How to Improve Customer Care: 10 More Tips from Our Experts

The evidence is undeniable: The service that a business offers its customers has a direct effect on its future success and profitability.

Data supporting this claim is almost limitless, including:

• Research information from American Express suggesting 70% of shoppers spend more with businesses that offer high-quality customer care.
• Findings from Bain & Company showing that superior care drives greater revenue growth.

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But we don’t really need research to clue us into such an obvious fact. The better you treat your customers—including responding to their inquiries in a fast, efficient and friendly manner—the more they’ll want to do business with you. And, to that end, most business leaders are presumably doing what they can to ensure a satisfying customer care experience.

Yet in an age where customers are savvier than eve—and more demanding, too—delivering an experience that truly satisfies is no easy task. It’s not enough to hire a few great customer care agents and hope for the best. You need to display real expertise in the way you communicate with the people who do business with your brand, and you need to do so proactively, rather than reactively.

To help accomplish this important goal, we recently offered a look at 10 ways that businesses can ensure a great CX in today’s marketplace. But, as if to underline just how complex the art of customer care has become, we soon realized that was only half the story. Today, we offer 10 more tips from our experts on how to improve customer care in an age of heightened demand and expectations.

How to Improve Your Customer Care Experience: 10 More Tips from Our Experts

1. Don’t Neglect the Power of Email. In the rush to ensure companies have a robust presence in all forms of customer communications—particularly social media, text messaging and online chat—it’s important to remember that email is still a highly popular channel for customer inquiries. Recent research from Forrester found 54% of customers say they use email the most when contacting a company’s customer service reps. That news should be all the incentive you need to make sure your contact center strategy includes an up-to-date approach to email marketing.

In the rush to ensure companies have a robust presence in all forms of customer communications.
Source: www.shutterstock.com.

Learn more about How to Focus on the Right Communications Channel to Meet Your Customers’ Needs.

2. Get Better at Resolving Customer Complaints. When it comes to creating a customer care strategy, the process of quickly and effectively resolving complaints is rarely given due consideration. As a means of retaining customers you’ve already successfully reached, complaint resolution is far more important than you may realize. After all, as the Harvard Business Review points out, it can cost 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.

Read more about How to Implement a Customer Complaint Resolution Process that Works.

3. Be Prepared for Seasonal Shifts. Whether it’s post-Thanksgiving retail sales, the summer travel season or a myriad of other instances, every industry deals with fluctuations in demand at some point. If you don’t have a plan to scale your contact center operations up or down as needed, you’re risking giving your customers a poor experience when it matters the most.

Whether it’s post-Thanksgiving retail sales, the summer travel season or a myriad of other instances.
Source: www.shutterstock.com.

Discover How to Prepare Your Customer Care Team for Fluctuating Volumes.

4. Approach Your Customers from a Common Ground. In decades past, outsourcing customer care services with companies based overseas was seen as an effective way to deliver affordable service. But those days are over. Today’s consumers are much more likely to appreciate agents who share similar cultures. Onshore contact center outsourcing makes this an achievable goal. Companies like Working Solutions offer agents based in the United States and Canada to ensure common cultural ground for customers.

Read more about the Benefits of Onshore Contact Center Outsourcing.

5. Get Analytical. Trying to run a customer care strategy without a sophisticated approach to data and analytics—such as tracking the information that passes through your contact center every day— means missing crucial opportunities to get better at delivering what it is your customers want. The good news is that the technology used to power today’s contact centers is readily available for this task. If you know what you’re looking for, the tools are at hand to ensure you get the best possible return from your customer care, while ensuring your customers enjoy an experience that’s always improving.

Trying to run a customer care strategy without a sophisticated approach to data and analytics.
Source: www.shutterstock.com.

Get more details about How Contact Center Analytics Can Help Ensure Customer Satisfaction.

6. Start Measuring What Matters. Important as it is to monitor your call center metrics, it isn’t enough to just cover the basics, such as dropped calls and close rates. To deliver the best possible customer care, you need to figure out which metrics are most meaningful to the people who do business with you, and then closely monitor that data to determine how to offer continuous improvement. And to do that, you should carry out a systemic audit on an annual basis to make sure you accurately identify strengths and weaknesses and avoid any potential blind spots that may arise.

Get more details about How to Conduct a Contact Center Audit.

7. Don’t Neglect Your Company Culture. Happy customer care agents deliver better service. Too few companies, however, really take the time and effort to ensure their agents are working in an environment that’s nurturing, fulfilling and even fun. Going the extra mile to provide agents with a positive working culture translates directly into the quality of care they deliver to your customers.

Learn more about Why a Good Company Culture Means Great Customer Care.

8. Promote Agent Education. Giving your agents the opportunity to pursue additional education makes them better at their jobs, which, in turn, translates directly into higher-quality service for customers. Offering educational opportunities is also a key driver to ensuring agents are satisfied and keeping attrition low—factors that impact overall customer care.

Giving your agents the opportunity to pursue additional education makes them better at their jobs.
Source: www.shutterstock.com.

Read more about Why Ongoing Agent Education Is Essential for Great Customer Care.

9. Don’t Think of the Internet as “the Competition.” It wasn’t too long ago that “showrooming” was a dirty word—the practice of browsing for products in a store and then going online to purchase the same thing at a better price. Showrooming was seen as a threat to brick-and-mortar retailers. That’s all changed, though. Today, savvy businesses have integrated the practice of showrooming into their customer care strategy, actively encouraging it as an opportunity to spur online sales.

Discover How Showrooming and Reverse Showrooming are Changing the Game for Retailers.

10. Invest in a Business Continuity Plan. When it comes to customer care, few things are more disruptive than actual downtime, when your lines of communications are interrupted and people can’t reach you. And because of the growing prevalence of natural disasters across the U.S.—including record-breaking wildfires and hurricanes, among other events—these events are becoming commonplace. All the more reason to ensure that your business has a fully vetted, regularly updated business continuity plan to be always prepared for the worst-case scenario.

Read more about How to Create an Effective Business Continuity Plan.

The Best Way to Improve Customer Care: Call in the Experts.

If some of these methods of improving customer care seem beyond your reach, it may be time to call in the experts. At Working Solutions, we offer on-demand, onshore customer care that’s flexible enough to meet the needs of companies of all sizes, across all industries. Our leaders are consulted by local and national media on a regular basis to share their customer care expertise.

Contact us today to schedule your complimentary consultation with a Working Solutions expert.