to be considered along with other factors such as overall productivity, error rates, quality scores etc. in order to make the most out of it.
