Best Practices to Improve Customer Experiences
Updated: Jan 17, 2020
What gets measured, gets improved. But what if your organization doesn't have the tools in place to measure how effective customer service and support teams are when engaging with customers?
Now more than ever, customers are choosing how they want to interact with organizations. Whether phone call, email, text, or web chat, organizations must adapt to the changing ways customers want to communicate.
According to a recent study, 88% of businesses believe they deliver "excellent" customer experiences, when only 8% of their customers agree. Yikes, that's quite a difference in opinion.
Even with so many options, phone calls still rank as the top communication channel. Check out a few tips and best practices to help your organization evaluate if the solutions in place are supporting customer experience goals.
Efficiency and Responsiveness
When it comes to enhancing a customer's experience when calling an organization, there are standard and customized phone system features and add-on platforms that can be designed to accomplish specific goals.
Common features include:
Toll Free, local, and direct telephone numbers with specific call routing options
Live answering or simple automated options to route calls even if located at other offices or 100% remote - Never ask a client to hang up and dial another number!
Call queues and ring groups to ensure customer calls are answered and handled as quickly as possible
Voicemail options to increase customer response times
Communicate anytime and anywhere integrating cell phones with mobile apps, and PC-based softphones
Along with enhancing customer experiences, many features can greatly improve employee productivity to get more accomplished with the same or less resources.
Silence is NOT Golden
If customers do need to be placed on a brief hold, there should be music or messaging to help reduce any potential negative experiences stemming from silent moments. According to a recent study, callers with silence while on-hold will abandon calls in less than 60 seconds. This statistic challenges the movie theater saying, "Silence is golden".
Measure and Manage When it comes to measuring and managing customer experiences and employee productivity, real-time call monitoring, recording, and reporting can provide powerful data on how customer service and support teams are handling incoming calls.
This information will allow management teams to develop data-backed strategies to improve employee productivity and enhance customer experiences, resulting in a positive impact to the bottom line.
Check out 5 customer experience metrics your business should be measuring no matter the industry.
1. Total Calls Handled
2. Average Response Time
3. Average On Hold Time
4. Peak Activity Times
5. Abandoned Calls
Whether operating in a single office, across multiple locations, or remote team structure, there are phone solutions to enhance customer experiences and increase employee productivity.
Know a business or organization that could benefit from understanding the importance of measuring and optimizing customer support calls? Let them know about our local, full-service telecom company at Recent Communications, Inc.
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Call: 484-998-4540 Chat: info@recentcom.com Click: www.recentcom.com
