Your contact center is a critical point of customer interaction. Customers who have a positive experience will feel connected to your brand and will be more likely to continue to invest in your organization. Conversely, a negative experience can affect your brand reputation – especially since unhappy customers or clients are more likely to speak up about bad experiences than positive ones.
Let’s explore some of the contact center practices that can impact customer loyalty.
Easy Self-Service Options
No one likes to wait on hold, especially for simple admin tasks. Set up your systems to allow customers to complete basic tasks with a few taps of a button. Examples include checking a balance, activating a card, confirming an appointment, or even making a payment. Simplifying and automating these tasks shows that you care about your customers’ and donors’ time and that you’re committed to making life easy for them.
Friendly Customer Service Reps
You can absolutely hear a smile down the phone line. Customer service reps who sound friendly and sincere will elevate any contact center experience. But this doesn’t just stop at tone – it also involves the individual’s ability to show interest in the customer’s situation and walk them through their issue or question while making the experience seamless. While scripts are important, reps who can make a conversation feel natural and organic will win points with your customers, clients, or donors.
Meeting Customers Where They Are
Many customers will try a DIY solution before picking up the phone or initiating a conversation. Optimize your website and other key content pages, such as your social media, by adding answers to common questions. An FAQ, knowledge base, short videos, or infographics are all great options for providing customers with the information they need, whenever and wherever they need it. If you have a chatbot on your site (or on social media pages such as Facebook), make sure they’re programmed to answer the most frequently occurring questions and that they can direct people to additional sources of information and help. One key tip: ensure that all of your information is standardized across your different channels.
Properly Routed and Staffed Lines
Two major sources of customer friction are waiting on hold and having to repeat an interaction. Your organization can minimize this friction and ensure customer satisfaction by ensuring that calls are routed to the ideal operator and that you have enough staff at hand to ensure a prompt response time. Automated call distribution scripts instantly send customers to the right person at the right time, improving the customer experience. Complement this with an agile staffing solution such as ACD’s easily scalable options to do away with long, frustrating wait times – and achieve those positive interactions your customers expect.
People-Friendly IVR
Interactive phone menus should be properly honed to minimize friction. Customers need to be able to easily identify their problems and get through to someone who can help with their situation. Voice-input menus are generally preferable to touchpad-based ones but always provide alternatives for accessibility purposes. Use post-call analytics to see why people are calling, then adjust your phone menus and self-help options accordingly. Make sure that people can escalate to an agent if needed – your customers will appreciate it.
Ongoing Agent Certification
Investing in ongoing agent certification is good for your team, and good for customers. Empower agents to easily deliver on customer expectations by walking them through common questions, pain points, and solutions and by providing an updated database that helps them deal with more tricky situations. Leverage system analytics together with post-call satisfaction surveys and agent feedback to guide your certification and ensure that agents are getting what they need to succeed.
Talk to ACD About Building a Powerful Customer Contact Experience
At ACD, we know that a seamless customer contact experience fosters customer loyalty and builds brands. That’s why we offer a smart, integrated customer contact platform that reduces pain points and elevates the customer experience. Combined with our on-demand staffing solutions, this ensures that long wait times and overworked staff are never a problem. For more information about how our solutions can positively impact customer loyalty, get in touch!
