How to uncover actionable insights from customer interactions
Microsoft estimates that 90% of all Americans consider customer service to be a discerning factor in which companies they choose to engage with.
Microsoft estimates that 90% of all Americans consider customer service to be a discerning factor in which companies they choose to engage with.
If you’re in need of a solid strategy to boost your customer satisfaction rates, one of the best ways to do so is with a quality monitoring solution. Call center quality monitoring benefits customers, call center representatives and businesses, making it a winning situation for everyone involved. Before implementing such a solution in your business model, you should first have a solid grasp of the overall benefits of quality monitoring and why quality monitoring is so effective when it comes to improving overall customer satisfaction. How Business Intelligence Solutions Involve Quality Monitoring When it comes to improving customer satisfaction, you’ve got to act quickly and with automated call center technology solutions that offer immediate results. Without quick and effective solutions, you run the risk of losing customers forever. One of the absolute biggest benefits of quality monitoring solutions is they pave the way toward higher profits, mainly because satisfied customers are more willing to spend time and money on your company and the products and services you offer. Another advantage is your call center agents have a better idea of the steps necessary to take the best care of your customers, something that can go a long way in avoiding trial and error. Rather than wait for your customers to need assistance before they ask for assistance, quality monitoring solutions offer customers prompts when they first arrive at your website. The great thing about this is that customers know exactly where to go when they do have a question, which is undoubtedly preferable to scrambling around on your site in search of a phone number or live chat link. There’s also the fact that taking steps to boost your overall quality helps you to retain customers. Like you’re likely to continuously renew your lease on an apartment in which you enjoy living and feel like you’re well taken care of, the same applies to businesses that take great care of their customers and their needs. You have to remember that no matter the services or products you sell, your customers are the lifeblood of your business. Take great care of them, and it’s that much easier for you to grow your business and fulfill its true potential. Saving time is another great selling point for quality assurance. Even if you make it easy for site visitors to ask for help, there are still a few more steps to complete to take full advantage of your opportunity. For instance, the information gleaned from quality monitoring can allow your call center agents to fully answer any questions customers might have and take care of them faster, saving time for the customer and your agents. Do you have (or have you had) to reduce your number of contact agents for financial reasons? If so, investing in quality assurance could make the situation better for your agents as well as your bottom line. Quality solutions can go a long way in reducing caller and customer wait times, preventing customers from having to talk to more than one agent about the same problem and better managing your need to potentially outsource your call center to agents who might not be easily understood by your callers or who might not easily understand your callers. Additional Benefits of Quality Monitoring You’ll likely find it’s much easier for you to gauge the overall performance of your agents with quality monitoring solutions. While there might be standards you have, and while your agents might adhere to those standards, quality monitoring solutions provide you with more information that can be used to pinpoint further exact areas of agent performance that need improvement, something that better keeps your agents on their toes and can keep them from becoming complacent in their work performance. There’s also the fact that you want to make sure your agents are all offering customers the same experience across the board, meaning you don’t want to send (accidentally or on purpose) mixed messages. Even if a caller or site visitor interacts with a different agent each time she or he reaches out for help, it should still feel like dealing with one individual and one set of standards. With this approach, the quality assurance and monitoring feedback you receive is precise across the board, allowing you to make solid improvements to your call center. Just as quality assurance efforts let your call center agents know where they need to make improvements, they also let you know where you might have areas of improvement within your business structure. For instance, if customers and visitors constantly reach out to you with complaints about how difficult it is to navigate your site, it’s likely you need to give your online home an overhaul, or at least some mild remodeling. On a related note, don’t forget that your agents are another valuable font of knowledge about ways in which you can make your business better, so be sure to listen to them and give them a chance to voice their opinions. Having a constant influx of information on the overall quality of your service keeps you and your agents from settling into a false sense of security, which provides you with an undeniable edge in the modern-day business world as well as your industry. No matter your market or audience, change is inevitable. Not only that, but it’s also better to keep us with those changes rather than struggle to play catch-up, which can result in more than a few avoidable disasters. See what a difference practicing proactivity makes by keeping yourself and your agents on your toes. Going back to how you can save money with call center quality monitoring, it can lower the amount of money you spend on calls and other common operational costs, some of which you might not even be aware are impacted by the overall quality of your customer service. That’s money you can funnel back into your business, giving you the financial resources you need for successful growth and to keep your call
If you’ve worked in a call center long enough, you’ll learn that customer complaint are among the least enjoyable to take. While complaints are simply part of the call center experience, there are four ideas you can put to good use to both reduce the number of customer complaints you receive and boost your quality monitoring capabilities. 1. Resolve the Issue on the First Call There are a few things that customers hate more than having to be put on hold, transferred, and made to call back before an issue is fully resolved. While you can’t prevent complaint calls, you can change the way customers feel about calling your company with an issue. Make sure your agents have the skill, authority, and knowledge they need to offer refunds, make promises that can be kept, and make it so customers don’t have to contact your business with the same complaint. 2. Implement the Right System You should also consider implementing a quality assurance system that gathers information on calls to provide you with valuable information you can put to good use improving your call center and your agents. The way QA technology works is it examines keywords used by your agents and callers so you can get a firm understanding of why customers are complaining and why your complaint resolution skills might not be as great as you’d like for them to be. 3. Keep the Lines of Communication Wide Open Not only do your agents need to maintain clear and constant communication with your customers, you also need to ensure your managers and agents can easily communicate with each other. You can take this one step further and see to it that your managers relate to other necessary departments and company personnel to allow them to be better. In addition to implementing quality monitoring solutions to help with this tip, it’s also a good idea to hold meetings to review past complaints, how they were resolved and how they can be better resolved in the future for even better results and happier customers. To make meetings more efficient, it’s a good idea to implement a complaint-logging system. 4. Stay Consistent Your agents should be consistent in their problem-resolution skills. If the same customer calls about two different issues and has two different experiences, that customer might feel you aren’t consistent or aren’t properly training your employees. Again, this is a good reason to hold regular meetings, to make sure your training efforts are the same across the line, and to see if any changes need to be made to your training. Make it so that when your customers have to call with a complaint, they know they’re going to be taken care of by your agents and fellow call center leaders. While you can’t please everyone, there’s most certainly no harm in trying. Put these tips to good use, and don’t hesitate to reach out to us here at Etech if you need more assistance or guidance in your quest to reduce customer complaints. This blog was first published on LinkedIn.