|
As the contact center industry continues to grow rapidly, competition has become more dynamic and intense, a clear indicator that companies are striving to become unique and different from their business rivals. Competition is good when it serves as an incentive for self-improvement and benefits the end users or customers in the process. But when competition results to increased cost of production, it leads to wasted effort.
Good competition can be achieved in the most cost effective method through quick and personalized customer service and service recovery. The contact center industry needs to make a significant step towards handling customer issues, and how this critical information is utilized by the management and staff.
The main objective should be to manage complaints and compliments, and to do this more effectively and pro-actively than ever before. Customer feedback is received by letter, fax, email, phone, daily and weekly reports, or directly from a front-line staff member.
A performance indicator should be established to acknowledge and resolve all customer issues within the shortest possible time, maybe in three days. No need to send out standard letters to the customer that will not obtain valuable feedback. All responses must be made by telephone. Questions are asked of the customer to ascertain what was done well and what could have been done better. Try to ask the customer if they have any suggestions of how a situation should have been handled. By responding to all customer feedback by the telephone, the management can be sure that at least 80% of their customers are satisfied and will renew their loyalty. It will be very hard to close a phone call if the customer is unhappy with the result.
The customer service staff should have the power to make decisions immediately in resolving the issue. Without such empowerment, then the customer would think they are not speaking to the right people, and would try to contact someone higher in rank. Customer service staff should have extensive training in conflict resolution.
Obviously, customer feedback and information is the key to getting into the minds and hearts of the customers. These data must be logged into a computer database system which allows front-line staff to enter any customer data which they may deal with over the period of a day. All this information is collated on a monthly basis to provide a measurement on what the customer “really” thinks of our product and service to executive management through to front-line supervisors.
While customer service unit may not grow in size, it is vital that all frontline staff take ownership of any customer issues that may arise. However front-line staff must be confident that if an issue requires further follow-up, that they have an effective back-up.
Customer service recovery will continue to create pro-active measures for any service issues and will increase customer awareness, both internally and externally. Also, it will ensure that the pro-active, “best practice” methods are standardized and globalized throughout the whole organization.
Free iFaxThe fastest growing provider of internet messaging services guarantees fast and efficient delivery of messages around the globe. www.freeifax.com">Online Fax | Internet Fax Service
|
|
SIGN
UP FOR FREE
