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Jun 22, 2021 Janis Ancic

5 Ways to Boost Your Customer Support Efficiency

Boost Customer Support

Business growth and customer service go hand in hand. After all, the success of your business relies heavily on the satisfaction, loyalty and advocacy of your customers. Happy clients won’t just spend more with your business, they’ll refer you to their friends and colleagues.

In fact, 7 out of 10 US consumers say they’ve spent more money to do business with a company that delivers great service (American Express), and simply increasing customer retention rates by 5 percent increases profits anywhere from 25 percent to 95 percent (Bain & Company).

To ensure your brand’s customers are delighted with every interaction they have with your business, it’s crucial you have a customer service strategy in place that focuses on efficiency and ROI. 

With that in mind, we’ve listed five ways that your brand can boost customer support efficiency and achieve greater results - delivering a far greater level of customer satisfaction, reducing costs and improving the profitability of your business. 

1 - Focus on improving customer service metrics and KPIs

Without measuring key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics, it’s virtually impossible to know how well your customer service program is performing. By setting KPIs and metrics, you’ll be able to gain real insight into what needs to be improved and where you can gain customer service efficiencies. 

Here are some of the most important metrics you should measure in your customer service strategy:

  • First-call resolution (FCR)
  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS) 
  • Customer Effort Score (CES) 
  • Call abandonment rates (CAR)
  • Average handle time (AHT)
  • Service level

You can learn about these metrics and why they are important to your customer service results on our blog - 7 Metrics to Track When Outsourcing Your Customer Service to a Call Center

2 - Provide proactive support

There’s nothing that will hamper the efficiency of your customer service program than a reactive approach to customer queries. Instead, build a proactive strategy that aims to understand your customers’ needs before they even come to you. This will ensure that your organization is able to delight your customers in every single interaction. 

To do so, you can use technology to understand your customers needs and expectations. For example, here at Advantage Communications, we use our speech analytics software, The Conversational Q Advantage, to uncover patterns, trends and the top customer queries on behalf of our clients. This allows us to know exactly how to answer a customers’ questions before they even reach out to our agents. 

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You can then use this information to either prepare your agents with the best things to say or provide your customers with a self-service option that means they can find their answer without even having to speak to your agents.

3 - Use technology to generate insights into real-time agent performance

Your customer service representatives (CSRs) are the front line of customer support success. If they aren’t performing to your expectations, then your entire customer support strategy will struggle to help you achieve your business goals. That’s why it’s crucial you use technologies to measure agent performance, and enhance how they work.

Technologies such as live call guidance and operational intelligence will allow you to monitor agent performance as interactions take place, and give you the opportunity to provide CSRs with real-time feedback to ensure they deliver improved customer service results. 

4 - Automate your customer service where possible

Automating doesn’t mean replacing your agents, it’s all about enhancing the service they are delivering. Automation enables your brand to offer 24/7 support across multiple channels, all while empowering your customers to self-serve and answer their own questions.

Automation typically uses technology such as chatbots and contact center artificial intelligence (AI) to better route calls, improve personalization, encourage self-service among customers and a huge number of other benefits!

5 - Outsource your customer service to a contact center

Does this all sound a bit too much? There’s no shame in admitting that successful customer service programs are incredibly complex and expensive to implement in house. That’s why many turn to contact center outsourcing instead.

Outsourcing your customer service strategy to a contact center will help your business save money, give you the time you need to focus on your core competencies, give you access to complex customer service technology that would be too expensive to implement internally, give you the ability to scale up and down seamlessly and many other benefits.

Want to learn more about the benefits of outsourcing your customer service program to a contact center? Get in touch with Advantage Communications today. Our team of customer experience specialists would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Customer Service Trends 2021

Published by Janis Ancic June 22, 2021
Janis Ancic