Customer Contact Services (Part 2 of 3)

This is the second in our 3-part blog series about Customer Contact Services and what you must absolutely do to win customer love and loyalty. In our first article, we talked about essential high touch culture and service – the Commitment to Do It Right when it comes to customer contact services. Your call center sets the tone for each customer’s purchasing experience.

If you expect to win the love and loyalty of your customers, you have to provide consistently top-notch customer contact services. Every detail matters. If you drop the ball, you could lose the sale. Worse, you could lose that customer for life.

The Ability to Do It Right

In our previous article we mentioned the importance of training. Superior call center personnel don’t just drop into their chair fully prepared. They have to learn the systems that enable them to communicate accurately with customers. They have to learn about your products, to effectively answer questions, advise and upsell customers.

Tools & Training

It takes tools and training to pull that off. For instance, call center agents need fully integrated inventory and order management technology in order to access accurate information in real time for customers. Without that kind of support, they’re destined to disappoint your customers.

How do you know if your people are delivering a “wow” experience? There’s no reason to guess. High touch fulfillment companies insist on the highest performance standards. And they closely monitor their own performance.

• On average, call centers take 30 seconds to answer a call. That can seem like an eternity. Your customers should expect 20 seconds. Or less.
• On average, 3% of calls are abandoned. That’s a lot of lost sales. Your company customer contact center should be able to cut that in half.
• Customers hate returns. Top customer care partners minimize that risk. Your customers are happier, and so is your bottom line.

There’s one more critical metric: turnover.

Average call centers can be a revolving door. On the other hand, superior call centers have superior employees. People who get quality training and have the latest tools to do their job are happier and stick around longer. The result? A higher quality, high touch experience for your customers.

Slow response and mistakes put any chance of long-term customer love and loyalty at risk. Do your current customer contact services get things right, every time, for every customer?

In our next installment, we’ll explore the third must-have for companies that want to create customer love and loyalty: an open mind.

If you’d like to discuss outsourcing your customer contact services, give us a shout!