In order to serve customers to the best of your ability, you must be able to understand them. And like most other things in the world, they change with time. The desires and troubles of a common customer today are quite different from the desires and troubles of a customer from fifty years ago. Many people want to be able to know how to fix a problem on their own, so they can avoid having to go through the call-center process again. Some people still want to be helped on the phone, so they know it’s done. And a few people just want the problem taken care of for them, and they don’t want to have to think about it again. People are different, and society is changing, so it is important that our contact center solutions adapt with the changing times.

• Invest In Quality Employees

In the past thirty years, call center have gone through some drastic changes. Many businesses started outsourcing their customer service in order to save money. Unfortunately, this has created more problems than it solves, and customers have become very skeptical of dealing with these call centers. The joke that the service you received from these outsourced call centers has become so mainstream that NBC even tried a sitcom based in one of these Indian offices. Unfortunately the show failed as did the mentality that contact center solutions are not important. In order to serve your customer to the best of your company’s ability, which you want to do if you wish to retain your customers, you should invest in hiring and retaining quality employees. Your customers will appreciate having an intelligent, polite, and informed person on the other end of the telephone line.

• Don’t Focus on the Wrong Stats

Many managers rode the technology wave toward the use of metrics for gauging an employee’s performance. The problem is many of these metrics are outdated and just plain useless. Just because one customer can be fully and efficiently helped in two and a half minutes doesn’t mean the next customer can as well. Some people require more time than others. Some customers prefer to be helped more quickly than others. Not everyone is the same, so there is no way you can use these common metrics to quantify everyone. Make the goals more team oriented and focus more on customer and peer reviews than basic statistics.

• Don’t Ignores Social Media

The business use of social media has exploded in recent years. The corporate standard even recognizes that social media has replaced a lot of the duties handled by the customer service departments in the past. People are now split between how they contact a company and ask questions. Whereas delegating social media duties to an intern might have been acceptable a few years ago, it is far from common thinking now. Social media is a huge part of the customer experience, thus we should all give it the necessary attention and resources it deserves.

Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dskley/9803378256/

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