What You Need to Take Your Customer Service Virtual

Customer service is the foundation of a successful business. Giving those who buy products and services from your company priority attention makes all the difference in keeping those customers and turning them into brand loyalists. What if your business needs require changing your customer service to virtual? How do you approach this transformation?

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Set Your Agents Up for Success

The first line of brand awareness is your agents. Set them up for success by ensuring there’s a structure in place that helps them help you. Give them tools that enable them to communicate easily with supervisors and with customers, virtual access to networking and project management systems, and remote support technology on a cloud-based platform. Training should be a top priority, so your agents have the skillset to handle your customer issues with insight and empathy. Empower them with a knowledge base of helpful content so they can solve queries expeditiously. And finally, give recognition and support for a job well done. Employee satisfaction helps you keep great agents on the team.

Nimble Tech: Choose a Solution

When choosing software to support your customer service team, look for a solution that helps your staff and protects your business. Most companies are moving towards cloud-based platforms, so work can be done by employees anywhere they are located.

A CRM (customer relationship management) solution helps you manage and stay connected to your customers. It assists with streamlining workflow, analyzing data and helps to improve revenue by automating processes. Virtual VoIP (voice over internet protocol) is a cloud-based phone system that operates over the internet, which saves costs as agents can work from anywhere. Video is also available.

Call monitoring is easily implemented by adding on listening features, co-browsing or video chat functionality. By building chat options into multiple channels, you give your customers the opportunity to engage with you wherever they are the most comfortable. And finally, consider your security needs when choosing technology. Having an offsite data backup is helpful during disasters and other crises. Think about what is going to protect your business most successfully from any touchpoint.

Don’t Dismiss the Data and Analytics

It’s easy to get wrapped up in day-to-day business demands and solving outstanding or urgent issues. But to be proactive, you need to check your insights regularly and act on what you discover. Listen to your customer feedback to define patterns and determine how can they be resolved. When moving to a virtual system, you can fix things as you rebuild. And take into consideration what your employees have to say. Being in the trenches every day gives them valuable insight into possible solutions or ways to improve. Make the most of this opportunity to address ongoing problems before you convert to virtual.

Ways Your Business Can Benefit

Going virtual may mean faster resolution to issues, reduced wait times, and higher satisfaction, both for customers and for employees. If customers feel that their questions have been resolved satisfactorily, expediently, and easily, retention increases and so does word-of-mouth recommendations. Creating brand loyalists from a positive service interaction is the goal all companies strive for. When this happens, employee satisfaction increases, too. And this only improves your bottom line. Happy customers and happy employees allow for your business to have a greater reach into new areas of growth.

Transitioning to virtual customer service is an opportunity for positive change and reduction of costs. It gives your business an opportunity to improve upon everything from technology and data to employee and customer satisfaction. Addressing and resolving customer issues quickly and efficiently is reason enough to consider a move to a virtual service center. Let us show you how.