As manager of a call center, you understand that one of your most important metrics is customer satisfaction and customer experience(CX). In fact, customer satisfaction directly impacts the success of your business!
How does customer satisfaction impact business success?
- Your business will creates loyal customers: Satisfied customers are more likely to interact with your business again in the future.
- You will prevents lost revenue: Unsatisfied customers who have a poor customer service experience will generally switch to a competitor.
- You’ll generate more referrals through word of mouth: Customers who are satisfied with their experience will spread the word to their friends! Keep in mind that customers who are unsatisfied with your service will do the same.
Ready to improve your customer service and guarantee that customers are satisfied at the end of each call?
Use these six secrets to improve the CX in your call center:
- Hire For Fit
- Keep Employees Happy
- Provide Quality Training
- Properly Manage Call Handling
- Collect Customer Feedback
- Complete Quality Checks
Hire Customer Services Reps for Fit
The employee with the largest impact on your customers is your call agents and/or call operators, usually known as customer service representatives.
Customer service representatives tend to have the first interaction with a customer, and often are the first impression that a customer gets of your company. Because of their large role in the CX, it is essential that your customer service representatives act in a manner that aligns with your company's values.
Oftentimes, a business wants it's call operators to display professionalism and compassion to their callers. Unfortunately, compassion can not be easily taught as it is more of an innate quality.
So, it is necessary to hire employees who already display compassion. A good way to guarantee this is by hiring for fit.
By hiring for fit, you will find that your call center agents are more professional and compassionate, resulting in happier customers.
Download Free CSR Training Guide!
Keep Employees Happy
Once you've hired those employees that fit your company culture, you want them to remain with your business and be happy.
Happy employees are especially important in call centers. A smile can be heard over the phone, and the tone of voice that your customer service representatives use will directly impact the outcome of a customer call.
Quick Tips To Improve Employee Morale In A Call Center:
- Engage With Your Employees: Distant leaders can leave a bad impression on employees that results in a lack of respect. Engage with your employees daily in order to get to know them personally and become a better team.
- Say Thank You: Customer service representatives often deal with upset or annoyed callers, and dealing with this day in and day out can be stressful for any employee. Small acts of appreciation, such as saying thank you can show your appreciation to employees and make them feel valued in their role.
- Provide A Nice Environment: Customer call center agents spend a good chunk of their day staring at their computer, an activity that can dampen anyone's mood. Brighten up their work environment by adding some motivational posters or house plants to the area. These ideas might sound simple, but they can reduce stress and productivity!
- Give Compliments: Recognizing employee achievements can dramatically improve morale and productivity, and the best part? It's completely free!
- Bring Fun Into The Workplace: Depending on your call center's industry, you can also increase employee morale by incorporating fun into the office. Consider having a drawing for employees who have perfect attendance or who provide the best customer service.
*Struggling to manage your employees as they continue to work remotely due to COVID-19? Take a look at these eight ways to work from home employees engaged and motivated!
Properly Manage Calls
Do you have the best operator on the line?
Customer call centers tend to have a high employee turnover rate, which can result in a lack of highly trained customer service representatives. If your call center has a number of new operators, be sure that you are properly handling calls when they come in.
Manage calls so that operators take calls that they can handle and are prepared for. By managing calls in this way, you can guarantee that your callers don't have to endure continuous transfers that can negatively impact their calling experience and customer satisfaction.
Provide Quality Call Center Training
No matter how compassionate and professional your call agents are, they must have proper training to give callers the best possible customer experience.
Call center training includes proper onboarding and ongoing training sessions. When onboarding employees, be sure to give them thorough information on the company or products that they will be representing.
Customer call center agents often serve as brand ambassadors, so it is essential that they have all the necessary knowledge to do this best while still using proper call center etiquette.
Continuous learning is a must in any industry, and especially in customer service. Take a look at these simple telephone skills that effectively improve customer service for some quick learning!
Collect Customer Feedback
The most direct way to improve your call center's customer experience (CX) is to conduct customer satisfaction surveys.
Engaging with your customers in this way will allow insight directly from the customer's point of view that you can use to better your service and improve customer satisfaction.
Complete Quality Checks
The best way to determine the quality of your call center's customer service experience is to become a customer yourself!
You can mystery shop your own call center by calling in and posing as a customer. Or, a Dexcomm expert could audit your customer service for you. Ask questions that your callers would usually ask and see how the experience is overall.
- Are there long wait times?
- Are you interacting with compassionate call operators?
- Are you put on hold too often?
- Are your representatives using call center phone etiquette?
Take notes during your call and present them to your team afterwards to discuss and learn from.
