The high competitiveness and availability of a wide variety of products on the market have caused brands to seek to differentiate themselves at all costs. Many companies are focusing their efforts on storytelling or reinforcing values to try to win customer loyalty, but the key really lies in trust.
Trust is essential to the relationship established between a brand and a customer. And to achieve this, from a business point of view, it is the customer service department that is at the forefront of generating this connection. If the customer’s experiences with the brand are positive and build trust, it will translate into brand loyalty.
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But what happens when a brand offers customer service that can be improved?
The consequences of poor customer service
Loyalty is based primarily on a company’s ability to solve customer problems at first contact.
For this reason, organizations should redefine contact centers to fit into their loyalty strategies, seeking to make them more than just basic support: a space to address broader issues of central importance to many.
In this new context, this means that contact centers will have to evolve to become a central part of customer loyalty and move into a more proactive and attentive role. With this, the role of contact center agents will also have to change to become brand ambassadors, able to understand and proactively respond to consumer needs and create satisfying customer experiences.
As a result, the importance of a good customer experience has become such that some surveys even state that 73% of customers cite experience as an important factor in their purchasing decisions, behind the price and product quality.
Investing in CX has become a key strategy for companies, focusing their business on listening to the Voice of the Customer in order to increase customer loyalty, create better products, provide better service and really understand the current customer experience with brands.
More than 80% say that improving customer experience is the most important strategic objective and investment driver for Contact Centers
Source: Deloitte
It is for this reason that not listening to the Voice of the Customer, ignoring their needs and providing poor customer experiences ultimately results in losing customers which, in turn, will drive them to competence. In fact, a Microsoft Customer Service Survey revealed that 61% of consumers who have switched brands are due to poor service.
Some of the causes of a service that can be improved…
- Lack of active listening and inability to understand customers’ needs: not being able to listen to customers’ needs and concerns is often the main cause of poor service. By wanting to resolve customer issues as quickly as possible, agents may rush through a solution before giving the customer a chance to explain themselves and what they need, resulting in customers feeling as if they are “talking to a robot”.
- Not resolving the issue: Not being able to resolve a customer’s problem during their first call or not resolving it at all is another key point of poor service. In fact, according to a Northridge Group report, 62% of customers surveyed had to make multiple contact attempts to resolve their issue and 1 in 10 even said their issue was never resolved.
- Long waiting times or redirecting the call: When a customer calls a contact center to ask a question or solve a problem and has to wait a long time to be attended to, it can give the impression that you don’t care enough to offer help to your customers. If this is added that, on many occasions, customers are redirected to other telephone extensions so that they can attend to their case and that they are forced to repeat the reason for their call several times, the image offered by the company is not the correct one. It denotes that the quality of customer service is deficient.
How to improve customer service and increase loyalty
Undoubtedly, the best way to solve poor customer service is to put the customer and the customer experience at the center of business strategies. Thus, taking into account the Voice of the Customer is essential to know in depth the needs, concerns and desires of customers. But what actions can be taken?
1. Create a CX-based strategy
As mentioned above, listening to the Voice of the Customer and understanding their needs is a perfect opportunity to improve every process carried out in the company, including the customer service experience before, during and after the purchase. In addition, listening to customers and focusing strategies on customer experience is beneficial not only to create a good customer service and increase customer loyalty, but also is the best way to optimize products or services to save costs and improve ROI.
2. Providing training for agents
Considering the training of contact center agents as a mere formality is a serious mistake. Contact center agents are often the first point of contact that a customer has with the company and, therefore, should be extensions of their brands. Therefore, it is essential for agents to improve their listening skills, learn to ask the right questions, or obtain the necessary problem-solving skills to provide good customer service and experience.
3. New solutions to improve customer service
Using new tools or conversational intelligence solutions to automate the analysis of conversations and being able to detect keywords that denote complaints, recurring problems, dissatisfaction or possible errors in service allows you to have a deep understanding of what is happening in the contact center. If brands can identify and analyze how customers feel about their service or products, they will be able to develop a better experience and increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. In addition, automating this analysis allows for an improved and personalized training for each agent and each specific situation, perfecting customer service methods.
Complete conversational intelligence solutions such as Recordia allow the analysis of 100% of the conversations in a Contact Center and facilitate the analysis of these conversations to discover possible problems or dissatisfactions in customer service in order to create an excellent customer experience.
Do you want to discover how solutions like Recordia allow you to improve your Contact Center’s customer service? Find out all the details here!