Email Response: How its good this method for customer support

Whenever we think about customer support the only name comes in our mind is Call center. Call centers are traditional and very old in this buisness of providing support to organisation’s service and product. Call centers are providing bread and butter to employee those are working in call centers and CCE/CCR job profile are most favorite of students those who are going for higher eduction, mid age, house wives and professionals who has experience and expertise in voice based technologies and methodologies. But there is another source of providing customer support and i.e “E-Mail”, and yaa in another words, Email/web support, Email response service.

E-Mail Support : Organisations which are not interested pay or invest heavily in voice based customer service they have another alternative to provide medium to provide customer service and that is in the form of email support/response. But from past few year email response loosing its shines and pride of being of alternate to call center due to negligence of organisationgs towards email support service. UK’s is the most demorilisation destination for email support practices accepted by companies. There are so many reports from which we come to know that how bad was the past years for e-mail support service.

Transversal’s study evaluated 100 UK companies from various domain like telecommunication, travel, retail, fashion, electronics etc., are failed to achieve the best result for email support as website averaged 5 out of 10 correct responses and 55 per cent of phone calls were answered within 2 minutes, email responses continue to deteriorate year on year. Insurance companies come bottom of the survey: only one email reply successfully answered the question and 50 per cent of companies didn’t respond at all.

Analysis of responses show that too many companies simply use email to push customers to other channels rather than even attempting to provide a useful answer. The usefulness of email replies has deteriorated year on year in 80 per cent of sectors. Even though many have improved response times, this appears to be through sacrificing effectiveness of replies. There seems to be a lack of monitoring of the quality of responses, with a narrow focus on agents answering questions to hit service level targets rather than spending the time to properly resolve customer queries.

Organisations need to take a step back and overhaul their processes to ensure that the email channel is providing what customers want and need. Organisations need to aim to reduce the sheer volume of email they receive. A key way to accomplish this is to allow customers to first ask their questions through a customer service FAQs on their website. If customers then go on to email from the knowledge base, the agent will be able to see what they have searched for there is then no excuse for sending customers back to the same website pages.

Do You Know Success of Call Center Depends on Agents “Sound” Affects

Even you have a good customer services and the good policy but the success of the call centers depends on the agents. The agents are the first person to make a contact with the customers. The sound or voice of agents has a direct result on the degree of satisfaction that customers rate your company. Often customers equate vocal skills with intelligence, interest in problem-solving and complete understanding of the situation of the caller.

With proper short-term training and long-term coaching, call center agents can achieve proper vocal excellence. Most people think that how they speak as an adult is part of their personality and not a physical skill set that they can change. That is not true. Through vocal coaching, the agent’s vocal ease and ability to be clearly understood without physical strain can be achieved. We learn our sound, our speech, and our vocal image from our environment.  

Call Center Managers and Supervisors must invest in the vocal skills of all agents – whether they have discernable problems or not. Enhanced self-confidence and greater ability to concisely deliver the corporate message is an investment that will pay dividends for the agent, manager, and corporation. 

There is no shame in needing this extra skill set to be learned and practiced. Many of the “basics” of education have been overlooked in the last several decades of progressive education. The skills of reading and comprehension are often discussed, but the lack of proper vocal training in pre-school and throughout elementary grades has all but disappeared from the curriculum.  

Call Center budgets are so focused in attaining the latest in IT technology and software for scheduling, scripting, up-selling, and process training for agents, but without the ability to properly speak and to be successful in vocally deliver of the message, the desired results may not be attainable. One way to raise the level of personal performance of the call center agent is by utilizing the skills of a professional vocal trainer. 

The ability to be able to speak with the proper vocal skills for 6-8 hour shifts does not entirely rest on the agents’ vocal skills or lack thereof. Part of poor vocal performance is related to physical posture, work-space ergonomics, and facility environment. With a brief evaluation of the call center facility, and by utilizing some fairly easy recommendations, in conjunction with formalized Vocal Training, can vastly improve the performance of the agents, but also will translate into greater employee satisfaction.  

The essence of Vocal Empowerment is made up of 5 Elements of Effective Voice: Interest, Clarity, Authority, Language, and Listening. When these skills are mastered and become second nature in daily speech, confidence and success follow. 

Interest: Interest is an intellectual skill requiring that you orchestrate the rhythms of agents sound. 

Clarity: Clarity is a physical skill requiring the use of an active, exercised mouth. 

Authority: Authority is an emotional skill that expresses credibility about what agents are speaking. Requiring self-confidence and cleanly executed emotional and physical choices.

Language: Language is the process of being able to respond to others with words and phrases which demonstrate interest, are clearly understood, and are informative, knowledgeable and helpful in evoking a sense of authority.

Listening: Listening is an act of respect and openness to others.

The success of call center, the job satisfaction of agent staff and company’s customer image are dependent on the ability to attain VOCAL EMPOWERMENT for agents.

Customer Service to Contribute Company’s Growth

A recently released Harris Interactive study confirms that a bad customer service experience with your company is enough to make a majority of consumers run for the hills. The study reported that 80% of 2,049 US adults surveyed decided never to go back to a business/organization after a bad customer service experience. The study clearly indicates that an organization’s customer service level is a defining factor that will make or break a company.

Consumers have increasingly higher expectations of businesses and are willing to walk away quickly from a majority of businesses if they are not met. Although a business may be attracting new customers the key to growth is being able to retain your existing customers while attracting new customers. The Harris study reflects how great customer service can significantly contribute to a company’s growth. Its findings indicated that 51% of consumers cited outstanding service as the reason that they continued to work with a company.

Many businesses fail to appreciate the value of customer loyalty and word of mouth exposure until it is to late. Interestingly, 74% of U.S. Adults indicated that they would file a complaint as result of their negative experience or tell others about their bad experience. In addition, 60% indicated that the main reason for recommending a company was outstanding service. A customer’s negative experiences with your company’s customer service can quickly turn your pool of potential customers into a dry well.

How do you then avoid becoming one of many companies whose customer numbers dwindle from bad customer service experiences? Here are several suggestions that will help make your customers’ experiences with your company better:

Have incentives in place for when things go wrong, and they always will.
Undoubtedly things will go wrong for some customers, no matter how much you try to make sure that every customer is pleased. The key to making sure that these customers remain and even become loyal to your company is to offer incentives that quickly resolve the problem and compensate for any problems that the customer has experienced.

Build a knowledge base of the problems that most frustrate customers and build solutions that can get the issue resolved on the first contact with the customer.
Although this might seem like a huge investment for some companies, this knowledge will pay for itself in the form of continuing customers.

Make it easy for customers to deal with you: The harder you make their life the easier it will be for them to let you go and never come back. Most consumers lead busy lives with very little time to deal with problems that they have with a company. The ease with which a problem can get resolved for a customer on first contact without having to take additional steps, the more likely they will continue to work with your company.

Respond to their concerns/questions quickly: The longer you take to respond to a customers concern or questions the less positive their impression will be of your company.

The Changing Customer Centric Approach of Customer Care

The customer is always comes first for any business. All organization takes customers on top to provide them the best services. Earlier when companies were not focusing for their customers then the loss was too high. Companies are learning from their mistakes. Today, the difference and the distance between call centers and the customers is declining with the help of the new technology medium of the customer’s choice – telephone, email or web chat for example – and effective problem resolution during the first call.

Now forget about those old days when the only way to discuss your phone bill was via the one number at the top of the BT invoice, today the customer has a number of contact options depending on the nature of the query and the required speed of response.

Customer relationship management helps call centers to deals with the customers and clients and make best use of developments such as IP telephony, routing and screen popping – company-wide contact centers are designed to consolidate these interactions. The old distinctions between inbound and outbound, telephone and the web, fax and email are all disappearing in the drive to connect the customer with the most appropriate contact as quickly and smoothly as possible.

The customers are always looking for quick reply so it’s very important to give them the correct information on right time. Now the next question comes that Why is this important? Costs typically increase five-fold if the issue is not dealt with at the first call, staff become demotivated and disenchanted customers vote with their feet. All of these can now readily be addressed and the ‘holy grail’ of win-win achieved.

Similarly, managers often complain about hearing of problems too late. Here the answer centers around published service level agreements which set realistic expectations and enable customers to find out about – and, ideally, track via the web – the progress of the issue in question.

This is especially important when several companies are involved, such as a retailer, manufacturer or service agent. If there are no SLAs in place or no structured way of managing escalations, no-one takes ownership of the problem and the customer may well be ‘bounced’ from department to department or company to company.

The result? He or she will almost certainly circumvent the established escalation procedure – the polite way of saying you will have an angry customer on the phone demanding to speak to the managing director. Which then rebounds on the help desk or call centre manager?

So to make service an integral part of your organization, boost customer retention and improve employee productivity you need to carefully consider the channels your customers might use to make contact and how you will keep track of the interaction.

Customer satisfaction in contact centers is at an all-time low. Never before have customers been more frustrated with the service they receive. The game is changing from one of customer acquisition to one of customer retention. With these conditions in place, senior management must take the necessary steps to deliver a personal touch to each and every customer. We have seen company’s ranked number one fall in the rankings while smaller, more intimate companies jump to number one. We can attribute a large portion of these changes to that “personal touch.” It all goes back to the feeling of walking into your favorite restaurant where the owner recognizes you and knows what you want the moment you arrive.

Strategic Approach To Improving Customer Service

As the current time is changing too fast, the needs and the demands of customers are also changing constantly. The good organizations are also changing their strategy to fulfill the customer’s expectations and to prove their organization as a customer oriented. Most customer service centers are giving the best service to be best suited on the customers needs and working speedily to increase the level of satisfaction of their potential customers.

The important Question comes that “What should be measured and how?” As contact centers have become more sophisticated, there are significant opportunities to transform the customer experience, add value and multiply returns. Most customer service centers have concentrate on the daily incoming calls. To measured there are important opportunities to transform the customer experience, add value and multiply returns.

The one good way is quick reply to the customers query but here one thing is very important i.e. if the information lacks the necessary knowledge and skill level to solve the customer’s issue, then the only thing the company has accomplished is frustrating its customer 20 seconds sooner. For any organization or customer services center have only one goal to provide the best efficiency for customer services. To be a one the strategy of interaction to customer is very necessary.

Success has changed little over the years due to automata ion in data management. Call centers are typically pretty good at measuring what happened in terms of when a call arrived, where it went, and how long it took, but are not as good at linking the result or outcome of the call.

To build a customer-centric environment, companies need to base agent rewards on their ability to satisfy customers. Using the voice of the customer as a quality metric will encourage agents to deliver better performance because they have a direct stake in what they are being measured against. The key is the ability to link the outcomes with the people and the processes that were involved in each of the transactions. This will result in more accurate evaluations and help you better focus your training efforts.
By rewarding agents who were able to arrange regular call-backs, the company was quickly able to change agent behavior, while increasing both sales and customer satisfaction.

If agents are measured strictly on talk time, they may not care whether they solve a customer’s problem, as long as they wrap the call quickly. The company’s accountants or the contact centre manager may be happy, but hardly anyone else is. Bottom line: you can’t measure speed and think that a positive speed of answer metric translates to customer satisfaction.

Does a company benefit more by saving 20 seconds on a call, or by winning a customer for life by taking extra time to create a satisfying experience? The problem lies in how you determine which metrics are most important for measuring agents’ performance; and how you use the information to motivate agents, identify specific problems and improve their performance.

More powerful than written surveys is the ability to give customers the option of answering automated survey questions from an IVR system upon completing a call or right after the service interaction. This provides data that can be immediately acted upon in terms of agent coaching, or to trigger actions designed to save potentially lost customers to competitors. This is the clearest way to isolate problems and identify how and where to focus your improvement efforts.

Help Desk Services: In Demand Now

According to one job portal site, the Demand for entry-level helpdesk positions has increased by 45 percent compared to the same period last year. The priority of the business is always to cost-cutting and to improve their bottom lines methods. Help Desk Services are giving this favor to companies.

To fulfill the customers needs and expectation now a days small and home based businesses are taking support from the help desk services. Due to less number of the employee or the financially challenging organization prefer to go for the help desk services. These services will give the support to give the best service to the clients on time. Accuracy and on time delivery of the project is two major factor for other client and the organization to get the more projects in future. Help desk service is suitable for the companies and processes which is huge and the client wanted the delivery in less time. Help desk services provided by the offshore contact centers 24/7×365 days.

A small company or even large company can save the money by taking the support from the helpdesk outsourcing. They don’t need to pay the outsourcing company a contracted amount and are not responsible for personnel expenses such as payroll taxes, worker’s compensation insurance and employee benefits for the employees of the call center that provide their sales, service and support functions. Another benefit of the helpdesk outsourcing is to save the cost of equipment, software and ongoing maintenance expenses.
We can entrust on the Help Desk service provider with their service and support functions which directly impact their customer’s level of satisfaction and relatively, the company’s reputation. As a result, the quality of service can reduce making outsourcing more of a burden than a benefit.

Take your decision to outsource help desk activities by doing an analysis of help desk support processes, expected service levels, customer expectations and costs of outsourcing. Training systems should be developed to ensure that your company’s expectations in regard to service quality, policies and procedures are clearly conveyed to the outsource provider. Ongoing monitoring of customer satisfaction is also necessary so that you can determine whether or not the outsource provider you have selected is meeting the needs of your customers in line with their expectations and your quality service standards.

The huge benefit of help desk outsourcing is that it removes the complication in work station support and makes it easy and flexible. By employing well-prepared who work for both effective and quick in completing their tasks.

Every Call Is Important

Don’t Be Rigid to Customer: Always remember that customers are not right all time but they are always the customers even when they’re wrong. It is all about how they are treated by everyone in the office.How many times have you heard the answer, “this is our office policy”? This can only be described as rigidity. Every situation calls for some flexibility and flexibility. By making your staff adhere to rigid rules, you prohibit them from providing customer service that will benefit your practice and image.

 Give Good Explanation: Explanation of the policy and the rule must be done with lot of care. Your policy should not be set in stone for the customers. If a customer asks why something cannot be done, your staff should not state that “this is office policy” and leave it at that; they should offer an explanation as to why something cannot be done. To make your customer to call you back again you need to give a good impression.

 Trained Staff is Essential: To give a full satisfaction to your important customer staff should be trained to understand customer service. The key to determining what customers want is to listen to them. Listening is different from hearing. Listening skills are about 75 percent to 80 percent of communication by understanding the desire of customer. Training staff on customer communication is essential, In order to compete in the marketplace with many other practices, the staff must be focused.

Four Zones of Services 

Four zones of service the rigid zone, the safe zone, the progressive zone, and the indulgent zone

The rigid zone – It is doing everything “by the book” and adhering strictly to company policy.

The safe zone – Everyone is courteous, but everyone gets the same service.   

The progressive zone – Offers exemplary, creative service; boutique style. Policies are flexible and used only as guidelines.   

The indulgent zone – Continues with the same philosophy as the progressive zone, but without consequence to the costs of providing these services.  

Take Hard Questions Boldly: Survey your accessible customer and ask how they feel about the office, services, waiting time, convenience of appointments, fees, resolution of problems and more. The feedback will be invaluable and should be done anonymously and randomly. Surveys can be handed out in the office with a self-addressed stamped envelope for ease of return.

The main objective is to improve the customer service and to improved production. A happier staff will generally create an atmosphere of relaxation in the office, which will definitely be perceived by patients. Give your staff reasons to take pride in their work and you can avoid high staff turnover, which indicates that the practice is operationally driven instead of people driven.

 Team Spirit and the Attitude: A quality of the team will bring us the potential customers. The team should work in same spirit and in the unity with all clear understanding of each and every policy of the organization. Devote a whole staff meeting to this discussion and role-play everyday scenarios. An office retreat away from the office with a guest speaker to address these issues is also a helpful way to start the process. Not everyone grasps change easily, so starting a customer service need lot of patient and team spirit.  

An office with a happy staff is the best mechanism for developing a customer service program. The most effective means of internal marketing occurs from our staff. If we treat our staff well, they in turn will treat patients well. Employees who are not treated well generally will not treat the other employees or patients well.Your customers must feel welcome too. If too much effort is placed on cultivating new business, the established customer will feel they are no longer important.

Future of Customer Service – Video Communication

Experts say within the next five years, two-way video communications will be the new cutting edge way of doing business. The banking industry already has started to deploy “virtual tellers” at branch offices while the retail industry is apparently gearing up to introduce “virtual store clerks.”

What is the Basic Problem of Customer Service?

This “kiosk-based” form of video communications at bank and retail locations is the introduction to the much larger rollout of fixed-line and mobile two-way video communications, which will ultimately bring this new form of communication into the privacy of our homes. Obviously, there are still hurdles to overcome before video communications becomes commonplace. For one thing, there’s still the basic problem of not enough bandwidth on our last-mile networks.

Is Your Customer having the communication Devices?

 The simple fact that most consumers do not have video phones or even video cameras and microphones onnected to their PCs at home. Perhaps more importantly, there is still a question of how many people really want two-way video communications whether actually seeing the person you are speaking with offers enough value to the consumer to make the cost of rolling out IP video communications worth it.

Wireless Service Providers and Video Phones -

However, with the major wireless service providers of the world working in concert with the handset makers and aggressively rolling out video capabilities on their next generation networks, we are no doubt getting closer to the day when two-way video communications will become a reality. As advanced new mobile devices (i.e., videophones) come onto the market, and consumer demand for them increases, it only makes sense that the call center industry will follow suit.

It’s Easy to Provides the Best Customer Services - 

To provide the best customer services in future using IP video for a wide range to support operations is a good idea. People can access from their homes. Let’s take an example, one day an agent in a tech support center will be able to “show” a consumer who just bought a new computer how to load some new software, or perhaps troubleshoot a set-up problem, right on the consumer’s computer screen. The ability to “show” a consumer how to do something, in real rime, rather than “tell” them over the phone will no doubt have powerful applications in the future.

Smart Way To Get Information From Call Centers

Most customers call to the customer care when they get any problem in their purchased products or if they want to take some useful information from the call center. They dial the company’s phone number expecting that someone from the company will respond to their needs. Indeed, someone would take the call. But too often, that someone does not originate from the phone company office.The person at the other end of the line answers from a call center.If your approach to get the information for your damage products is not right then remember that the customer service representative will most likely hang up the phone.To get the accurate and full information for your desired query, here are some good manners for customer.

1. BE CALM: When you are calling to customer care stay calm and do not shout. Realize that the call center agent did not manufacture the defective product you just purchased. They are lowly employee paid to answer the calls of the customers. If you come up with angry attitude then you are just dialing a wrong number. So remain calm.

2. BE POLITE: You have to give the answer with politeness when agents will ask you certain questions like your name, address, birthday, etc. This is for verification purposes. Call center management requires this procedure. Don’t get irritate by the call center agent. Instead, answer the questions properly.

3. BE SPECIFIC: Give the essential details like the name the product, model number, name of the store outlet you purchased it from, the date and time, etc. Giving this essential information will greatly help and speed up the kind of help you need. Remember you are complaining about a defective product in this instance, kindly state your problem very clearly.

4. LISTEN CAREFULLY: As soon as the call center agents process your issue, they will respond properly. Listen carefully. In this particular instance, you bought a defective product and you either want it replaced or repaired. If you want it replaced, they will give instructions on how to proceed. If you want it repaired, Agent will then set the necessary appointment 

5.SAY THANK YOU: After getting all the information on how to proceed, you are requested to confirm what you understand. Most customers simply hang up the phone after hearing the call center agent’s instruction, not knowing the basic information given to them. And when customer will get some problem again then they have to call to customer care and do the same process again. But if you want to save your time just check the details before hung up the call. And when you feel now you have get all the point about the process then at last say thank you to the customer care agent. It will show that you are good person.

Seven Steps to Remarkable Customer Service

 A Customer is the most important visitor on our premises. He is not dependent on us. We are

dependent on him. He is not an interruption on our work.He is the purpose of it. He is not an

outsider on our business. He is a part of it. We are not doing him a favor by serving him.

He is doing us a favor by giving us an opportunity to do so        - Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi   

v     Deal Everything In Two Ways: Customers will be Satisfy is the main factor for the successful business. Try to solve the customers problems at the same time try to find out the root cause of the problem so that in near future such problems do not occur. We can win the trust of the customers by giving them 100% satisfaction by solving their problems.

v     Improving Customer Services Through Customer Reviews: It’s like listening to the voice of customer by getting the pulse and benchmark of its products. It is necessary to give your customers the quality products and quality customer service. You have to chuck out the customer problems from its root.

v     Turn Customers Into Your Fans: When any customer has a problem, try to fix it, as the customer will be more pleased with your services and he will be closer to you. The customer will be enhanced before he deals directly to you second time.

v     Accept The Accountability: Always, accept the accountability of your customer. Approach the clients by saying “It’s my fault”, Sorry Sir this can completely change a customer’s emotions in a matter of seconds. It is also easy to get caught up in the emotional heat of the moment when someone is complaining.

v     Art of Communication: Angry customers are not at all angry with you, he’s angry at your business services and you are one of the representatives of that business services. The customer is screaming at the puppeteer, so you have to pretend as a puppeteer in front of the customer. You have to apologize on behalf of the puppeteer to the customer.With your art of communication you can attracted customers with the discounts offered to them. You have to be generous and prudent while providing discounts or refund to the customer.

v     Customer Centric: Adapt Customer centric techniques that are latest available in the market to develop more traffic and service oriented business. Companies that focus on creating a good customer will succeed far above those who do not.

v     Capture The Customer Service Through Blogs: Always, go according to the trend that are changing or change the trend in the market. Think about the service automation that is prevailing in the market and the consumer applications towards it to increase the satisfaction level of the customer.        

The information presented on this place is believed to be accurate. However, callcentersindia.com takes no legal responsibilities for the validity of the information.