The quality of customer service you provide plays a vital role in deciding whether your business will be a hit or a miss. You may have the best of products but they are of no use if you cannot convince people to buy them. Your business is bound to fail if you are unable to meet the expectations of today’s customers. Customer service holds a major significance for any business. Let’s see how:
Customer frustration exists in every business. It may be due to an unresolved query or due to the hassle caused by the company during the return or exchange of a product. There are a lot of reasons that cause customer frustration. Here’s a list of the top five reasons responsible for the same:
CRM is very well known to help businesses manage processes such as lead tracking, customer support, customer data management, automating sales, simplifying sales processes and a lot more. This is not it, there’s a lot more to customer relationship management. CRM software help businesses in a number of ways that are not known to all. Read on to know what those uses are:
Gamification is all about using game design elements in non-game contexts so as to improve user engagement, productivity, ease of use, the usefulness of systems, physical exercise and a lot more. This powerful concept, when used for businesses, provides a number of benefits. Read on to know how you can leverage gamification to boost your business’s success:
Market research is an important component of business strategy and refers to any organized effort to gather information about target markets or customers. It provides important information that enables you to identify and analyze the market need, market size, and competition. Here are some of the tips to make the most out of your next market research:
A support ticket is commonly used in an organization’s customer support center to create, update, and resolve reported customer issues, or even issues reported by that organization’s other employees. Generally, staff receiving a query from a user would fill out a small card with the user’s details and a brief summary of the request and place it on a list of pending queries for an appropriate person. Support tickets help resolve queries that are impossible to handle in a single attempt. Since it eventually affects customer satisfaction, so, the entire process needs to be speedy. Here are some useful tips that can help speed up the entire process:
Social media platforms do a lot more than just connecting the people around the globe. Businesses can use social media for a number of purposes like gaining wider exposure, providing customer support and more. Here are some of the best tips that can help you provide exceptional customer service using social media.
Businesses these days, very well know the power of a strong customer relationship. They are ready to go above and beyond to live up to the customers’ expectations to build an emotional connection with their customers. Connecting with your target audience on an emotional level can actually help you boost the level of customer satisfaction and hence, gain long-term customers. But how do you do that? Read on to know:
A single question helps calculate NPS: How likely is it that you would recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?
The score for the answer varies from 0 to 10. People who respond with a score of 9 to 10 are called “Promoters”. Others who respond with a score of 0 to 6 are labeled “Detractors”. Apart from these, the responses of 7 and 8 are labeled “Passives”. Now, every business needs a good amount of promoters so as to inflate their profits. And here’s all that it takes to get a good amount of promoters:
Customer feedback is basically the opinion of the customers regarding your products and services. Since customer satisfaction is the ultimate goal of any business, so, customer opinion is the most important of all and you need to make sure you listen to them at all times. Customer feedback matters a lot as it benefits your business in a number of ways:
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:
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.
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:
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
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.