Guest Post: 5 Contact Center Best Practices That Make Clients Happier

This week we feature an article from babelforce, a global cloud communications platform. They provide some tips and tricks to set your business up for success in the contact center.

Daunting as it may appear, keeping your customers happy is an attainable goal — when you put your mind to it. Following best practices and applying hacks has proven fruitful for a lot of contact centers. You can do the same and improve your customers’ experience.

This shortlist of contact center best practice hacks should set you up for success in the pursuit of customer service excellence.

1. Get to know the customer personally.

You wouldn’t have a contact center if you had no customers to start with. Keeping your customer agents aware of this fact goes a long way to making customer experiences pleasant. While it’s near impossible to know every customer the way you know your peers, you can use call center software to bridge the gap.

IVR systems make it possible to collect information about a client when they call. It can also assign their session to an agent capable of assisting them. The outcome can be something as simple as routing their call to an agent that speaks in their preferred language. Such a gesture goes a long way toward retaining customers.

2. Follow up on your calls.

Roughly speaking, about 50% of the customers you serve have any hope that their concerns will be addressed. To improve these odds, you ought to follow up on the calls with updates on the issues dear to your customers.

Automated outbound calls are one way to turn the follow-up practice into a ritual. Not only will it improve the image your customers have about your company, but it also translates to fewer calls from customers. They often call doing follow-ups on their tickets.

3. Cultivate a continuous learning culture.

Even with a knowledge base filled to the brim with product support cases, along with a killer script on their side, your agents’ effectiveness hinges on their knowledge of the product in more ways than we’d like to admit.

Refresher courses, seminars, and other product knowledge dissemination activities should be a staple of contact center work routines.

Yes, NLP and NLU have been shown to cut the product learning curve for agents and peak their effectiveness almost as soon as they get hired… but still, your customer will prefer learning about a product from a voice that sounds more in charge than in doubt of how a product works.

4. Adopt new tools quickly (IVR systems).

We wouldn’t blame you for keeping the outdated call center equipment you’ve been using as long as it takes calls and keeps the contact center looking busy. ‘Productivity’, on the other hand, is an angle of busyness that most call centers miss.

With outdated tools costing your agents 75% of their call time doing manual research, we can say with certainty that the older your tools, the less productive your contact center is.

5. Invest in your agents.

Happy agents set the tone for good customer experiences. No matter how well you end up automating with IVR systems, you will eventually need that good ol’ human touch. At least for now! That being the case, morale boosting and team building events should become the norm at your company. For a job that asks for a lot of listening, it lifts contact center staff to be listened to now and then.

That’s it… simple yet so effective as everything ought to be.

These five are by far the most actionable hacks you could apply to quickly improve your contact center.

In summary, keeping (and making) customers happy using a contact center requires deliberate effort. Making sure your agents are using the best equipment available for the job is one way to make their jobs easier. Them being happy is a contagious feeling that customers join in eventually. At the end of the day, the customer should be at the core of all your efforts like a cult.

Babelforce is a global cloud communications platform focused on No-Code integration and automation. It allows non-technical people to build even the most complex integrated processes for customer-facing teams, particularly in the call center.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Leaders, Here Are Five Stats You Know And Understand