5 steps to ensure optimal
customer service management
Are you already maximizing the benefits and functionalities of contact center technologies to create
an optimal customer experience?
“Customer is King” is an age-old mantra reflecting the importance of customers or consumers in every business. Traditionally it means the promise to provide good products or services. In today’s digitalized society, delivering seamless customer journeys and experiences is more important than ever and has overtaken price as the chief determining factor for business success.
About 73% of customers say that an extraordinary experience with a certain company or brand raises their expectations of other companies. And about 66% of customers are willing to pay more for a great shopping and customer service experience. Business buyers especially appreciate companies that really go the extra mile when it comes to delivering personalized customer service efforts.
This means that companies have to up their game when it comes to customer service management. This applies to your customer service management strategy as well as your customer service management software. What steps do you have to take to ensure optimal customer service management? Why is customer service relationship management so important? And what tools and techniques should you apply to achieve maximum success in this challenging field? Read on to find out!
- What is customer service management?
- The importance of customer service management
- Improve decision-making-processes
- Saving time
- Financial benefits
- More efficiency
- Getting to know your customers
- Representing your brand, mission and values
- Customer service done well
- The 5 steps to ensure optimal customer service management
- 1. Actively monitor customer feedback
- 2. Invest in the right customer relationship management software
- 3. Perfect your omnichannel experience
- 4. Equip employees with the right customer service management skills
- 5. Engrain customer service management in your company culture
- How can QuandaGo help you with ensuring optimal customer service management?
- Test: Are you delivering optimal customer service?
What is customer service management?
The importance of customer service management
Customer service management is important for a couple of reasons. Let’s take a look at the major benefits.Improve decision-making processes
Customer service management helps you to improve your decision-making processes. By collecting, organizing and storing data you are able to make better marketing and sales decisions. Customer service management also allows you to closely watch and follow trends in consumer needs and desires.Saving time
Time is a valuable commodity in these fast and expensive times. Smart, data-driven and tech-based customer service management allows you to maximize interactions and conversations with your leads and customers. It grants you the opportunity to connect in a quick manner with customers, however and whenever you need to.Financial benefits
A good customer service management strategy also brings a lot of financial benefits. It allows you to decrease customer churn and automate routine tasks. The benefits of this approach? You can free customer service agents to do tasks that require empathy and a delicate human touch. Such an approach not only increases acquisition and conversion, but also fosters customer loyalty and retention. And the numbers show that customer retention is generally cheaper than customer acquisition. The reason? Repeat customers are more likely to develop into big spenders than sporadic ones. Repeat customers also offer free advertising opportunities because they often refer family, friends and acquaintances to you.More efficiency
Good customer service management also increases efficiency. You can offload many repetitive and time-consuming tasks to customer service management software and robots. This allows you to serve people faster and offer a seamless customer experience across a wide variety of communication and marketing channels (omnichannel).Getting to know your customers
Customer service management helps businesses learn about their customers. You get to know who they are and why they purchase your products. This allows businesses to better anticipate their customers’ needs and, as a result, fulfill them. Effectively using customer service relationship management can also provide a strategic advantage. Well organized customer service management efforts make it easier to select the correct recipients for promotions and new products.Representing your brand, mission and values
Your customer service team is essential in promoting your brand image. Good customer service management can help influence customers and convince them of your unique selling points and strengths over competitors.But how does good customer service management look in the real world? When it comes to putting customers first, it’s essential to put your money where your mouth is. This means being generous when it comes to your return policy. Sending a replacement when a package gets lost or a product arrives with flaws or breakages? Setting up a dedicated help page and multiple ways to reach customer support? It should all be part of your customer-first mindset.
You should always start with the customer experience and from there on work backwards to the technology. Good customer service management in the real world means setting up systems around customers’ wants and desires and making employees the focus of your service. Companies like Apple and Amazon do this extraordinarily well. For example, when you go into an Apple store, you will normally see a enthusiastic horde of Apple fans talking about all things Apple, from the latest iOS update to the pros and cons of wireless headphones. And that’s just the people who work there! The company has made hiring its ideal customers an ideal business cornerstone.
Businesses that make serious work of customer service management use technology in innovative ways to give customers what they want, how they want it. They also reward customers with a personalized service that is fun and offers a seamless buying and after-purchase experience.
Actively monitor customer feedback
Waiting until customers come back to you to complain about services or products doesn’t cut it in today’s cutthroat and highly customer-oriented business environment. Great customer service must be proactive and starts by regularly asking and listening to what your customers have to say.
There are several ways to do this. One way is to consistently survey your customers after important milestones in the customer journey, such as a purchase or onboarding moment. Closed CSAT surveys allow you to monitor how satisfied people are with the support they receive. You can also encourage customers to write reviews on social media or independent platforms like Trustpilot or Yelp.
2.
Invest in the right customer relationship management software
- Advanced WFM (Workforce Management) software that gives you the opportunity to forecast contact volumes per channel, what-if scenarios, intraday reforecasts and agent availability.
- The right CTI (Computer Telephony Integration) software has features that identify customers through their phone number or email address and instantly provide the contact center agent with all the necessary details about previous interactions. Integrating call center software with your CRM takes the service level even one step further and allows your agents access to all the data and context that they need to provide better customer support.
- Interactive voice response (IVR) features. These give customers the opportunity to speak with an automated system before reaching your support team.
- Cloud-based calling software allows you to get rid of the typical maintenance and infrastructure costs that come with traditional phone lines.
- Good ACD software combines features like omnichannel routing, advanced skills-based routing (looking at the nature of an incoming contact and then find the agent who is the best fit for this specific customer) and IVR, but also seamless integrations with other systems.
- Call scripting software recognizes and stores certain keywords in the customer’s email and offers troubleshooting instructions based on a common answer.
- Analytics and reporting software assures that customer service management becomes a data-driven process based on the principles of continuous improvement.
A well-balanced mix of the aforementioned customer service management software solutions allows you to follow through on your customer service management strategy. They are powerful tools for significantly improving customer journeys.
Perfect your omnichannel experience
Working and buying is no longer static and location-dependent in the digital age. When customers have issues, they don’t just send emails or call anymore. They also use social media, your app and even live chat. And even more important: they expect consistent support and a uniform quality level across all of these channels.
So be sure to make serious work of creating the perfect omnichannel experience. This allows your contact center agents to pick up from where the customer left off. Because every piece of communication and customer data is integrated in the bigger picture, it becomes easier to create a complete customer profile that allows customer service teams to tackle issues, requests, questions and complaints in a quicker and easier fashion.
4.
Equip employees with the right customer service management skills
The right customer service management software and strategy are a significant part of the customer service equation, but don’t paint the whole picture. Great tools won’t significantly improve your customer service if your support team doesn’t know how to properly interact with customers. So be sure to equip employees with the skills that modern day customer service reputation management requires.
For example, it is important that your employees have a detailed understanding of your products and/or services. From a customer’s perspective, nothing is worse than talking to a service agent who doesn’t know what he is talking about. Empathy is another important trait of customer service agents. They have to possess the ability to empathize with customers and show that they care and understand about them. Taking ownership of and responsibility for mistakes is also important when it comes to customer service relationship management.
5.
Engrain customer service management in your company culture
Customer service management should be an important cornerstone of your overarching business strategy and engrained in your company culture. This means that all the people within your organization, from the top executives to the contact center agents that guide the daily flow of customer interactions throughout all of your channels, have to incorporate the basic principles and best practices of customer service management in their daily work routines.
You can achieve this by empowering employees to go the extra mile for customers. Make sure that they always have access to the right data and customer service management tools. And don’t forget to monitor employee engagement. Also be sure to compliment your customer service agents if they successfully resolve an issue and put a smile on a customer’s face.
How can QuandaGo help you with ensuring optimal customer service management?
QuandaGo helps you to create the contact center of the future by automating the right interactions and processes.
- The QuandaGo Connected Experience Platform makes integrating all your data sources and automating workflows across your business easier than ever.
- QuandaGo assists contact center agents in taking action to resolve the customer interaction by suggesting answers and next best actions, as well as automating common tasks. This allows the agent to do his work quicker without quality loss.
- Contact center managers can optimize more complex use cases with knowledge management and process automation bots.
- We provide a complete set of self-service solutions, including interactive voice response (IVR) and speech applications, virtual agents, customer and agent knowledge bases, and mobile support.
- Quandago offers next generation AI-powered contact center solutions like agent assist and virtual sales coaching.
- With QuandaGo you can completely automate today’s most common contact center tasks – like form completions, compliance checks, and after call work – while freeing up your agents for high-value interactions or more complex issues.
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What our customers are saying
“Everything starts with a good foundation. By bringing structure to people, processes and systems we worked on creating an ecosystem to offer more efficient and effective customer service.”
“Dela can resolve customer processes automatically, and all the monitoring of cases in other systems and departments is centralized in the platform.”
“Engie is now operating a customer process management platform with an intuitive agent interface and a clear structure where employees can easily and effectively accomplish their tasks.”
Want to know more about customer service management?
The modern customer expects great support via all channels, including live chat, email, and phone. Following the aforementioned steps and investing in excellent customer service management software tools helps you to meet these demands and supercharge your customer service team. Would you like to find out more about contact center software solutions and QuandaGo’s products and services? Then feel free to contact us at +31(0)73-62 34 097 or hello@quandago.com.
