Congratulations. You’ve made it through the holiday season. If you followed the tips in our December blog, you probably picked up new customers, provided incentives for customers to purchase your products or services, and supported your staff through the busiest time of the year. Be careful though. You’re not quite ready yet to take a break and recouperate. Let’s talk about a few things you may encounter in the post-holiday period.
- Followup service
While we hope that customers are satisfied with the purchases they made leading up to the holidays, it’s best to have plans for dealing with customers who need to return products or request technical assistance. You may also have customers calling to express dissatisfaction over problems with shipping or delivery. Although we try to provide the best service possible, mistakes do happen.
- Continued high call volumes
In an attempt to boost slower post-holiday sales or to clear last year’s products to make way for new ones, your company may offer deep discounts during January. These discounts may result in calls from customers who, having purchased those same products at higher prices a few weeks ago, have questions about pricing guarentees. (Of course, just like special promotions offered in December, these discounts may attract many potential first-time customers for whom you want to provide an efficient transaction experience.)
Regardless of the reason that existing customers are calling, make sure your call center can turn them into satisfied customers. Here are a few tips for keeping your customer retention rate as high as possible:
- Use self-service methods to resolve the customer issue before even being connected to an agent.
In December’s blog, we talked about using reporting software to “tag” reasons for calls. Continuing to draw from that data, update the information available to customers to make it relevant for new circumstances. For example, your IVR introduction may have provided information about delivery timeframes in December. Now, it may be more relevant to provide details about your return policy.
- Make the time with the agent productive.
As soon as possible after a call is received by the telephone system, let the customer know what information they will need on-hand when talking with an agent, such as the date of purchase or make and model number of a product. This approach reduces the number of customers who wait in a queue, only to find out that they need to call back because they don’t have enough information to complete a transaction. (Don’t forget to keep an eye on real-time statistics in your call center. You may want to adjust the acceptable length of time that calls wait in queues in order to answer calls more quickly.)
- Give agents the authority to deal with issues, as appropriate for their individual skills and experience.
No matter how hard you try to please your customers, some customers will have unreasonable expectations about what you should do for them. Make sure that agents understand what authority they have to offer solutions to customers and be clear about when they should contact their managers for input on difficult situations.
Look at issue-resolution as an opportunity to increase the loyalty of customer for your business. A really positive issue-resolution experience shows your customers that you’ll honor your customer satisfaction policies without hassle. Not only will those customers come to you first for future purchases, they may even recommend you to others.
Next month, we’ll talk about how you can use the data you’ve gathered over the last few months to plan for future call volume peaks and for changes in your business that affect call center forecasting.
See you next month.
Tags: business objectives, communication channels, customer loyalty, customers, first call resolution, Real-Time, service levels.