How to Improve the Customer Service Call Center Experience

A call center representative should help customers as fast as possible while taking time to build relationships. They must also make sales but not be salesy. When interacting with customers, an agent’s job is filled with dozens of conflicting “must-dos” that ensure they offer the best customer service call center experience.

How can call center reps be fast yet deliberate in their interactions to increase sales without hurting the customer experience?

Learn five strategies that help inbound customer support agents make the most of every minute without taking longer than necessary to solve issues or make a sale.

Key Takeaways:

• A great customer experience starts by collecting data to understand each person.
• Customer-centric call centers emphasize the relationship over a sale because they understand the value of loyal customers.
• Give customers options outside of your call center for finding solutions so customers can avoid unnecessary wait times.

How a Great Customer Service Call Center Experience Boosts Your Sales

Today, 88% of companies prioritize the customer’s experience even above pricing and products. When customers are satisfied with their customer service call center interactions, they are more likely to purchase from you and remain loyal to your brand. Prioritizing their satisfaction over meeting a quota will help you reach your sales goals and increase revenue.

A good experience in your call center improves:

• Cross-selling and up-selling
• Customer satisfaction
• Customer retention
• Bottom line revenue

Image from SuperOffice

5 Ways to Improve the Customer Service Call Center Experience

Use these five tips to improve your customer’s experience when interacting with your call center.

1. Understand the Customer

Over 66% of customers expect you to understand them and their unique needs. In a world overflowing with data, your company has access to tools and information needed to thoroughly understand each customer.

For example, every time a customer interacts with your brand or customer service agents, you receive insights into who they are and how they behave. Saving that data and using it to map their journey improves your understanding of the customer and what motivates their actions, which helps you personalize your solutions.

However, before you can create a thorough profile of each customer, you must unify your sales and marketing teams. United teams allow everyone access to data from every touchpoint.

A thorough understanding of your customer allows you to:

• Provide customized offers
• Interact with them more meaningfully
• Avoid them having to repeat themselves
• Connect more personally
• Address relevant pain points

2. Be Relational, Not Transactional

Practicing relational selling versus transactional means your call center customer service reps treat customers as people rather than numbers. Sales reps invest in customer relationships by making an emotional connection through empathetic and personalized communication.

For instance, before diving into the next deal, ask how they are enjoying any other products they purchased from you or ask about a pain point they mentioned in the past.

Some other examples of relational selling include:

• Surprising them with relevant and timely upgrades, discounts, and gifts
• Offering loyalty rewards
• Using storytelling to relate to customers
• Listening to their needs instead of doing all the talking

3. Offer Other Options for Communication

Be mindful of your customers’ time. They often have busy schedules and don’t want to spend too much of their day on a customer support call. You can improve their experience by streamlining the exchange so that they can receive the right solution faster and in the first call.

This also benefits your call center as faster customer service frees your agents up for more customer interactions.

About 68% of customers prefer to reach customer service over the phone. However, that isn’t the only way customers will interact with your business. About 55% prefer email, 40% prefer in-person, 33% prefer live agent chat, and 13% like using chatbots. Offering multiple communication channels will improve the customer experience as customers can reach out through the most convenient method.

Another way to streamline your customer service is sharing solutions outside of the call center, like on frequently asked questions pages or public forums. Since nearly half of calls are for more information, you can answer the most common questions on your website or blog instead of through customer service calls. Then, customers can get answers faster, and your call center isn’t as busy.

Image from INVOCA

4. Improve Your Call Routing

Long wait times can result in a negative call center customer experience before a call center representative even has a chance to interact with the customer. Over 77% of customers say that customer service is difficult to reach and will often hang up if they wait longer than 11 minutes.

Promptly routing customers and leads to the most qualified people in the right department will start your customer interactions with a positive experience. Good customer service in a call center includes:

• Using an automated menu for customers to select a department
• Provide automated solutions so they can get answers without having to hold
• Ask customers to input account information while waiting to streamline the call process.
• Use virtual call ques where customers can input their phone number, and the next available representative will call when their turn comes rather than staying on the line
• Collect customer phone numbers to use if they are disconnected during a call or transfer

5. Collect Customer Feedback

Requesting customer feedback before, during, and after a call provides additional data for improving future interactions. You can collect the feedback through a live survey given by an agent, an on-the-phone automated survey, or an emailed survey after the call ends. The feedback might include questions about the customer’s case that you can add to their profile or general questions about their experience that you can use to improve your call center.

Feedback is especially vital after a negative experience because you can turn a negative into a positive if customers alert you to their feelings and promptly address the issue.

For example, 83% of customers are willing to remain loyal to companies that respond to their complaints. In addition, only 20% of customers are willing to forgive a poor experience at a business with poor customer service, whereas 80% will forgive a negative experience if you have good customer service.

The feedback you receive, both good and bad, should shape your future customer service strategies to ensure you always provide the best experience for each customer and provide a way for customers to feel heard.

Create a Customer-Centric Call Center Experience

When you transform your call center strategies to always provide a positive experience, you will see more sales and improve your customers’ satisfaction. Enhancing the customer experience starts by combining your sales and marketing teams for a unified approach and better customer insights.

Contact us today to learn about our customer experience solutions to improve your call center experience.