8 Ways to Make Your Customer Service Experience Unique
Optimizing the customer service experience is a crucial task in a call center environment. The success of your contact center depends on it.
Simply being polite isn’t enough anymore.
Your call center needs to focus on being unique.
Providing an exciting, engaging, and one-of-a-kind customer service experience is what your call center needs to stay ahead of the game.
What Is Customer Service Experience?
Customer service experience is the opinion your customer forms about the quality of the service you provide. Naturally, the better this is, the better the reputation and success of your business will be.
So, how can you ensure that your customer has a great experience when they’re communicating with your call center?
These 8 tips are a mixture of helpful advice on how to improve your existing systems, and how to create a unique customer service experience. Impress your customers, drive more sales, and improve the reputation of your contact center.
8 Tips to Make Your Call Center Customer Service Experience Unique
The first place you need to improve your customer service experience in your call center is with your agents. You need to educate them on how to properly handle customer requests, how to talk and respond to customers, and how to make sure the customer feels welcome and heard.
All of these tips and advice are executed by your agents. So, explaining the benefits of each can help your team understand how each little step benefits your call center as a whole.
1. The Tone Is Crucial in Call Center Customer Service
One of the most important aspects of call center customer service is maintaining a professional tone of voice. Communicating over the phone poses challenges and risks miscommunication.
That’s why hitting the right tone can help the customer service experience the most at a contact center.
Some clients want a very informal tone. “Oh, gotcha….cool, cool.” However, some prefer a very formal tone using “Yes, Ma’am, or No, Sir.”
Supervisors and floor management need to be sure that the requested tone is what is being used for each client.
Know your culture and drive that tone.
2. Stay on Brand
You need to define your brand’s voice and give guidance to your agents on how to replicate that. After all, each call represents the company.
Branded content that your agents can read from not only solidifies your company’s message. It also draws the customer in.
However, just like with a good sci-fi film, a little bit of inaccuracy can quickly ruin the illusion. That’s why it’s important to have agents stay on brand at all times during the call.
3. Motivate Your Agents to Give Great Customer Service
If you truly want your agents to outperform themselves, offer them perks and incentives tied to customer service KPIs.
Give a day off to the employee with the best sentiment score for that month. Present the agent who significantly raises your center’s net promoter score with a gift card.
These seemingly little achievements have a huge impact on your call center, so appreciating your employees goes a long way in encouraging positive change.
4. Help Your Agents With Technology
Certain call center technologies have the power to influence the customer service experience. For example, computer telephony integration (CTI) can greatly benefit the work of your agents.
Screen pops with the caller’s name and basic information can help the agent provide a more personable customer experience, as they can engage the caller from the start.
Best of all, they also improve the efficiency of your agents. And callers love nothing more than fast problem resolution.
5. Immerse and Engage the Customer
If you truly want to give your customers an experience, you can also provide them with an immersive phone call.
Mottos and catchphrases can help any agent stay on brand. But, those aren’t the only tools in an agent’s wheelhouse that you can use.
Simple greetings can quickly turn into catchphrases.
For example, at Chick-fil-A, when an employee thanks a customer, the reply is always “my pleasure”. It’s something they’re trained to do to really keep the culture of the company.
You can make great use of ideas like this to make your customer service experience unique.
6. Make Sure Your Agents Are Having Fun
Miserable agents give terrible customer service. And who can blame them? As a call center leader, it’s your responsibility to engage your employees.
Organize office-wide games to shake up your routine. Give them a little bit of healthy competition that relaxes and motivates them.
Your customer service experience scores will skyrocket if you keep your agents happy.
7. Inspect the Customer’s Journey
First impressions matter. Your customer’s first impression of your call center is most likely the IVR (interactive voice response). They may be asked personal questions, such as account numbers or birth dates. And they need to navigate to the right department to answer their queries.
Make sure you make this journey as smooth as possible. Have them talk to an agent as soon as it’s feasibly possible. And once they do, don’t have the agent repeat questions the IVR already asked. This will only irk the customer and create a negative customer experience.
8. Minimize Wait Times
Everybody hates waiting. And your customer definitely hates to be on hold. Make sure you follow these call center workforce management best practices to have the right number of agents on the floor to handle calls.
Use this handy calculator to figure out your staffing needs quickly.
Ask a Call Center Where Customer Service Experience Matters
Customer service experience is more than just reading a script. A little bit of magic over the phone can truly make someone’s day. And the best way to get there is to combine customer service best practices with unique ideas.
At Expivia, we know that our customer service experience scores reflect the quality of our service. That’s why we pay special attention to creating the ideal environment for world-class customer service.
Reach out to us to learn more about how we engage our customers!
