5 tips for successful customer management
Customer retention is a doctrine in itself and it is clear that one of the most important conditions for this is the management of an efficient system of service calls that leaves the customers satisfied. How do you do it right? Let's talk about five points that are critical to good customer service.
1. Not on the phone alone
In an era where there is a technological revolution, different generations of customers have different habits and different ways in which they expect to receive customer service. The members of the younger generation will be happy to receive service through chatbots and to have access to knowledge that will allow them to solve the problem on their own. Older generations would be happy to receive service through a chat application that they know well such as WhatsApp, others actually prefer communication through email, social networks and there are still customers who would prefer to talk to a human being over the phone, especially if they are senior customers.
A smart and friendly customer service system allows each customer to communicate the fault in the most convenient way for him: via chat, WhatsApp, email or phone. Another way to make the customer service system more efficient and convenient for both customers and agents is to make a callback option available - leaving a phone number to which you can return if no agent is available to provide an immediate response.
2. If possible alone - better
Often many faults that reach the service systems are minor faults that the customer can take care of himself. Self-handling of the fault is a better solution both for the service call management system and for the customer himself.
For the customer, this is a significant shortening of the time for dealing with the problem: instead of contacting the service system, opening a call, waiting for an agent to arrive and take care of the problem - through treatment that can take hours and sometimes even days, here the solution is received in a few minutes, without delays, long queues or Make sure to be there when the agent arrives.
The customer service system, for its part, no longer has to deal with most of the negligible faults and can be freed up to handle those service calls that the customers cannot handle on their own. The company can reduce the number of agents and provide better and more effective service in complex service calls.
3. Knowledge is power
SLA - Service Level Agreement t and in Hebrew service terms agreement, is the accepted time for resolving a fault of a certain type to which the company commits. Even if the customers are not always aware of this time officially, they know when the handling of the fault takes longer. Different management levels in the set of service calls relate differently to the SLA. A good agent, for his part, does his best to provide the best service in the shortest time, but even if his intentions are good, sometimes there are difficulties that arise and stand in his way: knowledge or experience of friends, required equipment that is missing, and so on. Sometimes the problem is in the formation itself - a flu epidemic that leaves the formation with only a limited number of active agents, for example. Those responsible for finding solutions in difficult situations are the managers, but the first step on the way to a solution is often the most problematic of all - knowledge.
In order for a manager to solve a problem, he must first know about its existence. In order to tell this knowledge - it is necessary to meet certain conditions. Traditionally, the conditions are fast, transparent, and reliable reporting by the agents themselves and an initiative on the part of the managers who regularly check the status of the calls and look for possible problems. The second option, the more advanced and effective, is reporting a problem in the making by the service call management system itself. A smart SLA system that knows how to identify calls and attach them to the appropriate SLA for them, also knows how to send a push notification to the appropriate manager if it seems that a problem may arise, allowing the manager to free up his time from looking for problems - to solve them.
Knowledge is power also from the customer's point of view. When a client receives a call ID and can monitor the progress of her treatment, his sense of control will increase and his trust in the system will be strengthened.
4. Complex task management
Some of the service calls are simple, others are complex and require the involvement of different agents at different stages. In order to manage a successful customer service, there must be a management method that allows managing even complex tasks, those that require the execution of a chain of actions at the same time or those that depend on the successful completion of the previous stage. When the process is complex, effective management knows at any given moment what the status of the various stages is and what still remains to be done in order to resolve the service call.
5. Smart agent management
Smart agent management knows how to automatically route the service calls to the appropriate agents, whether it is a geographical distribution of the agents or of service areas, products or a combination thereof. In addition, smart routing knew how to bypass temporary problems such as an agent who went on vacation. Smart routing will take care of the work balance between the various agents without creating bottlenecks. Without intelligent routing of agents, a successful agent may give poor resolution times due to over-routing of calls to it.
