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By: Oscar A. Alban, Witness Systems
In an ideal world, we could strike the perfect
balance between consumers calling us to purchase
new products and those needing support or service
issues addressed. Unfortunately, it’s a
tough balance to achieve. While we want our customers
to communicate with us, we also want to ensure
we provide them with as much information, detail
and instruction so they can “help themselves.”
As customer self-service and e-media communications
increase in popularity, telephone support through
companies’ call centers remains an equally
viable option. The good news for companies today
is each time they connect with customers –
whether it’s through the telephone, Web
or email – new and valuable opportunities
surface to sell and service them, as well as make
a memorable impression with the caliber of our
service, the knowledge and efficiency of our staff,
and our service consistency regardless of the
touch point the customer chooses. Yet, at the
same time, we want to encourage customers to interact
with us through the least expensive medium, usually
self-service. The opportunity to retain more customers
and boost customer loyalty is an ever-present
variable that companies can continue to build
upon each and every time they connect with a customer.
According to JD Power and Associates’ 2001
Residential Local Telephone Customer Satisfaction
Study, customer service, cost of service/value,
and corporate image are all dominant factors determining
overall customer satisfaction in local telephone
service providers. Customer service – and
to some extent costs—are aspects we can
control. In the telecommunications sector, in
particular, approximately 90-95 percent of customers’
interactions with companies take place through
their contact centers. Following are some helpful
hints on how to master the quality service angle
to ensure your customers are satisfied and ready
to turn to your organization time and time again.
- Monitor your service standards: find
out how your customers are treated: Strive to
monitor a representative percentage of your
company’s contacts to gauge service, quality
and consistency. Capturing a sample of agent-customer
interactions provides great insight and business
intelligence into your campaigns, emerging trends,
revenue opportunities and training/development
needs for your staff. By monitoring customer
contacts, you can determine what improvements
you need to make in customer service and in
optimizing your customer relationships.
- Establish a thorough training and development
program, including captured samples of effective
and non-effective customer interactions:
In providing quality customer service, training
is one of the most critical elements to success.
Often, CSRs serve as the frontline and most
customer-facing connection point between your
organization and consumers. If their knowledge,
efficiency and skills aren’t up-to-par,
customers can leave with a negative impression.
In today’s Internet age, our competition
is only a click away – reinforcing the
need to foster continual training programs that
allow CSRs to grow and develop in our organizations.
Training increases CSRs’ productivity,
efficiency and skills, which translates into
higher levels of customer satisfaction.
- Provide your customers with the option
of Web self-service: Increasingly, consumers
are taking the route of “self-service”
to find answers to their questions, purchase
goods and services, and even pay bills on-line.
In fact, experts predict the number of individuals
seeking on-line customer service will more than
double in the next several years, approaching
70 million. Therefore, now is the time to start
taking action to improve your self-service channels.
An effort that’s very worthwhile, customer
self-service via the Web, is the most cost-effective
way to provide customer service and a great
way to help build loyalty, increase profitability
of on-line relationships and reduce overall
service costs. By capturing samples of how customers
help themselves, you’ll improve Web effectiveness
and benefit from a much more cost-effective
medium.
- Integrate all customer communications
into one touch point: Over the past several
years, the customer service industry has dedicated
a great deal of time and resources into evolving
our call centers into multimedia contact centers,
which handle consumers’ email, Web sales
and service interactions, in addition to telephone
calls. Many contact centers have even established
benchmarks for responding to these various types
of customer contacts, such as email response
times and Web callback standards. What we must
now ensure, however, is that our customers receive
consistent, personalized service across all
communication channels regardless of the medium.
That’s where monitoring multimedia communications
comes in handy.
- Simplify the sales process: Since
the telecommunications industry is required
to verify customer requests as CSRs sell products/services
through the telephone, implement a recording
solution that documents and acts as the customer’s
“virtual signature.” By recording
key interactions in the sales process, companies
can then retain the contacts for future reference
or dispute resolution. Capturing vital portions
of such interactions serves as both an insurance
policy for companies, as well as customers.
- Share customer information throughout
the company: Industry analysts estimate
that 60 percent of customer interactions occur
through the contact center; and in other vertical
markets, like telecom, that figure is significantly
higher, based on the nature of the industry.
Information gathered through multimedia customer
interaction recording provides valuable insight
into customers and their experiences. Too often,
this critical customer information never leaves
the contact center when it should be shared
with other divisions of the company, such as
product development and marketing. The ability
to capture key interactions and then share them
throughout the enterprise allows companies to
rapidly respond to buying habits, preferences
and overall consumer trends, which ultimately
allows you to serve your customers better.
Oscar A. Alban serves as principal, market consultant
for Witness Systems, a global provider of multimedia
customer interaction recording, performance analysis
and e-learning management software that enables
companies to optimize their customer relationships.
This article was originally published in the January
2002 issue of Phone + Magazine.
©2002-2003, Witness Systems, Inc. All Rights
Reserved Worldwide.
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