Customer service is a significant aspect of the whole customer experience associated with a company. Therefore, it is important to make improvements wherever possible in customer service. The best way to do that is to monitor the performance of your support department and make necessary changes where required.
Helping customers with their queries is important across all industries. Whether it is for a problem resolution or a new service offering, businesses are always looking to improve their customer support through different channels including their TFNs like the Cox customer service phone number. Regardless of the channel, the quality of service greatly depends on various factors. You can work on the following aspects to improve customer service:
Decrease Your Average Response Time
An extended wait to get a response to a query can easily put off a customer or a prospect. Your potential customers may leave your site and visit some other site to get the same product or service. Therefore, the first thing you need to do is to decrease the response time to answer queries.
Common challenges that result in bad average response time include a shortage of agents. Since AWT (average waiting time) is a crucial aspect of service, you should work towards clearing the roadblocks. Also, you may want to conduct training for faster responses from your support team.
Lastly, you should monitor the response times before and after making the changes to see if there’s any improvement. Measure the performance against KPIs and motivate your team to bring AWT within an optimum range.
Maximize First Contact Resolution
Regardless of the route a customer takes to contact you, your goal should be to resolve it in the first contact or at least keep the number to a minimum. If the customers are contacting you through call, understand their problem and provide a solution in the same conversation. The same goes for live chat as well. Even your response on email tickets should be similar. Extended emails thread can be annoying and can affect the overall quality of customer experience.
To increase your FCR rates, you can start by checking the current performance of your team. You may conduct mock calls to see the quality of responses. Bring the shortcomings to everyone’s attention in your company and work as a team to improve.
Enhance Quality of Responses
The quality of response to a customer query is one of the most important factors in customer support. Other factors like FCR rate and overall customer satisfaction depend significantly on the quality of responses. You can work on the improvement of this aspect by conducting in-house training regarding phone etiquette. You can ask your experienced support agents to help you in this regard.
Things like greeting, tone, calmness, and repeating a customer’s problem make a massive impact on the quality. Using reassurance and acknowledgment statements can further add to a caller’s satisfaction. You can test your team through mock calls and going through previous responses to check the quality.
Arrange 24/7 Customer Support Availability
Businesses that offer services internationally often offer customer support during limited hours. But the difference in time zones can be an obstacle for customers to reach customer support. Also, your competitors that offer 24/7 support can have an edge. Therefore, try to maximize your availability.
Generally, contact centers or support departments receive lesser queries at particular times of the day. Based on the requirements, hire agents who can respond to customers reaching out during those hours. If that’s not possible, you can offer the option of requesting a callback or generating a ticket.
Another thing you can do is to create a knowledge base and use chatbots to direct customers to helpful tutorials and blogs. In this way, even when you are away, your customers can get support.
Observe CSAT and NPS Scores
You can work on all the above factors to offer better customer support. Still, you will need to check performance metrics to see the quality of service. It’s important as you can see the results from compiled data of interactions collectively. That’s where customer-awarded scores to service can help you.
CSAT score stands for customer satisfaction score and NPS is the net promoter score. There’s a score you give to an interaction at the end out of five. The percentage of 4 and 5 ratings reflects the quality of service of your customer support.
NPS score on the other hand is another performance metric. Customers are given a survey to rate their experience with a brand out of 10. The customers who give you the score from 7 to 10 are your promoters and the ones who give you scores below are detractors. You subtract the percentage of detractors from promoters to get NPS scores.
Conclusion
Working on these 5 tips can help you significantly improve customer service. Also, you can retain your existing customers better and gain more as well by following these tips.