Improving customer satisfaction can have a massively positive impact on your bottom line. Here’s how you can enhance your customer service, which will lead to business growth.
Your new product is a huge hit-bigger than your wildest dreams, and the calls are coming in faster than your staff can handle. Or perhaps you provide a service and word is getting around that you do a great job. Your call volume is increasing and that’s great, but it’s difficult to give each caller the attention they deserve. This could be one of those “oh wow” moments, quickly followed by a big “uh-oh” moment. It may be time to find the right customer care call center to keep your newfound success on track.
Small and medium-sized businesses experiencing sudden or dramatic growth face a dilemma: how to keep delivering excellent customer service to new and existing clients while managing growth. Outsourcing to a customer call center is a relatively quick solution for addressing these issues and enabling more growth.
Ironically, increased sales and interest in your product or service can be the start of a downward trend due to lack of staff and inability to cope with greater volume. Avoid this kind of pitfall by enlisting call center services to help you build on current success, rather than having to rebuild lost sales and opportunity.
Key Benefits of Using a Customer Call Center
- A company’s employees make up its greatest resource. Those with talent, experience, and knowledge are most productive when dedicated to the core mission of the business. Outsourcing routine customer call service to a call center increases staff efficiency, saving their valuable time for essential functions.
- Adding in-house staff to accommodate growth is a risky step, and very costly. There is the cost and time investment in training new people, along with lost productivity for current staff taking time to train them, plus the cost of long-term benefits. While learning, new employees are less productive, too. During the training period, work falls off, and the whole operation is slowed down.
- Busy seasons or sudden sales growth can mean a flood of incoming calls, and, inevitably, missed calls. Each time a customer leaves a message and waits for a call back, opportunity is created for your competitor who promptly answers each call and handles a customer request for information, resolves an order or delivery problem, or escalates the call to a more authoritative source. Hiring a call center to perform these services means every call is handled, the response is prompt, and opportunities for new business don’t end up on your competitor’s balance sheet.
- The right call center will offer flexibility in deciding how much to outsource, and which services to choose. You will need the option to change this mix as you adapt to changes in your business growth or in the marketplace, either adding or removing services.
Red Flags That You Could Use Call Center Services
Determine areas where the operation is most in need of help before deciding on next steps. How can you identify these weak spots and decide if you need to outsource? Here are some signs to look for that will suggest where a call center can step in and break the logjam.
Ideally, you can anticipate when any of these common issues are threatening, and take steps to solve them before the red flags turn into serious problems.
You know you could use the assistance of a customer call center when:
- Voicemail is overloaded because staff members are too busy to answer calls, losing the hot opportunity and returning calls when they are “cold.”
- Your close rates are dropping. If your sales inquiries are going up, but your sales close rate is dropping, then that is a clear sign that you aren’t able to keep up with the leads on your own.
- Client retention is decreasing, and customer service complaints are increasing-a clear connection that indicates a high level of frustration with your service. The result will be more than immediate lost sales, extending to negative reviews and possible long-term damage to the brand.
- Staff members are complaining about overload and overwork-increased productivity cannot be based solely on adding to each employee’s workload, especially if the work is highly skilled and quality is important. At some point, assuming significant growth, your employees will be maxed out.
Key Inbound Call Center Services to Consider
- Live agents at call centers can screen calls, direct them to the proper department, take messages to relay to your employees, and overall improve communication efficiency.
- Live agents handle customer service calls directly, ranging from answering basic questions to more complex problem-solving. Agents receive in-depth training, utilizing your information and protocols to decide if a customer or issue should be referred directly to an in-house employee.
- Call center personnel act as dedicated or specialized staff, handling most or all customer service functions, like processing orders and purchases, or relaying dispatch requests for urgent customer care.
Here are some tips for both maintaining the vendor relationship and preserving the company’s relationship with clients.
- Provide accurate, complete informational materials to bring call center staff up to speed on their new client.
- Keep them informed of changes to the company profile and protocols.
- Create appropriate scripts for call center staff to use when representing the company in each function. The call center may offer help with this service.
- Schedule periodic inspections with the vendor to keep tabs on quality of their performance.
- Ask for regularly scheduled performance reports.
A live customer care call center, like Signius Communications, offers a menu of services that will seamlessly integrate into your operation, helping to maintain productivity and increase sales. Contracting out your customer care operation could be the key to keeping customers and employees happy, pushing that growth curve farther into the future.
For more information about our outsourced customer care call center services, contact us today for a free consultation. We’ll be happy to review your requirements and make some recommendations while providing a customized quote. We hope to hear from you soon!
More articles you might be interested in:
5 Top Reasons to Outsource to a Call Center
5 Reasons Why Using a Call Center is a Better Choice than Taking Calls Internally
