Customer service is more important now than ever, especially in the contact center space. Customer service is a representation of your brand image, mission, and values. In fact, many customers stay loyal to certain brands due to the quality of the brand’s customer service, and customer retention is oftentimes more important than customer acquisition. According to Hubspot Research, customer retention is cheaper than customer acquisition. An increase in customer retention by 5% can equate to an increase in profit by 25%. Hubspot Research touches upon this idea further by mentioning that repeat customers spend up to 67% more, than a first-time customer.
Having stellar customer service can improve business, improve brand loyalty and perception, and lead to more sales and growth for your business. Here are some ways to enhance customer service in your call center to ensure high customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Connecting With Customers on the Channel of Their Choice
Customers in the modern digital age are connecting on more channels now than ever before. Customers are increasingly on mobile channels and want to connect with the brands they love through the channels they use. These digital channels include email, chatbot, text, SMS messaging, messaging apps, video, and more.
Furthermore, customers want to be able to connect on any channel as effortlessly as possible with the option to seamlessly move between channels. For example, a customer that connects with your business through a AI-powered chatbot may want to be escalated to a live agent over the phone. Then on the phone, the customer may want to switch over to text messaging to continue receiving service. The best way to do this is through an omnichannel platform. An omnichannel platform allows your contact center to support any digital channel, and allow your agents to switch between digital channels effortlessly with the context of the conversation still accessible. With an omnichannel platform, your customers can connect with your business on any channel and switch between any digital channel with ease, all while your agent is able to keep up with the conversation through saved conversation contexts on their agent desktop.
Ensuring Quality Through Quality Management
Another way to enhance customer service in your call center is through quality management. Quality management is key to ensuring that every interaction between your agents and customers is high in both customer satisfaction and quality.
While many call centers perform quality management to some degree, it is often limited in scope and depth. Many contact centers only sample a small number of interactions, mainly over voice channels. To further enhance customer service in your call center, you can infuse AI into your quality management program. Through best-of-breed AI, you can monitor 100% of all interactions on all digital channels, giving you a comprehensive view of your contact center operations and easily allowing you to identify issues within the call center. Furthermore, through text and sentiment analysis, AI allows you to intervene in real-time if negative sentiment during an interaction is detected. Then, the conversation data is saved for agent retraining.
Seamless Self-Service Tools
Customers enjoy utilizing self-service tools when looking for a solution to their issue. In a report by Microsoft, titled the “Global State of Multichannel Customer Service Report”, Microsoft stated that “more than 90% of customers expect brands or organizations to have an online customer self-service offering, and 60% percent say they have a more favorable view of a brand if that self-service offering is mobile responsive.”
Efficient and effective self-service tools can enhance customer service by allowing customers to get quick and easy access to answers for frequently asked questions and solutions to common issues. Some great customer self-service tools include Conversational IVRs, chat bots that answer questions, and knowledge bases. With the right platform, customers that need more assistance can be automatically transferred to a live agent from these resources, enhancing their experience.
Bright Pattern’s Customer Service Platform
Bright Pattern’s cloud-based contact center software has all the tools and features your contact center needs to enhance customer service. Bright Pattern’s platform is omnichannel, has built-in quality management, and contains a wide range of AI-powered self-service tools to help guide customers through the journey.
Enhance your customer service today with Bright Pattern. Request a demo here to check out our quality management, omnichannel capabilities, and self-service tools in action.
