Key Points

• A call center might be the first and only interaction a customer has with a business.
• This is one of the easiest ways to surprise and delight customers by going above and beyond.
• No question messing up this process can easily force customers over to your competitors.

For any company that wants to earn customer loyalty and return business, raising the bar on customer service is the way to go. While low prices and an easy return policy can help a business get really far with customers, it’s the situations that happen when a customer has an issue that really differentiates the good brands from the bad.

There was a time not too long ago when a company knew it had to focus on a customer’s experience with its call centers, but today, companies have to know it’s beyond vital. This is especially true in an AI world where companies are looking to utilize technology to help expedite customer service responses and deliver better service to customers globally.

Why Call Center Service Matters So Much

For many companies, a customer calling into its call center is arguably one of the first points of contact, at least on the human side. This is especially true for an online retailer, where there is no human interaction at any point during a sale. It doesn’t matter if it’s a company the size of Amazon or a mom-and-pop online seller, a call center might be the only experience you have with a business that can make or break your next purchase.

It’s for this reason that call center service really matters so much, as how these interactions are handled is going to shape the way the brand is represented. Rude and quick call center interactions are going to lead customers to seek out another company that values their business. On the other hand, calling into a service center and working with someone empathetic can go a long way to building up customer loyalty.

Most importantly, customer service may be the single biggest differentiator in a crowded field where finding a competitive edge is challenging. Being known for having outstanding call center support might be the very reason someone picks your business over another. This is the very thing that can build up customer retention and quickly earn not just repeat business, but word-of-mouth referrals as well.

Strategies for Your Call Center Service Team

One of the most important things to do is to develop a strategy to boost the performance of your call center service team effectively. For starters, you are going to look at the idea of Continuous Training, which is going to make sure that all center service employees remain up-to-date on everything around the products they help support. They also need to receive ongoing training in soft skills, such as empathy and patience with customers.

Another big bonus and one of the things that will help differentiate from competitors is to Empower Employees. Without exception, all center service employees who don’t need to put customers on hold for 25 minutes to talk to a supervisor and can instead find resolutions on their own will help create a memorable interaction.

Add to this the idea that you need very Clear Communication Channels that customers can use to reach you. Whether it’s through social media, phone, email, or live chat, all of these channels are typically handled in a call center. The more likely it is that a customer can quickly reach an employee, the faster they will find a resolution.

In addition to all of this, you also have to look at how to Monitor Performance of employees and the customers they are interacting with. How long did a customer have to wait on hold before someone picked up the phone? What is the average length of time an agent at a call center is on the phone with a customer? These are all questions that matter a whole lot.

How about customer satisfaction scores that you can get from customer feedback after they hang up with a call center? These metrics and feedback reports are going to be essential to helping drive continuous improvement.

How to Raise the Call Center Service Bar

Start With a Smile

At the very start of every call center interaction, there has to be a “smile” on the face of the employee. Whether or not this is an actual smile or not doesn’t matter, as a voice also smiles when someone answers a call. There is a certain level of politeness and pleasantries that can go along with starting each customer interaction with a positive tone.

Wow Your Customer

When a customer hangs up with a call center, they should feel like they just left a five-star hotel. This means going above and beyond the expectations of the customer, which is the real differentiator that keeps getting discussed. You want your employees to feel empowered enough to deliver a “wow” experience so that a customer hangs up the phone or ends a chat and immediately wants to post on social media about their positive experience.

Don’t Just Match Competitors

Instead of relying on looking at what competitors are doing and going out and matching that, any company that has a call center should be looking to outpace its competition at every turn. This means establishing service standards that include empowering employees, being transparent with customers about policies, and taking responsibility for mistakes.

Asking for Feedback

Asking for feedback after a call center interaction doesn’t happen enough, and it needs to. The only way companies can improve is not just to hear feedback, but to act on it. Of course, to act on any feedback, companies need a lot of it to look at patterns through the data and then determine what the best courses of action are to raise the bar for customers who are calling into or interacting with agents at a call center.

Learn From Complaints

On the same track as the other bar-raising processes being discussed, companies must acknowledge and learn from complaints. This ties closely to feedback, but it has to go above and beyond in that ignoring negative complaints can’t happen. This shows the customer that a company they might want to keep doing business with doesn’t appreciate them or their business.

Embrace Technology for the Future

At the end of the day, companies that are embracing new technologies are going to be the ones that excel the most in raising the bar for customer service. While artificial intelligence is still relatively young as far as call center operations goes, it’s been around long enought o have shown promise.

This means that things like chatbots and online interactions that once happened with live call center agents can now take place with a computer system. The benefit is that the system can be customized to be as cheerful or as serious as a company wants.

However, the most important aspect is that a company can reduce wait times to next to nothing by employing artificial intelligence capabilities to give customers an immediate way to reach a company and get a result about anything they need to talk about.

Companies like H&M and Sephora are two prime examples of brands that are using AI-driven bots to handle common customer inquiries. Instead of forcing customers to call a contact at a service center and tie up a human for simple issues, the chatbot tool is handling the heavy lifting. This means that human agents can be freed up to handle more complex problems that go beyond the current capabilities of artificial intelligence.

The bright side is that the better this technology gets, the more likely these instant responses are to be helpful down the road.

Other Useful Tools and Concepts

Ultimately, customer service is far more critical than an afterthought in any business. The reality is that strong call center services are going to win over far more customers than deals and sales. It’s for this reason that you should read something about promoting customer service through process ownership.

On the other hand, when you’re done reading about customer service, you might want to look at the digital assembly line and how the digital world is taking over for the future. There is no question that we now live in a digital-first world, which means that there are companies all over the world that are thriving more than ever because of digital transformations.

Conclusion

It really cannot be emphasized enough just how important customer service is to businesses large and small. There is just something that makes it so easy to lose a customer because of one poor call center experience, and they will never come back. Airlines and insurance companies have learned this lesson all too well, especially in light of so much competition being out in the world.