Why You Should Establish SMART Goals
We’ve discussed many times on this blog why it’s so important to set goals for your inbound call center: without them, agents can feel unmotivated and adrift, making them less focused and less efficient. But perhaps even more important than the act of setting goals is choosing the correct goals to set and one way to ensure you are setting the correct goals is to use the SMART framework. Here, we’re breaking it down. Specific The S in SMART stands for specific, and it’s the first step for a reason. If goals are not specific enough, then they [...]
The Power of Expectations
A lot of the success of your customer service-centric inbound call center has to do with expectations. But not just one person’s expectations: there are three unique sets of expectations that must be met in order for your team to provide a satisfactory and first-rate customer service experience. Those are the company’s expectations of the quality of service provided, the customer’s expectations of the quality and type of customer service provided, and the expectations the customer has of your brand that they expect you to meet. Here, discover why all three are critical to providing exceptional customer service. Company [...]
A New Survey Reveals What People Consider ‘Good Customer Service’
Before setting goals for your inbound call center, it’s important to determine what benchmarks and characteristics are important to you as a company—but you should also consider what characteristics and benchmarks are important to your customers. The best way to find out what these are? Ask them! Customer support company Intercom did just that in a recent survey, polling over 1,000 U.S. customers in a variety of age groups to determine what is most important to them when it comes to good customer service. Here are some of the biggest takeaways. Feeling Valued is Most Important In the survey, [...]
Balancing a Human Approach with an Automated One
Businesses are nothing without their customers. And as much as you would love the opportunity to connect individually with each and every one of them, unfortunately that isn’t possible (especially if you’re successful and growing). For this reason, it’s important to create a balanced approach to client communication that delineates between situations in which a human touch is needed and those in which automated support will do. Establishing this line and sticking to it will prevent your agents from becoming overloaded and your customers from becoming frustrated with long wait times and inefficient processes. Here, learn when an automated approach [...]
Top 10 Customer Service Skills Every Agent Should Have
The agents you have answering the phones in your inbound call center must be well-trained and well-equipped to address any and every inquiry a customer might present to them. Here are 10 of the most important skills they need to cultivate to excel at customer service. Patience When customers call with a problem, quite often part of the reason they are experiencing a problem is that there is something about the product or service that they don’t understand. For this reason, it may take them a minute to explain the reason for their call and what exactly they need from [...]
3 Ways to Optimize Call Center Wait Times
If you’re running a thriving and successful business, it is going to be nearly impossible to avoid having customers experience wait times when they call your inbound call center. That said, the fact that customers expect to wait to connect with an agent doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be looking for ways to trim wait times to reasonable lengths. Here, three simple strategies you can use to optimize wait times and increase customer satisfaction. Maximize Call Quality Call quality is purposely a bit vague—the first step is determining what constitutes a successful and quality call. These could be things [...]
4 Processes to Integrate into Your Agents’ Script
Even though every call and interaction with a customer is going to be different, providing the agents in your call center with a script from which to work creates a rough structure that will move calls along toward a satisfactory conclusion. In addition to making sure the agent proceeds with empathy and listens intently to the customer, making sure that the apps they use most often are easily accessible from within the script will streamline calls and help eliminate lags that frustrate customers. Here are four processes that you should integrate into your agents’ script for your inbound call [...]
Outsourcing Your Call Center: Offshore vs. Onshore vs. Nearshore
You’ve made the decision to outsource your call center and use a separate company to handle your incoming customer service inquiries and the like. Once you’ve determined your budget for your outsourced call center, the next step will be to choose whether you want to use an offshore, onshore or nearshore call center. Here, what you will get with each option and how to determine which is best for you. Offshore An offshore call center refers to one that is in a faraway foreign country in comparison to the country where your headquarters are located. For a company [...]
Call Center Closeup: Telecommunications Call Centers
Telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and T-Mobile do billions of dollars of business every year. Given how massive these companies are, they need to maintain robust call centers to help troubleshoot customer problems, field inquiries, and process sales. Even the call centers at smaller telecom companies will need to deal with many of these same things. Whether your telecom company maintains an internal call center staffed by full-time employees or uses an outsourced call center, there are a few primary tasks for which all telecom call centers are responsible. Here, some of the most common tasks that are handled [...]
How to Build Lasting Customer Relationships
Every successful company goes through a growth period in which they can barely keep up with demand and the flow of new customers coming in. During these times, your main focus is on optimizing the product and getting it out to customers. But these periods are typically followed by slower ones in which sales to new customers lag—and it is during these phases that it is critical to take steps to nurture your relationships with existing customers. Ensuring that you hold onto the customers you already have is super important to maintaining steady revenue streams and keeping your business [...]
4 Ways to Boost Call Center Agent Performance in 2023
As we near the end of the year, call centers everywhere are looking back on 2022, evaluating the performance of their agents and business as a whole and figuring out things that need to be improved for the coming year. Even if the agents working in your call center did excellent work in 2022, providing top-notch support to customers and increasing customer retention rates, not taking steps to support them in the new year would be a mistake. Constantly working to help your agents do their jobs better will not only encourage and inspire them to do so, but [...]
How to Scale Customer Support Without Compromising on Service
Finding your business at a place in which things need to grow is never a bad thing. It means you’re doing well, you’re meeting or exceeding expectations and goals. At first, the need to expand your customer service capabilities can seem like a negative—if there are more customers that need help, there must be new problems arising with your services. But most of the time, it simply means that your business is growing and you need to do the same to meet the growing demand. However, when the time comes to scale your customer support, it’s critical that you do [...]
Why Your Company Needs Customer Service and Customer Success Teams
One of the primary roles of inbound call centers at most companies is customer service. Agents speak with customers who call in, solving or troubleshooting the issues they bring with the goal of resolving the problem by the end of the call. But at the same time as your agents are focused on delivering optimal customer service, they, or other agents on the team, should also be focused on customer success. Here, we’re explaining the difference between customer service and customer success and why your company needs agents that prioritize both in order to be successful. What is customer [...]
Answering Service vs. Call Center – What’s the Difference?
Despite the fact that call centers exist in numerous industries beyond telemarketing, the average person is not as familiar with them in these other contexts, even though they have likely had numerous interactions with the agents who staff them. Answering services, on the other hand, are something that most people have heard of and encountered. But are they actually the same thing? Here, we are breaking down the difference between an answering service and a call center. In short, answering services are technically call centers but not all call centers are answering services. That’s because the scope of tasks [...]
3 Tips for Managing a Remote Call Center
Being a manager of anything is hard work. You need to have a handle on everything and everyone you’re meant to be managing, balancing your own responsibilities with making sure the people on your team are excelling at their jobs, all while maintaining a positive attitude. Sound difficult? Now try managing a team of people who are all in different locations, dealing with different environments and distractions, all while speaking directly with customers who have the power to make or break your business. Now are you stressed? That’s what it is like managing a remote call center—and if you [...]