On today’s hyper-competitive business landscape, keeping your customers happy isn’t just a top priority: it’s essential for survival. In fact, Walker Information predicts that by the year 2020, customer experience will surpass price and product as the single most important brand differentiator. And even now, we’re seeing ample evidence of this in various marketplaces and sectors such as tech, healthcare and professional services, where customers are willing to pay more for a relatively limited selection of offerings, provided that they feel confident that they’re getting the best service and support available.
However, the customer experience story isn’t always positive — because just as happy customers stay on the roster and spread the good word, unimpressed customers churn and unleash their frustration online and offline. And that means if some (or many) of your customers are consistently being told when they phone to linger on the line and wait for an agent — or to leave yet another voicemail — then instead of inspiring delight, you’re triggering disappointment. And that’s where a call center could be the ideal answer. Here are three key reasons why:
1. You’ll improve customer experience.
A call center doesn’t just ensure that customer calls are answered more often and faster. It also uses features like IVRs to route calls to the right department, team or individual, which significantly improves customer experience. This is especially important if you’re a small or mid-sized organization competing with large enterprises.
2. You’ll reduce costs.
Call center systems have built-in features to help you track and measure a variety of metrics and KPIs, including call volume, duration, issue, etc. Your management team can use this intelligence to identify training and coaching opportunities, establish and enforce best practices, determine when you need more/less staff coverage, and so on. And if you look into a VoIP call center (a.k.a. virtual call center, hosted call center and cloud-based call center), you’ll likely save even more since you won’t have to purchase hardware or software, or experience disruption or downtime during implementation. Everything is handled, monitored, managed and maintained off-site, and you can deploy a remote call center team anywhere in the world.
3. You’ll improve employee engagement.
If your employees are spending more time than they should on customer calls (volume, duration or both), then it’s not just customer experience that’s on the way down: employee engagement is plunging as well — which reduces productivity and increases turnover. A call center liberates your beleaguered staff to focus on high-priority tasks and get more done vs. watch a backlog pile-up and a to-do list get longer — and more stressful.
The Bottom Line
Naturally, there’s more to the impressed and inspired customer experience puzzle than a call center. However, given that today’s customers are more demanding than ever — and so is the level of competition for their attention and loyalty — you may discover that after some additional research a few demos that a call center is exactly what you need to make customers happy, save money, and improve productivity.
