Want to Step Up Your Customer Service? You Need to Read This First

No matter what industry you’re in, online reviews are becoming more and more important to business success. The power of customers’ unvarnished opinions means your customer experience has the potential to make or break your business.

The Impact of Customer Service on Customer Experience

A quick scan of the average business’s online reviews will show that it’s not all about — or even mostly about — the product or service your company provides. It’s really about the customer service. The most delicious restaurant meal won’t get a five-star rating if it’s served by an inattentive waiter. Your product won’t get a great review if customers can never get a live person on the phone when they need help setting it up.

Conversely, employees who go above and beyond to make things right have the power to redeem even the worst initial experience. And nothing is more beneficial to your business’s online reputation than a complaining customer who turns into a happy evangelist after you resolve their problem.

If your customer experience is average, it’s nothing to write home — or write a review — about. If it’s terrible, you’ll get scathing reviews; if it’s excellent, you’ll get glowing ones. So how can you ensure more great reviews and fewer negative (or so-so) ones? Pay attention to the customer experience, especially as it relates to your customer service.

One way to improve the customer service experience is to implement a cloud-based call center. Here are some ways putting your call center in the cloud can lead to happier customers.

• Proper staffing. There’ll always be enough agents on hand to handle call volume. With cloud-based call centers, you can take advantage of flexible staffing. Use the tool’s dashboard and activity reports to monitor the volume of incoming calls and add customer service reps as needed so callers don’t have to waste a lot of time on hold.
• Maximize customer convenience. For example, if you use a system that can provide automated callbacks to customers, customers can receive a call at a time that’s best for them.
• Direct calls more efficiently. Look for a system that allows you to route calls to the proper customer service employee or team based on the customer’s need and the employees’ skills. When you have advanced call routing options, you can feel confident that more problems will get resolved on the first call.
• 24/7 access. Wherever you are, you’ll be able to access call-center dashboards and reports to track your team’s effectiveness. That means you can quickly identify bottlenecks that are slowing down call resolution, pinpoint weak spots in employee productivity, see how long it takes the average call to be resolved and more.
• Access to customer data. Customer service employees will have access to current customer data. Cloud-based customer service tools that update in real-time allow customer service agents to take notes about specific customers, concerns and incidents so the next agent doesn’t have to start from scratch. Your customer service reps will be more organized, and your customers will be happier when they don’t have to repeat information over and over.

Republished by permission. Original here.

Bad Service Photo via Shutterstock

This article, "Want to Step Up Your Customer Service? You Need to Read This First" was first published on Small Business Trends