It is not easy to maintain high levels of customer service. As a result, brands face more pressure to deliver outstanding customer service to retain customers.
Through an effective customer portal, your team can take on more challenging and interesting tasks and improve customer service.
Customer portals: what are they and how do they work?
It is likely that you have already provided customers with a self-service resource through a knowledge base or discussion forum. There are many similarities between these systems and customer portals, but they are not the same.
Through it, you can provide self-help resources to your customers. Those who do not find the answer there can submit a support ticket or chat with an agent.
First, let's define its characteristics and benefits.
Information relevant to the topic
You can provide your customers with access to information about their interactions with your business through a customer portal. Moreover, they can track the status of an order, locate an invoice, and view the history of their interactions.
Collaboration between peers
No matter what service you provide, whether it is software or coffee grinders, there will always be users who know more about the product than others. They can share tips, ask questions, or solve problems using the platform.
By using a customer portal, a customer community can be created. Both parties benefit from this:
- Existing users can provide help to new users
- It can be a lot of fun for members of your community to have a place where experts interact and share knowledge
- The product development team can improve the most troublesome features by allowing agents to focus on more complex inquiries
Therefore, it is possible to gain valuable insights and data that would otherwise be difficult to obtain. It would take time and resources to conduct extensive and thorough market research to achieve the same results.
When there are forums, communities flourish. In LiveAgent, every forum entry becomes a ticket, so your agents can keep track of customer activity.
Providing resources to help people
In your knowledge base, you have compiled a wealth of resources available to your clients. You can make access to these articles and tutorials for your customers as easy and intuitive as possible by using a customer portal.
By making your materials easy to access, you can reduce the number of tickets incoming.
Keeping everything running smoothly
All the helpful resources you offer your customers can be easily accessed through a customer portal.
Your LiveAgent portal can be customized to fit your business style, allowing you to provide seamless customer service. Using logos, chat widgets, or templates, you can customize the HTML and CSS styles.
What are the benefits for your customer?
If your client portal is efficient, your customers will have a far better experience. It is likely that your customers' satisfaction will increase if you offer them instant support instead of making them wait for an agent to respond.
Information is available every day of the week
The customer portal runs continuously. You can always provide your clients with the information they need, even after business hours and on holidays.
Empowering possibilities
By allowing your customers to submit support tickets, they'll feel more in control. They aren't going to feel the same if they have to call an agent just to get some basic information, such as the status of their order.
You can start a live chat immediately
Customers who cannot resolve their issues on their own should be able to contact your customer support team. Making your website more accessible can be done with a live chat widget.
The benefits of a customer portal are numerous.
By using customer portals, your business can also be more efficient.
Performing better than expected
Today, more customers perceive a customer portal as a necessity than as a desire. When it comes to building long-term relationships and creating brand loyalty, it is critical to living up to customers' expectations.
It is crucial to receive feedback
Customer feedback is a valuable source of insights into what works and what doesn't. Let them express their opinions and concerns through forums and feedback widgets.
With customer feedback widgets, customers can vote for features they want in your service, or they can submit their own ideas. Informing your users about the progress of the implementation can help them feel valued.
Get to know yourself
Having a customer portal can help you meet customer expectations by providing information regarding the quality of your knowledge base and other self-service resources.
You can determine which issues require further attention by examining metrics such as views, up-and down-votes, and forum threads related to a topic. All of this information can be used by your support team in the future to provide a better explanation.
Workload reduction for agents
Your agents will be more efficient if you emphasize self-service resources. This will allow them to focus on more pressing matters instead of answering minor, repetitive questions.
Even so, implementing such changes may result in metrics such as the time spent resolving tickets rising. This will make tickets harder to resolve and less automatable. To measure your agents' performance effectively, you must adjust the performance targets.
An overview
As part of your support resources, you should have a customer portal. Here's why:
- This software will delight your customers because it is fast, empowering, and efficient.
- You will benefit your business by providing effective customer support, getting insight into how customers utilize your products and having an engaged community of customers.
What do you think about that? Isn't it worth trying? You get a customer portal with each LiveAgent plan.
Recently call centers have evolved rapidly in many sectors such as banking, retail, Government, tourism etc. from being a simple add-on, customer-facing service to an important differentiator. In today’s race for competition and internationalization, customer satisfaction can have a serious impact on a company’s bottom line where, though one can easily calculate the direct loss of losing a customer, he often ignores the damage caused due to customer sharing his negative experience in his immediate social circle. Before diving further into the ‘how’,
Let’s take a look at ‘why’ customer satisfaction is so crucial for your business-
– Happy customers will always interact with your brand over and over again resulting in higher revenue.
– Because offering terrible customer service can make them switch over to the competition in a heartbeat.
– Great customer experience leads to brand promotion via satisfied customers sharing content across social media.
– Providing better service quality than your competitors will also give you an edge over the competition.
So, it doesn’t matter whether you run an in-house customer care team or availing your services from an Indian outsourcing company or any such, as long as you are ignoring the fundamentally interactive nature of customer service transactions, chances of improving customer satisfaction in your call center will always be slim. Below are some such transformative ideas to help you along the way toward generating the virtuous circle that customer service is always meant to create.
Abstain from the Agent Maze
Don’t waste time by escalating or passing over the problem to multiple agents who cannot help them and, in the process, leave unsatisfied customers and frazzled agents. Instead, install data-directed routing system to your contact center platform to automatically directs the calls to the best possible agent. Also encourage operators to handle situations on their own by spending time with the customers, thus taking full ownership of the problem.
Provide Multiple Support Channels
Making yourself available on as many support channels as possible and providing multi-support channels such as telephone, email, live-chat, social media etc. to your customers goes a long way toward improving customer satisfaction and higher retention. It not only offers a seamless transition between channels but also works well for customers who want greater flexibility and real-time interactivity.
Bestow a Human Touch
Providing a humanly touch to your customer service is the best way to make sure all your customers get equal and excellent service. You can do this by
- Engaging customers proactively
- Keeping your agents accessible at all times
- Keeping your language simple
- Always ask for a feedback
- Offer personalized recommendations
- Treat customers as individuals rather than demographics
Use KPIs to Measure Satisfaction
Choosing the right KPIs or Key Performance Indicators such as Net Promoter Score, Overall Satisfaction, Brand Attributes etc. to measure key metrics and analytics is crucial to building a service footprint that delights customers and delivers insanely great experiences by gathering actionable insights to guide long-term planning, smoothing out the kinks in the system along with fostering goals and objectives among staff.
Monitor Performance through CSAT Scores
CSAT or Customer Satisfaction Surveys is a form of research based on your customer’s reviews regarding your company’s performance. It’s a great way of understanding your customer’s requirements and concerns in order to improve the quality of your products and the standards of your service to that of the customer’s needs which in turn will improve customer loyalty and generate revenue and profitability.
Never Underestimate the Importance of Critical Moments
Creating meaningful relationships is a sure shot way of standing out from the crowd. Though there are numerous ways of showing your appreciation but keeping track of and acknowledging critical moments such as anniversaries, birthdays and other important achievements with the help of various tools available in the market will help strengthen the relationship and take you long ways towards your journey to success.
Wrapping Up
Customers’ expectations are constantly on the rise, sometimes even faster than the speed with which call centers in India and elsewhere can improve their customer satisfaction service. The important thing to understand here is that customer service is an area that needs great nurturing and care with focus and in due time, you will be rewarded with a positive impact on customer loyalty, increased revenues and higher retention.
Original Source: https://www.theoctopustech.com/how-to-improve-customer-satisfaction-in-your-call-center/
In every business, there are two critical factors that keep an enterprise and a customer relation unbreakable.
A customer is quite satisfied when a product or service satisfies his/her needs.
If these requirements are not served in the way they should be then your relationship with your customer will not succeed.
Let A.I Manage Your Customers
According to Gartner, technologies like chatbots will be handling more than 85% customer interaction until 2020.
A chatbot can help in making your customer’s experience better in the below mentioned ways:
